Deathwish 034: Marybeth
“And then I just was still. Eyes open. Done breathing.”
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I don’t think about death enough. Except when I dream about it.
Florida. New Years Eve, 2000. I was on beach, holding a baby. I had no real life baby at the time but had been pregnant before and grieved its loss every single day since the day since it died.
This beach was in Jamaica, I recognized the smell of salt and herb and sticky sweet fruit and that indescribable scent of paradise that was inimitable, like skin, like coconut, like green grass, like oil, like a rum kiss. I was happy. There was a sense of lightness or even celebration.
Next to me was a big wooden building, a warehouse, filled with old men playing checkers and sounds waving out the windows in Oliver Stone style visuals, nebula colored goo and woo coming out, but I could hear it as much as it was something to see. Men and women stood in the windows that faced the sea and jumped out and I was scared, nervous that they were going to get hurt, but then I would see them, bobbing in the water, laughing, calling me to come in.
The baby was heavy and I wanted to put it down but I didn’t want to lose it; it was special, it was worth something. I held on to its slippery naked body tightly.
And a wave, the size of a 30-story building, jumped out from the crystal water and turned into a big old tunnel, NYC meets the Caribbean; it was dark and looked more like concrete than liquid. The wave danced, full speed, towards me. Ska, Calypso, a drum beat that I couldn’t hear but knew owned the whole joint.
I turned around, baby in arms, and of course couldn’t run, my legs would only walk the speed of honey. And I panicked. Petrified. My heart was going to stop.
I kept looking over my shoulder and the wave became a huge creature, eyes and nose and mouth and it was laughing, cackling the way I do on Hallow’s Eve to scare the little kids that come to the door. It was animated. A crazy animated: seedy, back alley, NYC tunnel-wave scattered with broken bottles, shards of glass, a deathwish for me.
I ran towards the mountains, they were bright blue, as blue as the water should be, and I would get up them, just a little bit, but then slide back down to the sand, nails grasping at land. The hands of the water reached out and grabbed me, devoured me. Inside it was pitch black.
The baby was floating away. I could see its pale skin move farther and farther. I tried to reach out and swim to her, but I was useless. I had no control. The dream was directing me. No more baby.
Then it spoke to me. The wave. The water. Oliver Stone. And it said to me that I was done. This is how I will be done and I have to let it all be done. That there was no going back. I stop fighting with howls of no! and let me go! and please god, please!
I lost all ability to use my voice. But also how the voices were not coming from anyone, or anything, not even me. They were just part of the dreamscape. A soundtrack of destruction.
And finally something blue, a shadow or a light within the black sea, came through to me. Swallowed me up some more. Now I was in the sea of the sea, the next level of water. It slammed me down on the bottom of the inside of the bottom of the sea, and the sound said to me, “nobody wins.” And then I just was still. Eyes open. Done breathing.
And I woke up. My first thought was that I survived. That I will always be a survivor.
But then the moment held me at gunpoint. Someone was naked and asleep next to me. This ceiling wasn’t my own. I stared in. And I saw my death, again.
Alive and closer to death, something stops breathing every second. We are living to die. I can’t win. None of us do. We have no control, no way to get our heads above any kind of water, and more than that, the ocean will always win when nobody else does. We might as well lay there, open eyes, open heart. Knowing and unknowing that this life is swallowing us, every single one of us, pulling us back home.
So how will we choose to live?
Maybe it was just like any other dream. I had many more after it. Over and over again I’d run from the waves, the crash shattering windows, the waves pulling me in. But it was this one, that night, that I actually took my last breath of who I was. I let life pin me down and death have her way with me, let her fuck me hard. I knew there was nothing I could do to make anything different. I was going to die. I had no say in it.
Maybe I will drown someday. I am not sure if it’s the worst way or the best way to go, the ocean swallowing you whole. But in that dream, I was stolen. Because when I woke up, everything had changed.
Nothing stayed the same. Nothing ever does.
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To read the previous installment, "Deathwish 033: Shannon," go here. To participate in Deathwish, find details here.
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Marybeth was born in Jamestown, NY and currently lives in Portland, OR.