Snow Field
Have you ever had the feeling of drowning?
Not in necessarily a bad way like most people initially think. Drowning from an overflowing life, one filled with priceless memories that feel as if they will last beyond time and are truly infinite. At a certain point in my life I had the feeling of the best type of drowning, swept up in the magic around me to where I could see beauty in even the smallest detail.
As a child, I had plenty of friends and loved ones. Their smiles and joy had been something I had always enjoyed seeing. Yet, those aren’t always memories we hold dear. As humans, maybe we simply understand deep down that compared to the world around us, people are sometimes the ugliest aspect.
My memories of drowning were always something more special, because they were something unique only to me. Frozen pieces of time that I had carved out myself, to last into the darkest night. Like a golden wheat-field, radiating from the warmth and light of the sun. A breeze bringing the memories of fond conversations or those silent moments filled with content and enjoyable pleasure of being around one another. The sweet smells that feel similar to a lovers gentle touch and a life filled with happiness.
My dearest memory will always be of her, though. Everyone around me use to praise me, saying I was bright, handsome, and they couldn’t ask for someone better to pass the future of our family onto. If I was the light of a candlestick slowly burning out, she was the sun. True beauty is something beyond the physical, beyond understanding. She simply walked into my life and set it ablaze, scorching my very being, and altering how I viewed the world around me.
I’ll never forget that moment on the hilltops, gentle breeze weaving throughout the blades of grass, creating our own private orchestra. I remember the scent of lavender she always had, her black raven hair shinning brightly in the moonlight. She was more than just my love at that moment, more then just a princess to my Prince Charming. She was a goddess. My heart would clench, my throat would strain making it difficult to breath. My mind would slow, but everything around me would become so sharp. When she was beside me I too felt like a god and it was so very real.
That night, we laughed and talked for hours, but those hours felt like lifetimes. I understood in the moment one fact about this world, more then any other. That was my everlasting love for her. As the sun rose, she smiled with dimples brighter then any morning, her amber eyes so full of life and passion.
However, this isn’t a fairy tale, and there isn’t happy ever after. In my youth and arrogance I thought I could survive anything. Then, one day she was gone. Her dad had discovered our meetings on the hilltops, and about our love. So he called her a whore, and shot her dead before ending himself. That memory, will fade away. I had been the one to find them.
Blood.
Rage.
Fury.
Hatred.
Her dress.
His smile.
Her horror.
My vision.
It hurts, please, please make it stop.
My mind broke, the nightmare repeated over and over and over. When I woke up, my world was grey. I could only hear muffled words, and see the disgust everyone around me gave. I could only feel muddled emotions soaked in sorrow so unbearable it broke me down every single day. I had no life in me anymore, just a world around me filled with a muddy grey.
I spent a year of my life locking myself in my room, hardly eating or speaking. I couldn’t stand their judgment, their blame, their pity. I’d cry myself to sleep every night, shaking in the darkness as my hands grasped anything it could reach in an attempt to save me.
Inside my head, the wheat-field was barren, decayed with the scent of blood. My memories were just as grey as the world around me. I would replay those moments with her. This was the only way I could keep her alive. But it felt like I was losing. That I would forget what she looked like, or the moments we shared. The sound of her voice, like rose petals dancing across a blue sky ... Over time I did forget. Small things first, then larger, and the field continued to decay into nothing but rotten husks of what it had once been.
Yet, they couldn’t leave me alone. My dad dragged me from the bed by my hair, down the steps, and into the basement. He chained me up against the wall, but my body was limp and lifeless. That just made him mad, and he would call me trash, a waste, a loser. He would beat me until I bled, and if I ever reached out to him ... pleading for him to stop, to save me. He would stab my hand into the wall with a knife, and grind the blade down until my hand was pinned.
That’s when my world turned black. Every day, the beatings continued. Nothing but pain. My tears had dried, and my body felt filthy from blood and grime. He kept saying he would put God into my soul. That I would just need to forget her, admit she was a whore, a seductress, and that she had tempted me into evil. Then, and only then, would I be saved and redeemed.
I knew I couldn’t survive, and I’d never allow them to take my light. She was the only thing I held dear. She was my light and they simply couldn’t understand that. One day, out of spite, out of fear, out of hatred, I tricked my father into leaning his ear close to my mouth. He thought I was finally going to break. That I would do what he wanted. He was wrong, because as soon as he came near, I bit off his ear. The blood, and his screams, were more than satisfying, and for that I felt sick. In his rage, I believe he killed me.
I could feel his hands tighten around my throat. My feeble body wasn’t very sturdy. He applied as much pressure as he could muster, and my throat collapsed. I remember thinking to myself, this was what drowning really felt like. In some ways it felt the same, and in that, I found happiness as my vision faded. I remember the last thing I felt, the final beat, the final note of my final moment.
I awoke surrounded by an endless void, pitch black with only a single dot of white light. I don’t know how far I traveled, but I felt like this place had at one point been my home. When I reached what I first thought was a simple white light, it turned out to have been the field where my memories had always been housed. No longer decayed, no ... not even a field. It was the top of the hill, covered in pure white snow. I collapsed then, crying, but not from sorrow this time. In the center of the snowy hill, where I had my fondest memory, was a single green sprout of wheat that smelled of lavender, a star-filled night, and the rising of the morning sun.
