Mama says she’s taking me to the playground today! I’m so excited because I haven’t been in ages and Jackson taught me how to do the monkey bars the other day at school. Now I will get to show Mama how strong I am! Maybe that will make her happy. She’s been really sad for a while and super sleepy. She mostly naps on the sofa or just lies there staring. Not even at the TV or anything, just at the wall or the floor. I sometimes call it her awake naps, but she won’t wake up properly for hours. When she does wake up from them, her hands shake a lot and she’s really grumpy. That’s okay though, sometimes I’m grumpy when I wake up too.
I knew today was gonna be a good day when Mama made me breakfast. I had cereal with milk that tasted nice and not all sour, plus TWO pieces of toast. Sometimes Mama forgets to make me meals. She almost never eats food. But today she also ate toast. We were toast buddies! I love my Mama.
I hold her hand and try to run to the playground because I want to hurry up and show her my monkey bar tricks, but she tells me to slow down. I do because I don’t want to make her sad, but inside I want to GO GO GO and fly to the playground. It feels like it takes forever but we get there and Mama walks to the swings. I don’t really want to swing, I want to go on the monkey bars, but I want to make Mama happy. I’m really bad at making the swing go up and down. I try really hard but I can never get it to move much.
“Mama, I can’t make it go, can you push me?” I ask her as she slowly swings next to me.
“Not right now, baby,” she says, rubbing her eyes. She still looks sad. “Why don’t you go on the slide or something?” For a second I feel a bit like I might cry but then I remember about the monkey bars.
“Mama, watch what I learned on the monkey bars!” I run over to them and start climbing up. I use my big strong arms to grab onto the first bar and then I try to move forwards. I fall onto the floor.
“Poop,” I say as I brush sand off my knees. I don’t look at Mama but I know she must’ve seen me fall. That’s okay, I’ll do better this time. I climb up again and this time I make it to the second bar. And the third bar. And the fourth bar. I keep going until I reach the end.
“Mama, I did it!” I shout, so happy that she saw how cool I was. I turn to look at the swings.
Mama isn’t watching me. There is a man sat on the swing next to her. I know him, he’s her friend that comes around sometimes. I don’t like him. He smells funny and pretends not to see me. He passes Mama something and she gives him some money. They do it really quickly but I know because they do it all the time.
I try to wipe away the tears that I can feel in my eyes. I guess Mama’s gonna have another awake nap today.
She was haunted by the past, She felt rotten deep inside, She spent her days in a numb bubble, Wishing she’d already died.
But she couldn’t quite do it, Couldn’t end her life herself, So settled for the lesser evil; The razor sat on her shelf.
Now she’d have to wear long sleeves, And hide her arms from her friends, But if, for another day, her life Was to be without an end,
Instead there had to be a moment of ease.
At first, I thought it was a hallucination. Human brains are capable of incredible things when pushed to the limit, and ten days stranded in the middle of the ocean would push anyone to the brink of sanity. I’d woken from a restless sleep under the blistering sun to see a seagull perched on the end of my raft. I blinked and unconsciously picked at the peeling skin on my shoulder as I tried to figure out if the creature was real without scaring it off. It was poised on the bow of the boat like an ancient ship’s figurehead, beak facing forwards and beady eyes staring into the blue nothingness. As I leaned closer, the gull finally turned and faced me. Instinctively, as if I were beckoning a beloved cat, I outstretched a hand towards the bird and he quickly took off into the sky. The sudden grief of being alone again was momentarily more crippling than the constant, looming fear of death. I laid back on the raft and let myself waste precious energy on crying.
The next morning, it was there again. It’d settled in the same spot, on the bow of the raft, but this time it was facing me. I hardly breathed as I locked eye contact with the seagull. Minutes ticked by. Finally, desperate to feel some kind of connection to another living creature, I dared to talk.
“Hi buddy,” I whispered, my voice scratchy. The bird tilted its head, regarding me. A few tense seconds passed before it defecated on my boat and flew away. I couldn’t help but emit a laugh at this turn of events. It was a short bark of a laugh that hurt my throat, but it reminded me I was still alive.
On my twelfth day stranded at sea, the seagull was late. The midday sun was beating down on my red, blistered scalp and I’d just about given up hope of seeing it again, when the flapping of white wings caught my attention. My friend flew to its usual spot and it took me a moment to realise what the strange movement by its face was; there was a small fish thrashing it its beak. The bird dropped the fish onto the boat and I stared at it, waiting for the prey to get eaten. Instead, my friend watched me, tilting its head and I remained seated. Slowly, a strange realisation swept over me and I reached for the herring. Had the gull caught it for me? As my hands clasped around the writhing fish, the seagull took flight and left me to my meal.
I awoke the following day with an immediate and overwhelming sense of unease. Something was wrong. As I cautiously gained consciousness, I realised; I wasn’t moving. I’d become so accustomed to the constant bob and sway of the boat that stillness felt entirely foreign, like when you’ve been on a trampoline for so long the ground suddenly seems wrong. As my eyes adjusted to the bright light of the day, a gasp caught in my throat; I was on a shore. My raft had washed up on a beach and finally, finally, there was earth beneath me again. As I disembarked my boat, I saw a familiar figure out of the corner of my eye.
My friend stood proudly on the shore, head tilted and eyes watching me rejoin the world.
