Begin Here

Jenny was dead in the next room.

Jenny was dead in the next room and I was out in the hallway with my hands pulling hard at my hair and my mouth open on a silent scream.

The violence in the silence of that scream was

Deafening.

Jenny was dead in the next room with a needle in her arm, and I was out here, feeling so much and yet,

feeling nothing at all.

Grief takes on strange proportions in the mind.

I put my shaking hands to my mouth and

finally

tears begin to fall.

It settles in what has happened and I hear a high-pitched whine, something almost animalistic.

reverberate around the quiet house and it causes me to jump a little.

I look around wildly and gasp around my crying like a child. I realize that even at eighteen that is still what I am.

A child.

And Jenny even more so even though she’s only a couple of months younger than me. She always had that childlike manner and quality to her imagination.

Even this abandoned house that we'd found together to escape the rain tonight had taken on a mysterious and fanciful shape.

I take a deep and steadying breath.

My thoughts begin to run rampant with all the what's and how's of my next steps in this tragedy.

Because that is surely what it is.

From the very start that is all it could have ever been.

A tragedy.

I wrap my hands around my neck and breathe slowly, calming myself and centering. I walk through the house a while and when I find an old sagging couch covered in a sheet, I take the sheet with me back to that room.

Slowly I go through the door and look to her on the floor and I can't help but start crying again.

She is so small and thin lying there and there is something about her inanimation that makes her appear even more childlike.

My hands shake a little as I walk over to her and violently snatch the needle and throw it across the room. I put my hands to my head and rock for a minute. Get it together! I tell myself and shake my head before filling myself with a steel resolve. Brushing her hair back from her face and closing her eyes I begin to arrange her more respectfully.

When I'm finished, I lean down and kiss her forehead before covering her small frame with the sheet. Then I leave that dank dreadful room and shut the door behind me.

I walk to the other side of the house as I'm going through the steps, I should take next in my mind.

Jenny is a street kid and she always has been. She'd been placed in many different foster homes throughout the years before finally running away to escape the abuse. At fourteen she started living on the streets or surfing couches or prostituting herself for a place to stay when the weather got so cold it settled into your bones and wouldn't thaw.

She had no family, no one in the world to care about her no longer Being except for me.

I decide to wait it out for the night.

Such a coward I am.

I always have been.

Maybe I would be gone as well right now had I not been such a coward and succumbed to Jenny's pressure about doing some of those drugs with her.

I wouldn't be here alone now in a rundown abandoned house trying to decide what to do about Jenny.

My feet pace circles around this place as I think and think and think but get nowhere.

Suddenly as I take my fifteenth lap around my eye catches onto something shining from the crack in the exposed beams of the wall.

I walk forward.

I put my hand out and tug at the termite eaten board and it comes loose easily.

After pulling it away I find a small black notebook.

My finger flicks the zippo lighter on, and I stare at it turning it this way and that.

Curious.

I open it and there is nothing on the front page so I flip again and see in big bold letters

BEGIN HERE

What? I think before flipping through the rest of the pages to find nothing.

I look around the room before staring back at it.

What was this? I wondered.

I look back into the broken boards and see a tin box.

A feeling of mystery fills me, and I am thankful for something to replace the despair and grief from before.

I pull the box out and open it and my mouth drops open.

Hundred-dollar bills line the inside.

I look up again and around as if this some kind of trick.

Begin here.

I put two and two together and figure this is someone’s parting gift to the world.

I shove it angrily from me.

If only I had found it sooner, maybe.

My hands pull my own hair a little.

I think about what Jenny said as we walked up to the house.

“Look at it! It looks like a place that holds a story.”

She said and smiled.

“Don’t be so down all the time! You have to keep going. Promise me? You’ll always keep going?” She asked.

“Okay, okay.” I say and sniff before wiping the fresh tears away. “I’ll keep going.” I say aloud.

In the morning when the sun comes through the windows and the birds begin to sing, I stand at the door waiting.

A car pulls up to the front and a man in a suit gets out.

He looks to me sadly. “We’ve come to collect the body?” He says and I nod.

The cops came before and they knew the story, everything except about the notebook, and the box.

I counted the money as I waited.

Twenty thousand dollars.

Enough to begin.

I ride back to the funeral home with the man as I curse the sunlight a little in my mind.

How dare it shine today.

Shouldn’t there be clouds, and rain?

Shouldn’t the earth mourn?

I question.

Jenny and I had always talked about moving to California and living on the beach.

Of all the friends we would make and the things we would do.

When we were hungry, we would talk about the foods we would eat.

We had planned an entire life together in fantasies.

“I just want to see that big wide open blue.”

She’d say wistfully.

I wanted that for her so badly.

The man hands me the urn full of ashes and I step into the taxi.

I watch the sky as I head towards the airport.

One small bag with a black notebook in it and an urn.

That is all I own.

That is the whole of me.

I walk into the sea.

That big wide-open blue.

I pour Jenny’s ashes into the water and watch as the waves distribute the remainder of her this way and that.

I think of her and her sad little life.

Tears stream down my cheeks and I wipe them.

“Here is where we begin.”

I say aloud as I look to the ocean that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Here is where we begin.