Call Us Andrea

It would be so diabolically easy to take that final step. Hold my breath and move forward without looking.

I would never make it to the other side of the street, with a bit of luck.

I stand frozen at the edge of the slick sidewalk, letting myself be hypnotized by the dance of dead leaves in a half-dead tree. Their brittle fingers graze my hair—life’s cruel joke caressing a corpse. Rotting from the inside, but still breathing. Still here.

The street throbs like a living thing. Headlights wink promises, exhaust fumes thick enough to chew. My siren song of screeching tires. Ulysses tied himself to the mast, but I’m no hero—just a ghost who forgot to stop haunting.

It’s not pleasure or enjoyment I aspire to, but only peace, darkness, absolute emptiness. And to get there I just need to take this one small step.

Cars slip by quickly, headlights illuminating streets where evening hasn’t yet fallen, horns blare in the air thick with exhaust fumes. I pull my shirt up to cover my mouth and nostrils, in the useless attempt to breathe clean air. Not that clean air exists in the Neighborhood.

The Neighborhood, the eternal backdrop of my life: it saw me born, grow up, and will probably see me die. It will definitely see me die—I’ll never manage to leave here, except perhaps in a coffin.

Birth certificate to death certificate without leaving these eight blocks.

It wouldn’t be such a despicable end: in the air lingers the faint roar of spring, and the last image imprinted on my retina would be that of frightened headlights. The famous light at the end of the tunnel can’t be so different.

I just need to throw myself, and hope for the best, or for the worst. Matter of perspective.

I close my eyes and the world disappears. There are no more elderly ladies looking at me with concern, or drivers worried by my indecision. There are no more my worn-out sneakers balanced on the sidewalk as if it were the railing of a bridge. There are no more trembling hands, with nails bitten bloody. There’s no more me, or maybe there’s only me, and that’s enough to give me strength.

I snap my eyelids open and the desolation of the Neighborhood slaps me with coldness.

There’s the traffic light, with its brilliant red light, still slightly tilted from the last time someone hit it. There’s the sidewalk beneath me that wobbles. There’s the overflowing garbage bin across the street. The stench overwhelms the scent of the cherry tree in bloom above me.

I can do it, I can really do it. I can write the final word to a desolate story.

Bitter tears sting my eyes. I wipe them away furiously before the woman beside me understands that something’s wrong.

I wonder if she would care. Would she intervene if I threw myself under a car? Or would she just be an uninterested spectator?

I glance at her sideways: eighty years old, bent over, with a mane of gray hair. When she notices I’m looking at her, she stares back at me, squinting her eyes as if she’s having trouble focusing on me.

Aurora and I always played the game of inventing life stories for passersby. If she had found herself in front of this same lady, she would have pinned a miraculous past of deceptions and adventures on her. She did it with everyone. As if anyone from the Neighborhood could really live an adventure that didn’t have to do with drugs. Maybe Aurora hoped to live firsthand the adventures she told, maybe hoped to live them with me, as if we had an entire life ahead to spend together.

Maybe. Maybe her imagination was hope for the future. I never asked her, and now it’s too late.

New tears peek out, angry this time, and the lady beside me becomes just an indistinct blur.

A sob shakes my chest. I know she’s staring at me now, even though I can’t see her. Her and the kid across the street. Soon I’ll hear him laugh at me. I’ll hear him despite the blaring of horns and the screeching of motorcyclists.

I can no longer stop the tears, which flow endlessly and stream down my cheeks. I even sniff.

How ridiculous. Would he have told his friends about the pathetic girl who burst into tears on the street? Oh yes, he would have done it with the malice that only teenagers possess.

His laughter would be the perfect soundtrack for the accident. Laughter and squealing tires, that would have been all I would have heard as I left.

I bite the inside of my cheek hoping the pain will clear my head. It works, a little. Pain added to other pain. Different types of suffering, differently sharp but no less cutting.

I have to do it, I have to close my eyes and take one single, simple step. And everything would have ended.

No more torments, no past, but especially no future.

I inhale trying to capture the smell of every leaf, every stem, every pistil, I wait for everything good in that corner forgotten by the world to enter me and take root.

I raise my eyes to the crosswalk.

Suddenly, a lake of green light flashes across the street. It shines with hope and remorse. The shoes, which had peeked out until then, drag across the asphalt to the other shore. Another missed opportunity.

Attempt number twelve, none of which can be counted among the “real attempts.”

There’s no blood, no scars, no words that came out of my mouth that could suggest the torments eating me inside. No one would have ever understood, no one would have ever saved me.

“You have to save yourself,” Aurora would say.

“I couldn’t save you,” I want to tell her. “I can’t save anyone.”

I’m drowning, one inch at a time, day after day, and I don’t know how to swim. No one will save me. I wouldn’t have done it either.

I survived another intersection, though, I managed to hold back. Last time I had promised myself not to let dark thoughts assault me near risky places, but every good intention regularly fades.

I take the long way home past the library—avoiding streets where the asphalt whispers jump. Tomorrow, I’ll swear off this route too. Build a maze of safe sidewalks until there’s nowhere left to walk.

A cherry petal sticks to my wrist. For a heartbeat, it’s beautiful.

Then I let the wind take it.