“To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

Joan Didion — The Santa Ana Winds

With my hands in my coat pockets that were stuffed full of rocks I’d picked up on the beach earlier, I stared out into the unseeing dark waters below. I'd stood on this jumping bridge countless summers. Clad in a bikini, jostling with all the others, each of us overcoming our fears as we jumped. Our bodies plunged into the cold waters. For some, this act of bravado was simply for the thrill itself. Others, it was the leap that hopefully offered a glimpse to the elusive key that opened the gate to all mental barriers. This ritual had begun when we were in middle school, and it was the finale signaling the end of another summer season for Eric, our friends, and me.

     As I stood shivering in my coat now weighed down with rocks, I thought how strange I must look to the passerby. On this blustery night, Seaview Road was empty.  February, a month that was harsh and grim enough to make even the most stalwart reconsider life itself, was especially relentless on this tiny island, a haven for loners and those running from something. Most all-year-round islanders escaped to a warmer climate, leaving behind those with nowhere else to go. Although I wanted this moment alone, the immature child in me wished someone witnessed my end, no matter the cowardice of it. I imagined newspaper articles in The Gazette describing the bloated and unrecognizable body that had washed ashore. While the mystery of the deceased caused a stir for the islanders, the story faded soon enough. My death was another tragedy in the annals of an island with its share of awful endings that added a patina of mystery to this small island in the middle of the Atlantic.

     It seemed ironic I was going to drown as Virginia Woolf had done. Unlike many of my classmates, especially those with a particular feminist, lesbian leaning, I’d never been a Woolf devotee. Her dictum for a woman to have a room of one's own was cast aside by most of my generation, who yearned to fill that proverbial room with a mate, a cat, a dog, and someday, children. I'm sure Woolf would plunge herself into the bitter cold English waters again if she knew how her feminist ideal symbolized failure for her sex in the twenty-first century.

     I edged my feet a bit closer to the edge, unsure what the hell I was doing. How was I on this bridge instead of back in the city?  My uncertainty and fear made me wish I'd downed a bottle or two from my parent’s well-stocked bar before driving here. I glanced behind me, verifying how my solitary clichéd denouement was, akin to one of Shakespeare’s overwrought tragedies. My eyes drank in the expanse of Sengekontacket Pond behind this bridge, the shore of the pond dotted with houses from this distance resembled the houses in Monopoly. As I took in the stillness and unadorned beauty, I noticed the emptiness of the sky above, not even an osprey circling and hovering serving as a witness. I was resigned, accepting the finality, how unsurprising it would be for those in my life. As the wind whipped my hair into my eyes, I opened my mouth, a scream erupting from me.  To my ears, the wail coming from me sounded like that of a person possessed, this inhuman cry blending with the rhythmic pounding of the water breaking against the shore.

     As I quieted, the fatigue of standing here for more than an hour made me unsteady. I eased myself carefully off the ledge of the bridge before I toppled head first into the Sound. As I stood staring at the gray waters below, I asked Eric, wherever he was now, the question that had haunted me, “How could you kill yourself without trying to reach out to me, to any of us?” Whether he heard my lamentation or not, I hoped he felt guilty for leaving us behind, leaving us bereft, unable to make sense of, unable to move beyond our grief. Worse, each of us carried the irrational belief we could have stopped it if only…

My feet numbed and tingling inside my sneakers, and my hands grabbed one large rock, chucking it as far as I could. A light splash was the only clue the smooth rock had landed amid the darkness of the night and the waters. With one last look, I strode to the rental parked next to the bridge, heading to the shuttered house abandoned after Eric’s death.