When Are You Going To Land

She used to skinny dip in the ocean, her swimsuit at water’s edge. I would keep my shorts on and earn her daily jibes. We would laugh and dive and float on our backs in the sun’s first rays, a rented cabin on the beach was more than we could afford but we managed somehow, as we managed much that summer — somehow. I was learning to write and she was learning to paint — although she vehemently declared art could not be taught, a contradiction but she was made of such contradictions, they seemed to spur each daily pursuit.

As is customary of the young, I would live day to day, she would live hour to hour, hesitancy a barrier she refused to acknowledge, a god to which she would not approach on bended knee. As she periodically reminded me, “Hunter Thompson believed he would die before age thirty, and lived the remainder of his days in quiet desolation that he had failed somehow.” She vowed to live as though she held an appointment with death, as though each moment was but a prelude to the ultimate finality, and she’d be damned if anything stood in her way.

When we walked the markets, men would stare, first at her and then at me, I knew what they were thinking, “What is she doing with him?” I did not blame them, truth be known, I held similar thoughts myself, but she would intuit such resignation and placate my ego … I was her “finest lover,” she would say with a smile, a sweet sigh on pillow top. I knew this could not be true, but each time she declared this, I believed her, if only for a moment, and for that sweet moment I felt up to the task, an equal in our affair.

She spoke one day of a “need for a gun.” Not a desire, no inquisition, simple declaration, “I feel the need to buy a gun.” One was not difficult to find on the black market, and we purchased a revolver at a reasonable price. Neither of us had handled a gun, and that first night we were both giddy at the sight of it, precious to the touch. So much power held in the hand.

We were both taking bennies by the handful with whiskey to wash it down. One particularly daredevil night she held the revolver in her hand and loaded a single bullet with the other. She spun the chamber and placed the gun to her head. Before I had time to cry out the trigger was pulled.

She simply replaced the revolver on the shelf as I held my head in my hands.

The next morning I woke alone. A simple note was pinned to her pillow, “My time has come…”  The pill bottles were empty, the whiskey was missing. I ran outside and found her footprints leading to the water’s edge.

“There lay her swimsuit.

I waded, and I dove, and I swam, and I cried out, and yet, in the end, I bid my tears to the salt water.

“My time has come,” and even now, I find a simple courage in this. Naïve yes, selfish certainly, but resolute nonetheless. “My time has come,” and she had taken it by the hand