A MOMENT OF CLARITY
A four-part story of growth and arrival at revelation written over the course of my teenage years. To look back upon this now as a 21-year-old brings to my heart a pang of bittersweet love for the girl I once was, and the one I’m glad to never be again.
By Mariel Wiley
Artwork by Samuel Chopin
PART ONE
The City that Never Sleeps
July 2014
I am fourteen, and I am singing along to songs that I don’t know the words to. My hand is reaching through the car window, trying to catch the wind as the New York City skyline glitters in the water beneath the bridge.
The lights I see reflected there are stars on earth, piercing through the blackness of the night. Now I see why they call it the city that never sleeps. Not because it is simply awake, but because it is always alive.
The car reaches the middle of the bridge. In that instant, my entire being is overcome by a wave of emotions that I had spent the past few years trying so hard not to feel. For a girl who spends her days putting up walls, the novelty of simply feeling so many things at once was one that shook me to my core. My heart aches for a life that could have been; the melancholy thought of possibility. Tears pool in my eyes as I yearn for the security of home, but in my stomach, I feel the fiery burn that accompanies new and strange and wondrous experiences. I have never felt so alone, and yet I have never been so full of love. This is one of those moments where everything that I’m feeling — the good, the bad, and everything in between — feels right. It is a moment of clarity.
I want this moment to last forever, but the car doesn’t stop. We turn off the bridge, leaving the galaxy of golden lights behind.
I pull my hand back into the car reluctantly, and press my wind-chilled fingers against my heart, telling myself that this is one of those memories that I must never let go of. For I know that at that moment, I saw the sinister beauty of the world laid bare before me. I know with absolute certainty that this was the happiest moment of my life, as much as it was the most heartbreaking. I am not the girl I was only minutes before. I am new, I am vulnerable, I am powerful.
And for the first time in my fourteen years of life, I am awake, and I am truly alive.
PART TWO
Thoughts from the Edge of the World
July 2015
The frigid autumn air hits my bare arms through the open car window, and a feeling I remember from two years ago stirs deep within me. The feeling that once soared in my chest staring out at the earthbound starlight of the city that never sleeps.
I push my fingers against the sultry air, trying to pull that feeling back to me.
We race along the north side of the island, and the sidewalk stares out into the blurry melted darkness that merges sea and sky. There are no stars here, and there is no horizon either. It almost looks like the walkway sits at the edge of the world; a drop-off into the eternal night of the universe.
I sense it tugging me; that moment I once knew dancing in the rushing air, waiting for me to reach the edge and join it there. It is a feeling of awe and inspiration; it is the tender insignificance of my being that makes my eyes weep but my heart swell. It is that sense of harmony between self and world, a moment when my mind and the universe unite and I can feel and see everything that I am, all at once.
And I am reaching and straining in an effort to recapture it, to pull it back into me.
But I can’t.
Because I can never feel that way here. There is nothing here in my childhood home that stirs the deepest chords within my soul, no matter from how many angles I try to view this sad place.
There is beauty here, but it is shallow like our balmy shorelines. The beauty here does not soar as it would amongst mountains or starlit towers. It does not swirl along with currents in a fathoms-deep sea, nor does it drift down on the first snowflakes of the year that christen the earth with a crystalline blessing.
But most importantly it does not shine from the eyes or thrive in the minds of the people here. Including myself. They are as shallow and grey as the polluted sand flats that surround these washed-up islands that I, for now, must call home.
In that moment two years ago, I felt everything and anything all at once: pure joy, wild elation, devastating sadness, raging fear … But now all I can feel is the sadness. Dull, quiet sadness moving through my veins slowly like a dammed-up river.
I sit in the backseat of the car staring out the window at the edge of the world, my friends singing along happily to the radio in the front seats. Their minds open upwards, while I stand here on the bleakest edge in the darkest corner of the universe.
PART THREE
Thoughts from the Edge of my Mind
June 2017
I stand on the edge of oblivion. But this time, there is no physical bluff; no swan-dive into shallow water.
I stand at the edge of my own mind.
I feel cheated, used, battered. A stray sail beaten by relentless stormy gales.
My vision doubles as my eyelids sink like sparse blankets begging me to sleep.
I
cannot
think
And my entire body hurts from head to toe to soul.
This is the halfway point; the crossroads. This is the moment in which I am powerless, in which everything that I ever was and ever could be seem like a lie.
PART FOUR
The City that Stands by the Sea
July 2017
Yesterday, a girl died here. She was seventeen, just as old as I am now. I know that I, as a writer, am prone to metaphors, but this tragedy is not one. It is real. I stand in the footsteps at the top of the cliff from which, the day before, a young girl slipped and fell to her end.
I look upon the raging sea below, the late afternoon San Francisco fog curling around the face of the rocky edifice.
And I see what she saw as she fell.
I see the grey sky above, and the darker waves of her fate below. I see faces. Beautiful faces of everyone that she had ever loved. I see grand vistas from across the world. I see first steps and laughter-filled sleepovers and Christmas mornings.
And then her world is filled with stars as she sinks into the water that will claim her last breath.
What is a young girl like either of us supposed to do when we come face to face with what the world throws at us? We both undoubtedly shared long nights spent hunched over homework when we wanted nothing more than to sleep. Late afternoons spent in run-down diners giggling with our friends. Early evenings huddled under blankets trying to ignore our lovesick hearts.
But for her? All of it was for nothing. Those seventeen years she spent fighting tooth and nail for a foothold in this wild world. Seventeen years of life: gone when she couldn’t find a foothold in the very ground beneath her own feet.
I could have been like her.
Not here, where the wind sings down the neck of my jacket and makes me feel alive. Not here, where the rust-colored bridge soars above the bay towards this beautiful city that stands by the sea.
Not here, but on my own cliff back home. The one in my mind.
But I chose not to fall. I had wanted so badly to just slip quietly into eternal sleep. The past three years of my life had been spent in a fog; in that halfway place between dreams and wakefulness. Always dazed, always confused. Confused at who I loved, at who I was supposed to be, where I was supposed to go.
And now I am here, standing tall with the world below me; my whole life ahead of me. Seventeen years old and full of enough light and life to last me a thousand years. That feeling, the harmony between myself and the world, soars through me like the first sunrise. And for the second time in my seventeen years of life, I am awake, and I am truly
alive.