You’re eighteen years old.

You sit on the swingset and laugh, laugh and feel invincible as you plan a future you won’t live. You don’t know that yet, but you will. You will know when you come home still warm with that hope, come home to your family lying cold and too-still on your living room floor. The floor itself is warm, and too sticky. You don’t understand.

You understand even less when they come for you, all cold eyes and ready fists. The lights hurt your eyes and the handcuffs are cold on your skin and they bundle you out of the van into the noise and the accusations, the crowd itself a clenched fist ready to strike.

You have too many questions, protests, but they’re all swallowed by the remembrance of the warm floor, too warm and sticky, and the tabletop is cold against your cheek. Your face feels flaming hot, and the man’s breath is hot and carries a clammy hint of moisture as he hisses into your ear. Do you know what we call people like you? You try not to listen. You do your best but you’re eighteen and your wounds are still fresh and your ears haven’t closed yet. You don’t listen, but it’s hard not to hear. 

A waste of space still echoes in your ears, long after he’s gone and you sit alone with the bruises you don’t feel, with your back against the wall and your arms wrapped around your knees like you can pull yourself in so tight you collapse into nothing. (All dying stars do.) You’re eighteen and your wounds are still open and your ears haven’t closed either, not yet. One day you would have blocked out the words but it’s too soon for that and now you stop your ears but they worm their way in, too deep, too deep. It’s too hot here. Hot as hell, you think, and you almost smile - and you almost curse. In six months they will rule you innocent, not for any evidence, but for lack of it. You don’t feel innocent, and part of you knows you never will again. 

Prison was hot as hell. The real hell is waiting in an empty house far from here. It has empty photograph eyes and whispers you should have died too, why weren’t you there, why weren’t you with us. 

The whispers don’t stop. They follow you everywhere, they follow you home. They stir underneath your pillow as you lie sleepless, unblinking, with hot eyes and lips that tremble and hands that won’t stop shaking.

Almost two years now and you stand on that bridge and you probe the hollow inside you where the swingset used to be. (They were buried, they tell you, in a sunny field without you. You’ve been there alone and you know better. You buried them yourself, in the silence between sobs, amid empty bottles of soju and the space between picture frames.) At the last moment, when everything should stop - the thought comes rushing in. It’s enough to stop you from falling, and you dare to hope it might be enough.

(Twelve years in total. Twelve years and you stand again on the bridge between noise and silence, and you wait. You wait for the way out, for the “but,” for the hope. For a last-minute miracle. It doesn’t come. You fall. Then the thought is there, different than before - the water just gets there first this time. At the last moment, you sense, or imagine, a hand reaching for yours, before it’s swallowed by the water and the dark. You wake with a name on your lips and the feeling of water still in your lungs.)

Twelve years and one dream later, you sit on the floor with the scars and the bullet hole you don’t feel, and you wonder what the point was. You wonder if you can ever escape. (You can’t. The empty house is part of you now, part of your soul. A space gone to waste.) You flicker in and out like a worn out lightbulb and you wonder if the end will ever be any different. 

In the darkness of the empty house, you sense, or imagine, a hand reaching out. Closing your wounds. Drawing the water from your lungs. You fall asleep with the feeling of that hand wrapped around yours, promising a new end to the story.

For the moment, you dare to hope it might be enough.