The Trapeze Swinger

3.9

An ache. The sound of wind and a droning engine, the occasional muted conversation between two men I could not remember the names of. Consciousness stirring just enough to allow distant sensations to filter through the throbbing pain in my chest, right behind the sternum.

"Hey, hey, can you hear me?"

Make it stop.

I scratched weakly at the agonising spasm trapped behind the bone, eyes closed to the world. It had ended, surely. It had to have ended, and if it hadn't then I didn't want it anyway.

"Where's your home, girl? Where can we drop you off?" The interrupting voice asked again, a hand coming to rest on my shoulder.

Home? A trailer sitting halfway up a hill at a seaside fairground. An underwater room at the bottom of a pink island made from trash. There had been someone, but I couldn't see their face as I clutched hard at the centre of my chest, feeling the aching pulse become a burn that forced the air from my lungs in a ragged gasp.

Make it stop take this from me take it all I cannot bear it -

Hands on my hands, trying to pry my grip free as I clawed and crushed at the fragile skin over my sternum.

"Hey! Stop that."

It hurts it hurts it's killing me make it stop make it stop make it STOP -

"Let go! Hey, please let go."

Then the memory of a lilting voice, so different from the one which tried to pull me from my panic, echoing up through the layers of white noise within my mind.

I know it's scary, Sloane, but you gotta let go.

A breath, fingers going limp as I felt them fall away from the throbbing ache within my chest and I remembered what the thing was that hurt too much to bear; a heartbeat.

That's the only way a Trapeze Swinger gets ta fly.

Swallowing painfully against the raw expanse of my throat, I tried to envision the man that had spoken the words, only to instead see jagged fragments of my life flashing out across the endless dark. They were broken pieces of a lost whole too painful to watch, and I opened my eyes with a gasp, staring up and into the blurred face of the collaborator acting as co-pilot as he restrained my once-violent hands.

"Where do you want us to drop you off?" He asked again, and I stared blankly at his mouth moving, unable to find my voice.

I have lost everyone that ever mattered to me, everyone I ever built a home in.

I could feel myself standing back from the past five years, holding the end of the thread that I'd laid down day by day to become the miserable tangle I saw now. I couldn't re-enter the chaos, couldn't lead myself back through to find some place in the past where they all still lived, yet as I stared blindly into the co-pilot's face it was the only way I could imagine being able to survive.

Next time build the home in yourself; you cannot continue living in other people.

I lay there still in the static of shock, faced with the slowly dawning realisation that the girl who had made herself now only had her self; that she had been gifted her life and now had to live it, no matter the pain. The Nowhere Girl had to give up her ghosts and let them go; someone she couldn't allow herself to remember had told her to.
                   Numb, my lips parted despite the grief that sat heavy against them, pushing past the ache beneath my sternum as my heart continued it's steady beat. When I finally spoke I didn't recognise my voice, the sound hollow and broken as it left my tongue.