the loch ness monster

September 2023 (it was a bad time)

I will find the loch ness monster first. She will find me. I will not be armed with heat sensitive cameras or an oxygen mask: I will walk into loch ness alone and stripped down to my shirt and my underwear and I will not think twice about the myth in the water. I will think about how it felt to walk barefoot in the woods and how it tasted to have a birthday cake made for me and how it sounded when beautiful people would laugh my name. Because everyone is beautiful. I will think about that.

I will wade into the lake and the water will take me and I am not a very good swimmer but by god I will swim. Down until my ears pop. Until my head hurts. Until it is so pitch black that every fear I’ve ever had starts to tear at the skin of my calves.

I know that I want to kill myself: I have always known. My death will not be natural — I am going to be young, and it is going to be tragic. Hopefully I will not make the news.

I will find the loch ness monster first. I will be so deep into this country’s most famous water that I can feel the reeds as they take me by the wrist. I will take the breath and the brine will be so cold in my lungs that it’s the shock which knocks me out first. My first ever last thought will be that I hope my family survives my non-survival. My second ever last thought will be that I hope my brother forgives me.

I will die. My stories never go like this. I have never written myself into the dying role. Always the second person, you, you will die and they will not find you, or the third, where the boy dies or the girl dies and this is the end of the chapter.

I will die. My body will never be recovered. This is not a metaphor: my heart will stop beating and my lungs will stop working and the blood will cool to ice in my veins. This is not a metaphor. I am taking you by the shoulders and shaking you and there are tears in my eyes. Do you understand me? I will die. This is not a metaphor. There is something desperate written into the set of my jaw and I am telling you that I am going to drown in a lake and do you believe me yet? I think you do: I don’t think you want to.

I will find the loch ness monster first.

This is not to say that I will wake: there will be no waking. I am dead.

She will find a corpse in her lake. The corpse will be mine. Did you know that she is not the monster which any of the stories have described? Teeth and no fangs. She is as much creature as she is comfort, a being of flame and fear and refracted light. The hunters aboveground are looking for some beast, some demon, some nightmare who rises from her depths only to consume. Of course they have not found her: she is the way that the sunset arcs from mirror-smooth water. She is the way that the lake laps at its shoreline even in the winter, when there are neither tourists nor tide to disturb it. She is all physical form, all mental image, shaped in equal parts like a plesiosaur and like the sky after it rains. She finds the corpse — the corpse is mine. Did you forget? Did you try?

I will find the loch ness monster first. She will find me. I am equipped with nothing except the will to die, and she will not save me, and she will not try. I will find the loch ness monster first. I worry most days that I’ve gone insane. I will find the loch ness monster and she will not save me, and she will not try, but she will cradle my body so close to hers that at least in death the ribs are still warm in my chest.