I met a boy. No wait, not a boy. A man. March break 2010 was supposed to be spent with my parents, grandparents and best friend but plans can change right?!
He was perfect. Sandy brown hair flowing in the wind fell in light waves around his lightly freckled cheeks and chiselled facial features. With worn faded jeans hanging low on his hips he looked like life, death, and all else the world has to offer rolled up into the picture of perfect ease as he strolled along the shore line. Bare foot and a pair of aviators resting on his straight nose, he walked, arms swinging lightly at his sides, his white tee shirt would tighten around his broad shoulders and arms leaving every girl imagining what perfection lied beneath.
He was hard to miss and impossible to ignore. So of course I noticed him when I hit the limits of the sandy beach across from my hotel. But him noticing me, well at first I just found it beyond embarrassing, later on it was still very embarrassing but at the same time a dream come true. But now, there are only two words to describe my thoughts on that on single moment that changed my life-death sentence.
I've always liked to believe that everything happens for a reason, though the reasons for these happenings escaped my knowledge for a long time. I know now that I had to meet him, had to fall for him and had to trust him knowing if I hadn't I would not be dead right now.
If I had not kept walking, blatantly staring at him instead of watching where I was going he would have never looked up and found me greeting the wooden planks of the Murtal beach board walk with my face. He would have never had a reason to come talk to little old me and wouldn't have had a reason in hell to choose me. He would have planted his himself in some other innocent girl's vacation, life and ultimately her death. He would have taken her to dinners, concerts and walks on the beach throughout the week.
He would have asked her one night if he could walk her back to the hotel she was staying at and it would have been some other girl he told to follow him down an alley to create a shortcut. She would have followed him instead of my stupid naive self and she would be the one taken advantage of, sexually assaulted and almost drained of life. It would have been some other her instead of me. And hey, maybe if it had been some other 16 year old Canadian girl in that alley wearing her favourite purple dress with white flower designs; she would have done something different than me.
She might not have screamed or tried as hard as I did to get help, or maybe she would have tried harder. Maybe that group of people would have never known to help or could have come before it all got that far. Maybe she wouldn't have been saveable or maybe she would have walked away with some bumps, bruises and lifetime of nightmares.
But it was me who was too ignorant of everything except the beautiful man shimmering in the sunlight to see all the hints and clues that there was something truly wrong with the whole situation I was in. It was me in the pretty purple and white dress who screamed just a little too late. It was me who this perfect man chose to ruin. Me he bit into, intending to kill. It was my blood he was so preoccupied on to notice the group of his kind coming to my rescue. It was my body he was ripped off of and my body that felt the crashing waves of pain of a thousand fires and ice storms. My body that slowly started to change into something I had always thought of as myth. Needless to say both he and I died that night, but in two very different ways.
This is my life...after death.