cliff’s edge
May 2020
In response to this writing prompt:
“You’ve always loved watching waves crash against cliffs. As you grew, you began to paint them, spending many a day watching from different angles, capturing the chaos of foam and water in acrylic and oil. One day, when painting at the top of the cliff, you fall, and brace for death. But it does not come — instead, you feel as though you are being cradled in the arms of many. “Oh no,” you hear. “We cannot destroy something that has loved us so beautifully.”
For a moment, I’d thought that was death. I’d done it. I’d crashed into the rocks below and the pain had been so fleeting, so quick, that I was spared the torment of feeling it at all. But as my eyes opened, as my gaping mouth wired itself back shut to blockade the salted mist that fired up from the waves below, the realisation hit me as hard as the rocks might have done. Should have done. Cradling my limbs with the icy intensity that only the ocean could supply, were the invisible grips of a fallen nation. A seraphic army of however many souls that it took to keep me up, to hold me steady. Surrounding me like perhaps the water would have done, if they’d let me fall, if they’d let me go, was a chorus so damningly familiar and yet, simultaneously, so hauntingly like nothing I’d ever head before.
“Oh no.”
It echoed off of each crevice in the cliff face, shattering every supposition I’d ever been fed that nothing supernatural could possibly exist. The sound itself seemed to come from inside of my own head and yet somehow, it was emanating from everywhere, anywhere, a sphere of resounding uproar which rattled each strung fibre that made up the person I thought I knew. And then, again.
“We cannot destroy something that has loved us so beautifully.”
This time I’d been expecting it, to an extent—this time I didn’t flinch at the thunderous clangour that blocked out every other rational thought, and after a moment I could pause to appreciate the scope of those words. Each painting that hung, now, in my otherwise empty room, each fleck of pigment that had distracted me from every other aspect of my shatteringly disillusioned worldview, was worth something.
And before I could move, speak, think, breathe, I was hoisted back onto the very grass that had taunted me already for so, so long. I was standing—somehow—but the physical act didn’t last for more than a few moments as I stumbled to my knees, releasing a desperate breath I hadn’t even been aware of holding in the first place. Without pausing to wait for the rest of my conscience, I could feel my fists hurling themselves into the unsteady land as finally, the scream I’d been fighting against for longer than I cared to remember let itself go.
It put up no comparison to the deafening boom of the voice that had filled the air just seconds ago, but it was mine, and it was loud enough, and for a fleeting moment it was almost as if the crashing waves themselves had paused to listen. Dragging my own weight back along towards the edge of the cliff, praying that this time, the land would fall away, this time, the waves wouldn’t hold me back. A drop of water slipped from my chin onto the ground beside my palms. I hadn’t even realised that I’d been crying.
Gripping the edge of the precipice with all of the tenacity that my aching hands could manage, I felt the scream die in my throat as another string of words fought their way out, instead. In between the sobbing gasps that I realised, now, had taken over my body, tearing the impenetrable veil of furious desperation and raging pain into more pieces than could possibly hope to be picked up, I let myself speak.
“Don’t you understand?”
I could barely hear my own voice over the roar of the ocean below, but it was enough. For this. For me.
“I jumped.”
