Page 1 of Forget Me Not

Cold.

I’m so cold.

The water threatens to drown me, tugging at my ankles and pulling me down with the car’s descent into the Mississippi River.

I fight against the strong current, reaching for the surface, though I can’t see it. It’s dark. No light breaks the surface of the rushing water overhead.

Fight. I have to fight.

My head grows dizzy, lightheaded as I fight for air. I kick my feet, swimming up as hard as I can but the current draws me back down.

I try to squint and see what surrounds me, but there’s nothing and it sends me into a panic as my heart lurches in my chest.

I’m not going to make it.

Just a little bit further.

I’m running out of energy. I can’t fight hard enough.

A sudden weightlessness overtakes my limbs and I can’t kick anymore.

I’m not going to make it.

My mouth fills with water as my lungs accept it in with a silent scream. It feels like breathing in fire, but I can’t put the fire out.

This is it.

I think of my parents. My friends. Jack. I think of Jack the most.

Where is he?

I hope he made it to the surface.

Calm spreads through my body; the sound of the water is drowned out by a delicate thrum in my ears and I can’t fight the cold anymore. It’s in my bones, my blood. My lungs.

Suffocating. Drowning.

I am drowning.

Where do you go when the world is at your throat? Home? Some secret place where no one will find you?

Where do you disappear to when you don’t want to be found?

I come here.

The ocean is my home. More specifically, the Atlantic. The way it welcomes me back time and time again, day after day like an old friend.

I rest on the water, at peace with the demons from my past. On land, they catch up to me, but out here?

I guess they can’t swim.

Caw!

There’s a fucking seagull perched on the back of my deck, screeching at me.

“Shut the fuck up,” I grumble, tossing it a rotten fish. It must be getting five-star meals wherever it nests because it looks at the fish, then back at me like I’m a peasant for offering it some of my bait.

“Well, then starve.”

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