A Thing Unreal

She sits and watches her ifs stretch on to infinity, like the branches of a probability tree. She was young, then; still a kid emotionally. Skating across the surface of her life, she heard the ice crack, saw the fissure grow, and it only took one heavy foot standing in the right place for her to be plunged into the icy water underneath.

She was submerged and cold and wanted to be pulled out, but the darkness soothed her, and the paralysing cold let her abdicate from choosing. Left on her own, she would have remained there, under the ice, underwater, until she sank.

But then a hand, an arm, a grip that grabbed and pulled and said, ‘Trust me.’ Her own hand too cold and numb to grip back, so he gripped more tightly and dragged her back up from her watery womb, through its murk and half-seen truths, back to the surface where the other one stood and watched, his heavy foot the cause.

She wanted, then, to shout, but her throat was frozen, burnt by too much water almost breathed through her lungs. The icy burn in her throat sealed the words away for eternity. The hate and the love locked away like a cancer, eating into truth and colouring perception with its toxins, designed to resemble the things it slowly destroyed.

The one whose hand still gripped her icy arm. His body a question then; a question now, in her mind.

She sits and watches her ifs, beginning with one and following through the others. None of them tells a story that should have been. No alternative ending, no other path to follow. She wonders if that was fate then. That plunge through ice that numbed her and showed her the comfort to be found in the gloom beneath the surface.

His hand kept its grip, and the attempt at memory is still like ice. Unacknowledged, hidden away, how wrong it was. The biggest if of them all. If he had not pulled her out, would some other? If he had not been first on the scene, and had not wanted, who? If she, once rescued, had walked away, or even shouted, would she have broken the spell?

But none of this happened, and so the spell took hold. Frozen under the surface, numb and moving through existence. She watches the ifs, she hears the questions. She does not know the reasons why.

A hand; four fingers and a thumb. A hand that holds her hand and asks the questions of her. Not ifs, but whys. The something that isn’t right. The nothing that it was. The spell that still binds, even now, when the nothing has doubled and squared and expanded itself exponentially into infinity where it sits and waits and wraps its ties around her life. The something that happened, the nothing it was, the hollow, the hole, the frozen, icy numbness. The hand that holds her hand asks the questions.

The ifs are gone now. The whys repeat, and her hand wants to pull away. To be touched is too much, and the water is pulling her back again. A descent into madness that she wants to resist; a descent into ice that she doesn’t.

Why him? Why her? Why the grip that pulled and almost strangled her in the minutes, days and years that followed? Why the nothing that should have been something, but was all pretence, all sham? A fake, a feint, a blind. Smoke and mirrors. A thing unreal that protected him, that protected her, that damaged them both and the things they valued. The cancer eating away beneath the surface. The shotgun in the cupboard, waiting. The powder in the packet, waiting. The gag, the blindfold, the terror of being alone, in silence, beneath the water.

The lies, the act, the polish of normality. Derivative normality. A thing seen on the tv screen. A thing read in books. A life observed through a lens that tilts and shifts and changes perception, so you direct the viewer’s gaze to the thing they want to see. Not the thing you want them to see. You direct the viewer’s gaze away from that. The small fire burning in the corner of an oil painting, that gives the thing its title, but is not really there.

His hand holding hers across the table asks the questions. The answers she gives avoid answering. He knows there is a lie there; she knows the lie she lived; the lies she carries on telling. But the why is always unanswerable.

Frozen under the surface, numb and moving through existence. She does not know the reasons why.

© J R Hargreaves 2006