cold
AN: Suicide tw! If that is a trigger for you, please please don't read this.
"And I will cry tears of joy
When I see my little baby boy"
- Promised Land by: Ashley Monroe
For a young, healthy women, she'd spent a great deal of time considering how she might die.
When she was a young child, she believed that she'd die after being thrown off of the back of a horse just as the little boy that had lived down the road had died. She had been five years old at the time. Before that, she had never heard of a human dying, let alone a child her age. That fear stuck with her for years, frustrating her parents as they tried to get her onto the back of one of their horses.
When she was thirteen, she was sure that she was going to die of the flu. There had been a deadly outbreak in Columbus that winter, killing dozens. When she fell ill one afternoon, she was convinced that it would take her too. But she had been healthy, back on her feet in under two weeks as the elderly and weak throughout the city lost the fight.
In her early 20's, she thought that Charles would kill her one day. A wrong punch, too hard a shove was going to be what ended her life. It was not so much a fear as it was a reality after the months and months of abuse at his hands. She'd written out a will, had tucked it away into the pages of one of her favorite books in hopes that her parents would find it one day.
After she had fled from Ohio, she feared dying in childbirth. She feared that it would be too much for her body, that the doctors wouldn't be able to save her. The thought of leaving her baby plagued her mind for months. The thought of Charles finding out about him without her there to protect him kept her up at night.
She never thought she'd end up like this, sitting on the edge of a cliff with her son dead and gone before she'd even had a chance to say goodbye. The cold stone beneath her masked her physical pain. The grief, though, it was in control of every fiber of her being. Her head was pounding and her eyes stung. The tears hadn't ceased, not since the doctor had slipped into her hospital room that morning with an apology on his tongue. Not since she'd checked herself out of the hospital with the blanket he'd only gotten use once clutched tightly in her hand.
She'd cut the bottoms of her feet sometime along the way. She'd been wearing house slipped when she left the hospital but kicked them off when she made it to the edge of the forest. She wanted to feel something more than grief, feel the sharp twigs and rocks below her feet instead of the crushing weight of loss. It hadn't worked, of course, that was what led her up to the cliff's edge. The rush of the water, the adrenaline of merely sitting too close to the edge would be- she'd hoped, enough.
How wrong she'd been, she realized as she took a seat a few feet from the edge of the cliff. She had inched forward more and more until her legs were dangling from the edge. Now, the wind was blowing her dress from side to side as she scraped the already bleeding bottoms of her feet along the jagged rock. The cold made goosebumps appear on her skin but she didn't shiver. She'd been cold for some time now.
She'd never wanted to die. That was why she refused to climb up into that horse's saddle, why she choked down the medicine her mother had made her take. That was why she gathered up her small amount of possessions and fled from Charles in the middle of night.
She hadn't wanted to die. But now she wasn't sure. She wanted the pain to stop, that much she knew. She wanted to grief and the cold that had overtaken her body to subside. She wanted to hold her baby against her chest again, his warm little body nestled safely against her breast.
She didn't want to die but didn't want to live either. Not in the same world where her son, the only thing she'd had left, was dead.
She pulled her legs back before pushing herself to her feet, looking down at the hard ground at the bottom of the cliff. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes as she pictured the face of her baby boy. His bright blue eyes shined at her and she smiled, taking a step forward.