What held the door.

Santa Cruz in the afternoon. Gulls squabbling somewhere overhead, a breeze off the water keeping the heat honest, and under it all the slow, patient sound of the ocean meeting the shore. Something in my chest, wound tight for years, finally lets go.

I stand on the deck of the holiday home with a cocktail sweating in my hand. There isn’t a single worry left in me. I search for one, out of habit, and come up empty.

“Mum,” I say to no one, “I made it.”

It’s all I can think to say. It’s enough.

I leave the glass on the railing and run for the water. The sand is hot, the waves are cold, and the sun sits warm on my shoulders. This is the life.

Is it?

I stop, ankle-deep in the foam.

That wasn’t my thought. It was in my voice, in my head, but the shape of it was wrong, like a word I’d never learned to say, spoken in my own mouth.

“Who said that?”

You did.

“No. I didn’t.”

Then who did?

I have no answer. The gulls have gone quiet.

* * *

The water takes me before I notice I’ve waded in.

A hand closes around my ankle and pulls. Something heavy settles over my body, chains, hundreds of kilograms of them, and the surface slides away above me, bright and rippling and already too far. I kick. I claw. My lungs burn, and I can’t see, and I can’t…

What is happening? What…

The last of my air slips out between my teeth. I watch it rise in a trembling silver string toward the light while I sink the other way.

It’s over.

“Why?” The word is only a bubble. “Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve this.”

You do.

That voice again, calm and close, as if it were speaking from inside my own skull.

“Who are you?”

This is on you.

“No. It isn’t. It isn’t!”

You are the root of all of it.

* * *

Dark.

Then nothing, and the nothing is quiet. The voice is gone. That, at least, is a mercy.

Where am I?

I should be drowning. I remember drowning. But there is no water in my lungs, no lungs at all. I try to lift a hand and feel the intention of lifting it, the old motion rising out of habit, but nothing answers. No hand, no body. I am simply here, wherever here is.

I exist. That much is certain. Beyond that, I have nothing to hold on to.

I want to go back.

Then go back.

“Not this again. Who are you?”

You.

“No, you’re not.”

Yes, I am.

“Prove it.”

The answer comes at once. I move, and I don’t decide to. Something that isn’t a hand lifts, then turns, then closes into a fist, each motion smooth and sure, like a puppeteer who has done this a thousand times. I am being worn. The voice isn’t trying to convince me. It’s showing me who holds the strings.

Do you believe me now? I do mean business.

“Stop reading my mind.”

I am your mind.

“Stop.”

Silence.

Then the strings go slack, and it stops. This time.

I can’t say for how long. Here, a minute and a year weigh the same.

And now I can’t move at all. The motion that came so easily when it moved me is gone, and what’s left feels like a cage built to my exact measurements. I never feared the dark before. I used to sleep with the lights off. But this is not dark. Dark is the absence of light, and this is the absence of something deeper, the thing that lets you tell one place from another. It isn’t even empty, because empty is a room with nothing in it, and there is no room. There is nothing, and then there is me, which means there is something, so the nothing is wrong, and I can’t look around to check.

Unless this is me looking around. Unless this is all there is to see.

Oh, stop it.

“I told you to stop.”

And you were moaning. All that whining. It’s exhausting.

“What are you...”

Silence again. No answer.

Maybe it’s tired of me.

Good. I’m tired of it too. I wanted it gone, didn’t I? I said so, more than once. Let it leave. Let me have this nothing to myself.

…

Except that “myself” is a bigger word than it was a minute ago. There’s no one here. No voice, no weight on my ankle, no hand on the strings. Just me, and I can’t even find the edges of me to be sure.

“Hey.”

Nothing.

“Hey, hey. Come back.”

Nothing pushes back. Nothing even echoes. A voice needs somewhere to land, and mine goes out and doesn’t return.

“What’s happening to me? I don’t want to be here. Please, let me out. Please.” A laugh slips out of me, thin and cracked, the kind you make when you’re hoping it’s a joke. “Pretty please. See? I’m asking nicely.”

No one laughs with me.

“I hate this. I hate all of it. I don’t know what’s going on, so please...”

You will. Soon.

The relief is so sharp it’s almost shameful. I would have wept, if there were anything to weep with.

“You’re back. Okay. Okay, just tell me what’s happening.”

I only know as much as you.

“That’s not true. You’re something more than me. You moved me like I was nothing.”

I’m you.

“Then take us out of here.”

I wait for the answer.

I notice, somewhere in the waiting, that it didn’t say I know nothing. It said as much as you. I turn the words over once, and then I put them down very carefully, the way you put down something you’re not ready to look at.

“...Hello?”

Nothing.

No answer. No pull on the strings. Only a mind with no body to hang from, drifting in a place that has no up, and a question I’m no longer sure I want answered.

Somewhere in this place, I’ve stopped looking for the edges.

There’s no end to it, or maybe no beginning. It doesn’t matter. Nothing here is in a hurry to be measured.

I wonder what I should have for lunch. Chicken, maybe, crisp at the edges and still hot. Or beef, something thick and dark and salted. If I had a mouth, I’d be drooling.

I laugh at that. It doesn’t make a sound.

Only a matter of time.

The thought of food is gone before I can finish chewing it.

“You’re back.” I almost trip over the words. “A matter of time until what?”

You’ll find out. Soon.

“How soon is soon? Please, really. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Then leave.

“How? How do I leave?”

Nothing.

“Show me. No, prove it to me. Like you did before.”

The strings stay slack. No hand closes. No fist.

We’ll meet again.

“What does that mean?”

I wait. The silence settles back over me, thinner than before, and I realize I’ve stopped trusting it to be empty.

Then, faintly, a sound.

A ring, thin and high, from nowhere in particular. I hold still, the way you do when you’re afraid of scaring something off. It grows. Second by second it climbs, and somewhere underneath it the dark begins to loosen, going from black to charcoal to the gray of a window before sunrise.

Light.

I never thought I’d see it again. I can’t believe it. Am I alive? No, it can’t be. But it is. Yes. Thank you. Please, let me move. Let me breathe. Let me feel…

The light swells until it’s white and the ringing is almost unbearable. Then it frays, like a thread pulled out of cloth, and what’s left behind is softer. A slow sway. A hush and a drag, over and over.

The ocean.

Above me, a blue sky, wide and cloudless.

I’m back.

Something in me comes loose and I let it. I’m back. Finally. I don’t know who I’m talking to, but I say it anyway, to the sky, to the surf, to whatever held the door.

“Thank you. Whoever you were. Or, I suppose...” I stop. The word sits strangely in my mouth, which means I have a mouth.

“Thank you, me?”