Parts of Me I Left Behind

I watched her cold body be dragged out to the ocean. She drifted away so peacefully that it was difficult to believe that just a few hours ago the same woman was screaming her lungs out, attacking people, ripping out hair from their skulls. The waves swallowed her and held her like a little girl holding a porcelain doll, gently, possessively, rocking her deeper and deeper.

I could feel the tears burning red behind my eyes and hear the screams ripping from silenced mouths in the distance. Something felt wrong in the air. I couldn’t remember arriving at the beach or why my feet left no prints in the sand. I looked back at the scene.

People, who stared at her, smiled, pleased with her death, celebrating dressed in all black. The sun died, and she was too far into the sea, so they left one by one, laughing as if they didn’t just commit murder.

I stepped out from the shadows to hear their voices, but whatever they seemed to say scattered in crashes of the waves. The sand beneath my feet sank deeper, pulling me in, yet I managed to run, reaching for their shoulders, ready to tear them, and they just continued, walking through me. Their eyes slid past me as if I wasn’t there, muttering something about the cold. My hands wrapped my arms only to find they weren’t there. My fingers grazed my face and felt no touch underneath their tips.

Their hands were blood-stained yet as they met my white dress they left no imprint.

I could hear a gasp and then a scream, an echo of a voice I once knew, but no source. I tried to yell, but my voice continued to dissolve into the wind like ash. My feet lifted from sand, weightless, levitating closer towards the clouds until the stratosphere was close to my reach. Then I heard the cries again, and the whispers, the rumors, the slurs, the names that christened me as Satan.

And that one, “I love you” on repeat until I was an angel who had lost her wings.

I fell until I felt the sand swallowing me again, with their laughter and hideous comments pulling me down.

The voices buried me, grief wrapping around my ankles like chains. I tried to forget the faces of those who had tortured me, the people I trusted, the man to whom I had given my heart, lifting me only as they faded from memory.

Yet the water still mocked me as I managed to rise, only to be dragged down again, caught between despair and letting go.

Then I saw her, the same woman they had carried to the sea, rising from the waves.

A stranger who was familiar yet a blank face in my mind. Floating above me in silence, watching me struggle to breathe. Her eyes met mine, empty and tired, yet full of understanding. She did not speak. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe her words drifted off like smoke here too.

She was me…and yet not me. She held my own body, my own past, and continued staring back with the hollow eyes I had once called my own.

When she saw my arms give up and my legs sunken too deep to climb out, she reached down to give me a hand. Her long slender golden-brown fingers gripped mine and pulled me up beside her, flying, just a few feet above the ground. She didn’t let go the whole time we floated.

“Thank you,” I whispered, yet she gave me no response.

“Why did they hurt you? Break you? Drown you?”

She just nodded. Her gaze dragged me backwards by hours, days, years to a time when she was not a monster, but a sister, a daughter, and a soon-to-be wife. When her now scratched face once held beauty. I saw memories of her disguising unhealed cuts and blooming bruises with makeup. Seeing the fear in her eyes as she tucked it back with a smile. She had not done anything wrong. She was innocent, a victim of fate, a victim of love.

Like me.

I wanted to cling to the anger, the betrayal, the echoing voices. But her hand in mine, patient, pulled me higher. The memories continued to flow in my mind like water, like music, but they no longer pulled me down. My past had shaped me, but it would not chain me.

She nodded once more.

And together we continued to float upwards, towards the silence I had feared but belonged to. Below us, the waves erased the last footprints in the sand. The ocean grew small, then distant, then still. And I let it.