It Had To Be

By Catherine Wear

She sat alone at the end of the pier, watching the water slip quietly past her. The sunlight was beginning to fade. Every moment the air around her became colder as the sun sank behind the line of trees on the far side of the river. She sat and watched as it disappeared from sight, leaving her in half-black shadow.

A firm breeze lifted her hair, causing chills to creep along the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and silently accepted the cold. She wore no jacket.  When she’d left home all that mattered was leaving. She took nothing with her in her haste. She didn’t know how long she had walked the back streets and by-roads of her sleepy home town. She could not remember anything about the journey because her mind was racing with anger, fear, hate, love… and sadness; overpowering, nearly crippling sadness.

Somehow she ended up here; staring down at the strangely inviting, dark black, water flowing beneath her feet. There was an empty beer bottle in her hand. She didn’t remember drinking it. She didn’t even remember buying it. She looked at it in the dim light of the lamp posts which were beginning to turn themselves on in the lowering light of sunset. She smiled a half smile, remembering long-past, good times. Friends, family, people, places, events, all crowded her mind fighting for first place in her memory. All were crowded out and expunged by the sudden recalling of the events of the past three days. A cloud covered her face as she threw the bottle, violently into the river. It bobbed up and down for a second or two, and then sank as it filled with water.

She wanted to be like that bottle. She closed her eyes and imagined how it would feel. She knew it was cold in there. This time of year the water was frigid even if the air was warm. How would it feel to just let the cold and the current take her? She imagined how she would look, floating there beneath the waves. What would happen to her body? Would she be carried by the near currents, back to shore, or swept out to sea by the deeper cross currents? Would anyone find her? Would anyone care if she just disappeared? Would they even try to find her? She knew the answer was yes.   Imagining the scenario was short lived anyway, when she remembered that she knew how to swim and her self-preservation instinct would take over, causing her to rise to the surface and ultimately swim back to shore. She couldn’t even kill herself properly!

So she sat. She sat and she thought. She sat and she thought, and she cried. How did it get this way? How did she let things go for so long? Why didn’t she do something before it was too late? A million memories of years past flowed through her mind as the tears flowed from her eyes. She knew, truly that she had done all she could to stop it. She had tried and she had fought and she had talked and shouted, and cajoled. She had even tried pretending that nothing was wrong. She knew she had done all she could but, no matter, it was not enough. SHE was not enough.   She had not been meant to stop what had happened. It had to be.

The loss was too much. It was unbearable. It was painful. It was UNFAIR! Why? Why did this happen? She knew so many others, even by name, which had lived so much worse than she ever had. Why did this happen to her? There were so many others, more deserving of the fate she suffered. Why her? Why now? Her heart felt as though it would tear itself out of her chest. She passed back and forth between breathing and not breathing. The tears flowed.

She became angry. The same questions played in her mind over and over again? She knew the answers but was not able to face them yet. The tears stopped, replaced by a fire in her heart that couldn’t be quenched. She raised her eyes to the night sky. The stars glittered beautifully in the blackened sky but she didn’t see them. Looking past them, through them, she opened her mouth and questioned the God she had stopped believing in during her twenties. She asked him all the same questions. Chief of which was…WHY? “I know you’re out there!” she shouted. “I know you’re here and I know you know what’s going on! So why didn’t you stop it? Tell me that, huh?! Why?! “

An immediate sense of shame and foreboding overcame her. The tears began again, braced by indignation within her that would not be denied. Her pride would not allow her to feel bad. She knew the answers. He knew she knew. He would not tell her. She had to find it. It had to be.

Catherine Wear is a recent convert to Islam. She lives in Orlando, Florida where she writes stories and poems.