Apathy

Apathy

I died when I was fifteen.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. I didn’t crash a car, didn’t slit my wrists. I wasn’t murdered. It was a quiet death, silent and unremarked.

Driving over the range, it was mid-afternoon, just starting to get dark. Shadows were inching over the road, grey and black peaks and troughs and blurs across the gravel and concrete, where the ferns and mossy trees and cliff faces blocked the setting sun.

My Aunt in the driver’s seat with her daughter by her side, there was a cousin to my left and a brother and cousin at my back.

The car was noisy - three girls, two boys all fifteen and under striving to be heard over each other and the radio, which switched intermittently between the latest disposable top 100 and the snapping crackle of static.

I had the window-seat, closest to the roadside, to the winding edge.

I looked out over the flimsy guard-rail, over the tops of the trees, staring at the lights of the city and its suburb-spawn, gazing over the coast and out to sea, where the late ships coming in could barely be seen even with their glow doubled by the reflective ocean surface, slipping from view as they approached the wharf, masked by towers and modest skyscrapers.

I sat there as they argued, my family, and laughed and shouted. I sat and stared as the four-wheel-drive moved steadily along the winding trail, and wondered what it would be like to die.

What would happen, if my Aunt didn’t turn sharply enough at the next bend, and we went over the edge?

I could almost feel it, in my bones, in my skin. The press of the seatbelt against my chest as I was jolted forward by the car flattening the guard-rail. The neck-cracking impact of the car’s underside against the cliff’s edge as the front wheels tip over, teasing, tempting the abyss.

Would I scream? Would I pray? Would I huddle down in my seat and try to convince myself it wasn’t happening? Would I have time to do any of these things before we went through the flimsy barrier of spindly tree-trunks, over the cliff’s edge, freefalling to the unyielding, unforgiving carpet of brush over stone at least fifty metres below.

I could almost feel it, the moment of weightlessness, my hair whipping against my face as wind howled through the open windows, or the windows swallowed the wind, while we twisted through the air.

Would it be euphoric, as if we were flying? Or would it be like a Show ride gone mad, twisting and turning and sickening?

The road wasn’t busy, there would be no-one around to see us go over. There wasn’t anyone at home to worry if we didn’t turn up that night. Who would know? Who would search?

The dawn would reveal the damaged guardrail, maybe even tire-tracks in the gravel bordering the fall. But even if we somehow survived the initial impact, would we live long enough for the rescue team to be of any use when they found us?

I tried to focus on the arguments, the music, the static. But it was nothing but white noise. My mind wouldn’t let it go, kept screaming, what if? What if?

I couldn’t escape it, the blood shooting through my veins, sped on by my tripping heart, was keeping time to the sharp, staccato thought. What if? What if? The curlews screamed from the dark, adding their eerie voices to the doubts, to the terrors, they were like the ragged old madmen who preached from street-corners, the storm-crows prophesying doom.

My breathing was heavy, fear froze me to my seat as I sat and watched the trees go by, convinced we were soon to become rather well acquainted.

I was going to die there, that night, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t ask my Aunt to pull over because I knew it wasn’t rational, it was mad. It wasn’t logical, to believe that we were all going to fall, screaming until the abrupt halt crushed the air from our lungs.

But logic is just a different kind of religion. It requires belief, faith in the rules, in structure, in probabilities.

Faith never saved anyone.

So I convinced myself that it didn’t matter.

One human amongst 6.6 billion. One country of 193. One species amongst 1.8 million, One planet amongst an uncounted and uncountable multitude. A drop of water in a depthless ocean, a grain of sand in a shifting desert, a leaf in a trackless forest.

I convinced myself that it wouldn’t matter if I died. So what was the point of being afraid?

It worked, far too well.

I was free.

It no longer bothered me that my mother was an alcoholic who‘d chosen alcohol over her children, and had them taken from her for the third and final time. I was irrelevant, after all. So was she.

It didn’t upset me that I had no friends at school. I don’t matter, they don’t matter, who cares if people don’t like being around me?

I did the bare minimum of work to get by, relying solely on intelligence rather than study. It didn’t matter that my marks had dropped from A to B, then to C, what was I going to do with my life where my marks would have any significance?

I hadn’t talked much before, but after that I hardly ever opened my mouth. I lived in an un-vowed silence. My opinion wasn’t relevant, no-one cared what I thought, and neither did I.

I lost myself in books, fantasies and science fiction, things so far from my reality they pulled me along with them.

I had no purpose. Like a phytoplankton I drifted on the tides, went where the waves carried me, not moving unless forced to.

Nothing mattered. Nothing at all.

I died when I was fifteen.