You will never know all the battles an individual is fighting. Be kind, compassionate, seek to understand and never be afraid to offer a smile. There is often no way to tell those of us standing “at the edge”.
A few hundred yards in front of me I could see the open water, a threatening black; an ominous warning framed against a thousand different shades of grey of which most wintry days in Wisconsin are made. Although the ice had begun to melt and there were some hints that another springtime would make an appearance sooner than later, on this day there was a strong wind and enough bite in the air to freeze the tears upon my cheeks before they had a chance to join the ice beneath my feet. The wind-crusted snow crunched beneath the shit-kicker boots I always wore at this time of my life and formed perfect prints leading from the shore of the life I used to know to the open water now before me. I remember thinking, looking back at the prints of those boots, my prints, my life, how appropriate it was that the coming spring would wash everything clean, everything anew. Nothing would remain.
No pain. No tears. No more suffering. No more dirty shit-kicker bootprints to blemish the world in which I did not belong.
The tears swimming in my eyes began to blur the differing shades of grey upon the horizon into one thick blanket, slashed across the middle by the slow-moving blackness of the open water that cut the huge expanse of frozen water into two huge slabs. A hundred yards away. Just. Keep. Walking.
Something was wrong. This was not the way things were supposed to happen. I was an athlete. I was smart. I was handsome. I had lots of friends. I had a good family who loved me. The world had been kind to me and my future looked promising. In my sophomore year, my dad had taken me to the west coast so we could tour USC, UCLA, and Pepperdine University. Penn State and Columbia were also being considered. I was not supposed to want to die.
My legs were saying no. They would carry me no further. Everything within my body and soul was saying NO by now. My eyes were so continuously soaked with tears I could only see grey, black and the diamond-like sparkle of the paper thin ice dancing just above the cumbersome current that moved below. I remember the heat of my body disappearing; as if my body was trying to prepare itself to welcome that first icy breath that would not contain the proper mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and all the other components that had once sustained my life. I stood thirty yards from the edge. Waiting.
CRACK! The ice broke. My heart stopped. My legs faltered and I began to fall.
The amount of noise that a large piece of ice can create as it breaks up in the springtime is shocking. Terrifying, actually. I can still remember that moment. Everything stopped; the tears, the crying, my breathing, my heart. I think I may have suffered my first mini-heart attack, and I was only 17. I was going to die.
The ice I was standing on had not broken. But the ice all around me was breaking up.
I walked onto the ice that day not wanting to live any longer. I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to disappear. I didn’t want to be weak anymore. I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I didn’t want to hurt the ones I loved anymore. I didn’t want to be a failure anymore. I didn’t want to pollute the world with my fucked-up teenager thinking anymore. I didn’t want to cry, to scream, to rage anymore. To feel pain. To be so awkward. Unwanted. Unneeded. Worthless.
I was 17 years old on the day I walked to the ice’s edge. The ice didn’t want me that day and the world had plans for me that I could never have known. I am grateful.
The thing of it is though, even now, at 43 years old, I am NEVER that far from “the edge”. I am destined to dance along its periphery, and this is something of which I must always deal, along with so many others.
A Grateful Life 