text: Every time I feel peaceful and calm I see myself die. I don’t actively search for death but I seem to find it everywhere I turn. Today as I looked off the balcony I saw my body bent into unnatural shapes on the concrete. The soft lull of the rain quietly created red pools drifting from my head into the corner of the lot. I stared at it and felt peace. Everything felt serene. The brokenness of my limbs and the cracks in my skull seeping into the cool water seemed a perfect fit for an otherwise colourless day. Something to break up the monotony of summer rain without being a cacophonous and grandiose drama. A way to erase myself gently and calmly. But my feet never tried to reach the ledge even when my brain started calculating the likelihood that such a fall would cause death. Then the daydream ended and the concrete was just concrete again and my hair was wet with raindrops, not the ruby elixir still stirring about inside of me. When I went to the lake last summer to lay underneath the full moon I saw myself in the water. The moonlight illuminated my motionless body under the waves, my dress simultaneously clinging to me and drifting in time with the tide. I had been laid out in my grave with no headstone or sign of who I was beyond the residual bubbles that occasionally floated up to the surface. The rocks tied around my limbs held me in place like paperweights as the soft blanket of the lake enveloped me, and the beautiful glow from the sky highlighted what looked like a smile on my face. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in. I was no longer in the lake and any trace of a smile was nowhere to be found. Just a week ago in my hotel room I stood at the floor to ceiling window looking out at the skyline and admiring the architecture. A small city that was quiet by midnight and lit up only by a few streetlights and brought to life by a few people staggering home from the bar. In the reflection of the window I saw my body hanging limply from the ceiling fan. My feet were bare and my long hair cascaded across my face and down my chest. The air felt thick and heavy and I wondered how long I had been hanging there. The scarf tied around my neck was a gift for my birthday; a beautiful piece of fabric meant to celebrate my life now represented its abrupt and painless end. The reflection wavered and as I focused my eyes harder, it faded. When I turned to look at the room it was empty. As my mind relaxes I observe my body as though it belonged to someone else. Someone I happened to stumble across after it was too late to change the outcome. It doesn’t scare me. It never has. The only thing I find disturbing is that in each vision, something about me is different. When I was broken on the concrete my skin was a beautiful olive tone. When I was stuck to the sandy floor of the lake my body was thinner and the fabric of the dress highlighted protruding bones in my hips and ribcage. When I swung from the ceiling in the hotel my hair was a vibrant blonde. I am never the same in any of my visions, but I always recognize the girl as being me. I always recognize her as though I were looking in a mirror and when the memory of a life with different hair, different skin, or a different body starts to set in I lose the image. A life that might have existed somewhere in time is always just outside my grasp. I can’t help but wonder when the day will come that the body is truly mine.