Quiet Mind

• Courtney New, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2015

You know that feeling when you’re floating? The water surrounding you entirely, supporting your body, making you feel light as a feather. It felt like that at first. Right before the feeling of falling came. You might remember watching Alice in Wonderland as a child. Remember that moment when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, the top of the hole where the light is pouring through getting smaller and smaller. The world just seems to fall away and there is the illusion that you are remaining still, except for the wind brushing past you, reminding you that you are indeed the one falling. That is what it was like. It happens so quickly, yet you still have a few seconds to realise the fate awaiting you at the bottom of your very own rabbit hole. Only a split few seconds left before death and there is nothing you can do to change that. They say your life literally flashes before your eyes. But it didn’t for me. Her life did. The girl in whom I reside– my hostess you could say. I was merely here for the ride. But going from peace and serenity to the panic and rush of approaching death was not a pleasant ride.
As we lay there on the ground, a pile of limbs all belonging to her, I noticed her lack of awareness or energy. Everything seemed to get cold, so quickly, so suffocatingly and I could no longer feel her presence in any crevice of the vessel. This seemed awfully wrong and dreadfully real at the same time. I pulled myself together, feeling my energy bundle into a small ball, tiny enough to fit through the veins and arteries of her body. Travelling via bone and muscle, I found myself working from her head to her toes, listening out for any pulse of energy. Yet, as time passed I found myself tiring from the search and still frighteningly alone.
She was gone. My beloved Harper was gone. Seventeen years we had spent together, only to end at the bottom of a cliff among illegal dumping and sharp rocks. She deserved more than this. She deserved a life of love, happiness and adventure. She did not deserve to fall endlessly with her short life flashing before her eyes. With such a short life to remember, the rest of the fall is left to the mercy of panic and pure dread, taking over your mind as you watch death reaching out with its ghostly tentacles. But that was how it happened. And that was how I found myself left in an empty, cold, crumpled and broken body at the bottom of a cliff, awaiting someone to come and find me – to find us. The powerlessness I felt in that moment summed up my entire existence. What was the point of me being here if she wouldn’t listen to me? What was the point of a conscience if the vessel does not give it a voice?