This Will All Be Over Soon

PART ONE: CALIFORNIA

10 hours until death

Today is the last day of my life.

Some girls dream of weddings, but in many ways I’ve been dreaming of this day since I was a little girl. The idea that I might someday die has long carried me through most of my short and wretched existence, and though I’ve tried to fight the call of the end so many times, really, it’s a relief to finally answer.

The first thing I decide to do on my last day on Earth is head over to grab a coffee from The Wayward Owl, my favorite local cafe. I’m really going to miss coffee. It’s one of the few things I truly will miss, if I happen to still be able to miss things after exiting this mortal coil.

I order my usual — a large iced coffee extra half and half, because who cares about calories when you’re about to die — and slip into my favorite table, reaching into my backpack and shoving aside crumpled receipts and empty wrappers to pull out my worn-down copy of Wuthering Heights. I generally reread it every year, and since I won’t have any years left after today, I figured I might as well give it one last go.

Everyone thinks that the main point of Wuthering Heights is the romance at the center of it, but I really have always thought that the main romance in Wuthering Heights is with death. Only in death — sorry, spoiler alert — are Cathy and Heathcliff able to be together, haunting the moors like they always were meant to.

I’m nearing the end, my favorite part. Heathcliff is consumed by madness, staying out all night in the rain, wandering those frigid hills in search of his other half. The narration doesn’t allow us to see what happens to him out there, but I imagine him calling after Cathy’s ghost as she pulls him closer and closer to the edge.

He’s wearing his death grin when someone joins me at my small table.

I smell cigarettes and spearmint. A prickle runs down my back, though I can’t yet tell if it’s from fear or intrigue.

He’s tall and very thin; that’s the first thing I notice when I look up at him. His ears are pierced, his face is pockmarked with acne scars, and he wears a thick jean jacket that looks like it’s seen better days. In fact, all of him looks like it’s seen better days. He sort of looks like he might be living on the streets.

I force my eyes back down into my book, sipping my sweet ambrosia and feeling the rush of the caffeine spiral through my body. Of course, it’s nowhere near strong enough to wipe away the weight that has weighed me down for as long as I can remember.

I’ve long known that nothing will help with that. Not medication, not therapy, not friends, and definitely not, as everyone has tried to tell me for the past twenty-two years of my life, exercise.

Nothing has ever helped. Except for what I have planned for the evening. My final cure, the ultimate miracle drug.

I stare at the page, but my eyes don’t take in the text. Instead of looking back at him, I think of what awaits. What lies beyond the pale? Will I come back to haunt this world, like Cathy and Heathcliff do? Will I be reborn as some other being, brought back to live all over again? I hope neither of those things come to pass.

I hope I just disappear. Get swept back up into the primordial ocean. Become no one at all.

I hope I am ripped apart like a packet of feathers. I hope I am finally allowed to rest.

I close my eyes and imagine how it might feel. The end of it all. No more of this. No more me.

“What’re you reading?”

It’s him. I ignore him, more out of habit than anything. Growing up on the outskirts of LA, I’m used to homeless people coming up and trying to start conversations. It’s not that I have anything against them. In fact, I know that if I was just a little less inhibited, I might also be up screaming and brandishing knives on public transport. Actually, it probably would be me if I lived even a few more years.

I try to reenter Wuthering Heights, but he is pulling me back into real life even without speaking. He has an intense, loud aura — as if there is a kind of jet-black stormcloud surrounding him, though it’s closed off by a wall of ice.

(I skimmed through a book on auras recently at our local metaphysical shop and have been trying to guess at people’s ever since. Though I haven’t mastered the art of actually seeing colors, I have always been hyper-sensitive to people’s energies, which is one of the reasons why life has been so hard for me. Everything is always just so damn loud).

“Sorry. I’ll leave you alone,” he says, standing up, surprising me. There’s a touch of what sounds like regret in his voice, I think, and I wonder for a second if he was actually coming over to try to ask me out.

That sort of thing never really happens to me. It happens to all my friends, and all storybook girls, and to basically every woman I’ve ever been out in public with. But I’ve never really been pretty enough to be very visible, except to men who want to cat-call me or rob me blind or worse.

It is my last day on Earth, and although this wasn’t in my plans, maybe I should talk to him. Maybe it’s a sign.

But I can’t. I’ve never been good at talking to people. And I’ve never really enjoyed it that much, either, at least not without the help of drugs.

Drugs are certainly part of this evening’s plans, and I unconsciously reach for my pocket at the thought. But even drugs can’t really make it all go away.

They’re always there, even here, in my favorite cafe. The locusts, the ants, the scorpions, nipping at my mind. Stabbing me in the gut. Prying my brain apart, strand by strand, filling it with their little knives. Pulling me towards the soil.

So I remain quiet. He walks away, and soon other strangers fill the space he left behind.

I can’t focus on the book anymore, and my coffee is mostly water now. Time to move on to the next part of my final extravaganza.

So I say goodbye to The Wayward Owl, with its stacks of bookshelves and bohemian-style pillows and fairy lights and Jim Morrison posters. It’s full of people laughing and talking and living their lives. For a moment I feel a pang. Not of doubt — I’m so far past that. But of envy. How often I’ve wished I was like them.

Then again, what do I know? They’re probably all suffering in their own ways. I eye a middle-aged blonde woman who’s downing espresso shots like whiskey, and imagine that her marriage is crumbling. A young couple by the window are breaking up. The old man sitting at the counter alone is going to shoot himself in the head tonight. Maybe I’ll see him in the spirit world.

Outside, it’s a cool, bright day, typical of a California spring. Most days are the same here, and the same old palm trees greet me from above, waving their arms above my head, promising what they’ve always promised. The Hollywood dream, which is really the American dream, all epitomized by the ocean gleaming somewhere beyond the ugly mass of highways and towers and smoke that separates me from it. An ocean full of trash and bodies. My body’s future-forever home.

I watched a video online recently about how most of the palm trees in LA were imported in the early 20th century in order to make the city more appealing and to propagate the Hollywood illusion that still lives on in this place. Most of the palm trees have lifetimes of about a hundred years, so many of them are already starting to die, their leaves wilting and browning, their spindly tunks looking thinner than ever. There has been talk of replacing them, but the city has inevitably never gotten around to it.

I walk past gas stations and sex shops and motel signs all proclaiming vacancy, past kids cutting class and migrants vying for jobs on the side of the road and sex workers striding arm-in-arm as the endless traffic floats by them. The Wayward Owl’s presence is actually a symptom of impending gentrification, and once they’ve turned this place into another wealthy enclave, it’ll continue to spread outward like waves of poison. Thankfully, I won’t be around to see it.

The sky grows paler as I walk into the parking lot. I step into my car and turn it on, and the radio immediately begins playing The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreamin’. I laugh at the irony. The skies are gray here too, believe me, I want to tell them.

I try to back up, but just as I kick it into reverse, I hear an extremely unnatural grinding sound coming from somewhere deep in the vehicle’s bowels.

This used beast of a thing has never been reliable. Of course. I’ve never had any luck before. Why should I expect any, even in my final hours? If there is a God, he’s never cared much for me.

Then I smell smoke.

If you or a loved one is having thoughts of suicide, please call 988 or 1-800-273-TALK(8255), or text HOME to 741741.