Chapter 37: Accidental Ghosts
"They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated like ghosts from our pity."
-F. Scot Fitzgerald
Date Unknown
The breeze of the ocean bustled excitedly around her figure. It mingled lovingly with her fingers, playing games with her flesh. She stood unmoved by its suggestions. Her eyes stared blankly out at the wavering water, flowing in and out like her thoughts. All around her the world seemed stuck in that perpetual motion, in and out. Everyone got so far, so close to what they wanted, only to be swept back out into their own miseries and misunderstandings.
What is it they say about steps forward and back? She wondered, waiting patiently for the voice to reply. It didn't, leaving her alone when she most needed comfort. Always the cruel inner-self, she realized.
Behind her stood a little village under the shadow of a house for mad people. In front of her stood the open expanse of the unknowable. Back and forth, in and out. She splayed her palms upward, giving them to the sky as if they would drop answers into her waiting hands. Desperation kept her from flinging nervous eyes to the sides. The right, the left, whatever waited there would not help her. Had she come to the conclusion that there would be no help from the outside? No one could simply pluck her out of herself, even if they wanted to.
Her hands fell to her sides limply and she closed her eyes against the scenes around her.
"Are you here?" She asked as she swayed in the air. Perched in the air, on the overhanging piece of land above the vast stretch of beach, stood a house. She knew it was there, though it could be entirely abandoned. "Are you here?" She repeated, her voice trembling dangerously. "I can feel you with me. Always." She whispered into the night.
Unbidden, tears started to cascade down the cool flesh of her checks. She wrapped her arms about her and sobbed into the open, empty spaces. Paris hung in her mind like a nasty rumor, a diseased growth. Had she been able to flee the mere memories of her own mistakes she would have been standing somewhere else now. It had not taken her long to learn that she could not escape her problems by running away. It had never worked before and that had been under much less dire circumstances.
Elodie let a wail float from her vocal chords and drift away across the waves. Like pieces of herself leaving her body, they disappeared with time and distance. "I'm so sorry." She sobbed as she forced herself to look at the moonlit world around her. "What I was, what I have been, isn't quite real. I never tried very hard to overcome that barrier, to be something worthwhile. How did you find me that night? In the moonlight? Like a skeleton on parade, making her way tediously, like a fledging sea turtle, to the edge of land and water. I was ready to cast off, disappear beneath murky depths that continue for miles beneath swimming feet. I was ready to give up. I'm sorry to have forced your involvement. I wish that you would forgive me. Erik." His name came out choked and disappointed, as if she knew he would never hear her words.
Had she ever truly cared for him, the masked man she had relied upon so heavily to escape in the beginning? Even now, what did she know of him?
Her head shook furiously as she tried to clear the memories, setting him free from her tangled mess of life. It would be better this way. They could both journey on with their solitary fate without a brief thought to the other. Even as she thought it to herself she knew she was lying.