a route obscure and lonely

For a time Eleanor lived in a shaky brick apartment building, a tower lopped off just shy of too tall for its foundation. On days like this one, with the wind hurtling across the lake like an invisible train, she liked to lay flat on her back on a blanket on the pebbly rooftop, stretched out between the pinwheeling fans and ventilation ducts. The whole building swayed -- imperceptibly if she stood, but when she lay down it was as if she became part of the building, an extra layer of brick, jumbled and stacked, for no reason, right here. She would sway with it, close her eyes and imagine it pulling apart beneath her, erasing itself, brick by brick. Would she fall as it gave way?

She was thirty-six and alone, as she had come to accept was her fate. The searching had grown tiresome, and she listened without enthusiasm for the voice -- sometimes for any voice. When she dreamed, she fell fast, landed hard and brutal, and the music was conspicuously absent. Her mind lingered too long on the vision of blood spreading in the water, clouds of it like silt stirred up violently, expanding, billowing, erupting.

There was no Jack to tell her to be still, to simply allow what happens to happen, and in the gap left where he once lay, she found herself lost and uncertain. The dreams were staticky, sporadic, and she woke crying from them, but never certain why. She started to fear that the fall would slow in the dreams until it stopped, and then, for reasons of balance, she would begin to plummet in her waking life. She could feel it starting, feel the threads of this rope that held her beginning to stretch, aching to unwind themselves. And she was certainly in no position to stop them.

She wrote to her father daily, keeping a journal of sorts, and with each completed notebook enclosed a recent photograph. She mailed the packages to her mother, who, so far as she knew, never opened them, only stacked them, as was her way, beside her father's side of the bed, where they likely remained, never to be read. This didn't stop Eleanor from writing, or from photographing herself in buck-twenty-five booths whenever she saw one. She would save a single strip of her smiling face, the one that felt as though the smiles might possibly be rooted in some kind of legitimacy, for her father's packages. The rest she bound in a sort of painter's book of swatches, stabbing a brad through the topmost end of the photo strips so that they unfolded like a fully-circular fan. Some nights she stared at the photos until she fell asleep, wondering where the little girl she remembered had gone to. Once in a million years she would catch a glint of light in her pupils, a catch in her smile, and she would sleep dreamlessly.

But more often she dreamed, and her dreams furthered the confusion, replacing the young girl on the cliff with a version of her thirty-six-year-old self, erasing whatever gracefulness once flowed through those limbs. Eleanor ached for morning on the nights when the dreams came, only to wake to a life it startled her to admit that she wasn't prepared to continue living.