I nudge a bigger guy next to me as he texts rapidly on his cell.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
It’s the curvy redhead on my right that answers. “Suicide.”
“Attempted,” the Hispanic guy next to her corrects.
“I don’t know. I have a friend who lives in the building, and she said he hung himself.”
“Pills,” the guy with the phone finally answers. “I know the guy who found him. It was pills.”
At that moment, the front door opens, and they wheel out a stretcher. One paramedic is rolling it toward the ambulance. The other has one of those respirator things fitted over the guy’s mouth, and is squeezing it periodically. The crowd begins to shift and whisper, pushing forward in morbid curiosity as the stretcher arrives at the ambulance. They lift the patient up, high enough that I’ve got a clear view, and for all my thoughts about time being a constant, I swear it slows to a stop then.
Because I recognize the dark, shaggy hair. The shape of the face. Even with that oxygen thing over his nose and mouth, and his unusually pale skin, I know with a bone deep certainty that it’s Van.
My Van.
I’ve seen his face in the brightness of day, scruffy from not shaving, and clean and smooth. I’ve seen him in the low light of his room, sleeping and awake. I’ve seen him in the glow of his laptop as he sat up late at night tapping away at the keys while I tried to sleep.
I know him.
Maybe he didn’t know me, and maybe he was just a means to an end, and maybe I was that for him, too. But all the same …
I know him.
My breath catches in the back of my throat, halfway between my lungs and the open air, and for a moment I can’t get myself to push it out or pull it in. My vision begins to narrow, a lens zeroing in until everything else disappears but the boy being loaded into the ambulance.
This is my fault.
If I hadn’t influenced him one last time to get him to go away … If I’d never smiled back at him in that bar six months before that … If Van Noffke had never met me, he wouldn’t be on that stretcher.
I stumble back away from the crowd. I try to walk slowly, calmly. But I just can’t. I put one foot in front of the other, faster and faster, until I’m running. My heart seems to twist between every beat, and I’m just waiting … waiting for it to twist so hard it tears loose.
And somewhere along the way, the image of Van on that stretcher blurs with the wild energy I can feel pumping through my body, mingling with my blood, the energy grappling for release. And I’m no longer sure whether I’m running from what I saw or who I am.
Maybe those two things aren’t really that different.
Creation and Destruction.
These are the things I inspire.
Six days later, I stop going to class. I wake up in bed, and it just doesn’t even occur to me to go. There’s so much energy still trapped in me because I haven’t been able to bring myself to do anything about it, to expel it, not after seeing Van.
And I’m just so full, I can’t think beyond the way it feels. There’s a world inside my head, and it’s so easy, too easy, to vacate my real life for the one in my mind.
There’s a tempest there…
Churning
Raging
Flooding
It laps at me in waves, crashing high and then rolling away. It drags me a little farther away from myself every time, that irresistible tide.
And it’s suffocating and extraordinary and glorious. And I no longer want to push it out. I want to drown in it, in all the colors and ideas and feelings it opens up in me. The thoughts … they’re so big that they eclipse everything else. The past. The future. Emotions. They drown those out completely. For the first time in many, many years, I know what it feels like to not have memories shackled to my ankles, holding me back.
I pick up a pen and paper to write down how it feels to be this alive, to be this free. It’s beautiful. Brilliant. This must be how the other gods feel. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean I’m free from the mortal coil. I’m just not chained to it by life and death. I’m chained by need. But not now, not anymore. I don’t need anything.
I write a single word first.
Need.
One word becomes two.
Want.
More words spill out of me then, springing to mind faster than I can write them.
hope hatred joy
fear awake freedom
laughter lies faith
beauty wild desire
purpose truth
change art
pain happy regret
passion grace
strength courage
shame
dream life wonder power
sorrow poison peace
mercy wisdom belief grief guilt
time
love
The words shift, become sentences. Those sentences tangle and twine into paragraphs, my ideas grow legs and they walk, run, sprint across the page, and I can’t stop. I write all morning, across every piece of paper I own until my desk, the drawers, my backpack are all empty. Then I write across the furniture and the floors and the walls. I write words I love and hate and feel so intensely that they bring tears to my eyes.
And the words … gods. They’re everything.
All that I am and want to be and hate to be … it’s all in them, and sometimes I sit and marvel at how a series of scribbles can mean so much, how words can hold so much meaning in the space between their measly letters.
INSPIRE.
I write the word across my living room floor in big, black letters. Then I stare at it, unsure whether I want to scratch it out or deface it or write over it.
It’s a curse, that word. A purpose I’m tired of serving.
So what if I just … quit?
I know what it will do to me. Is already doing to me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I can look around at my scribed walls and know it’s not normal. I know that I’ve let this go entirely too long, and now the power I wield is stronger than I am. It flexes in me, fierce and hungry, and for a moment, I feel a spike of fear. Then it passes in a wave of euphoria, and I know now why people find me, what I can give them, addictive.
It makes me feel brilliant and aware and one with everything around me, and for the first time ever, I understand. Not just an idea or a person or a place. I understand everything. The world. The past. The present. My existence.
It’s vast and complicated and I can’t put it into words, but I just know. For the first time in my life, I actually feel like a goddess.
I come to a decision then.
I draw a D at the end of the word I scrawled on my living room floor.
INSPIRED.