L'appel du vide

‘How far down does it go?’ she asks, her blonde hair hanging down over the edge of the ravine as she peers into the inky darknesss. One push. That’s all it would take. One push and the darkness would swallow her up. Forever.

I snap back to my senses. ‘I don’t know, pretty far I guess. They call it the Grand Canyon for a reason.’ I take a step back. ‘Don’t stand too close to the edge.’

She smiles back at me mischieviously, then starts flailing her arms as if losing her balance, her exaggerated expression forcing a chuckle out of me. She walks back to where I’m standing and stares into the horizon. The sun hasn’t fully set yet, but some stars are already visible in the darkening star. We stood there, quietly, at the brink of the end.

‘We should head back’ I say, turning to her.

Her eyes still fixed on the final moments of dusk, she shrugs ‘Yeah, ok’.

The darkness seems to have calmed us, and we silently walk back to the SUV parked on the trail. She buckles up in the passenger seat next to me and I start up the car. As I'm about to move off, she places her hand on mine, the one on the gear stick.

‘Hey’, she smiles, ‘I had a great day’.

Again, I see her tumble down the ravine to certain death. In my mind, she doesn’t even scream,

She’s too shocked.

I smile back, ‘Yeah, it was fun. And tiring. I can’t wait to get back to the hotel’.

She sits back in her seat and closes her eyes as the car starts winding down the trail. ‘Me too. I’m dying for a long shower’

Silence again, for a while. Dying. The word reverberates around my head.

Dying, dying, dead.

At some point she turns on the radio, but I tune it out into background noise. The canyon still looms on our right, the only thing seperating it from us is a thin wooden fence. We had taken a more obscure route, on her insistence, She wanted to avoid the throngs of tourists and have some alone time. And that’s just what we are right now. Alone.

The thought returns with a vengence. Just a slight turn of the wheel. An action that would take a split second. That’s all it would take. That’s all that’s stopping this rental car from plunging to the rocks below. The thin, wooden fence of my own sanity. The endless echo of eternity.