I’d spent winter planning the way I’d die.

It was kind of cool, keeping things simple, because, as you might expect, I have a history of fucking things up. When the moment was to arrive, when everything would come to its unnatural conclusion, so to speak, I didn’t want complications.

It had to happen in summer – the time of year for some reason I can never stand. I knew the location, too: my judgmental mother's dowdy holiday caravan at the resort we’d been coming to for years. From the caravan door, it was a two-minute walk, up a short path, past a gate that warned encouragingly of DANGER OF DEATH, to where I visualised my final moments at the edge of a cliff. There I would let go; shut my eyes and never open them again. 

Up to a point, that’s what happened. When summer came, I was patient, if a hostage to superstition. On holiday, I waited for a day that was as warm and sunny as my dreams, and then held off until late afternoon before starting my walk, barefoot along the path, baked hard and hot. I touched the warning sign as I passed, by way of acknowledgement. I approached the cliff edge and only stopped when I was so close that I could tilt my neck forward and look down, over the tousled grasses that softened the lip of the drop. From there, I could measure, in seconds, the distance to the rocks below. I could feel the breath of the sea as it surged upwards.

Another half-step forward. Yet. Like I said. Unpredictable things happen.

Jesus, so many people say I’m full of it. So much hate, and doubt and people who judge you just because of who you love, but I’ll say it anyway: at that moment, I could touch everything: the air in front of me, fragments of memory; every shard of loneliness, all the doubts, every argument I’d had, the girl I’d wanted, but couldn’t have. All as tangible as the beach grasses, which, under my feet, had been reduced to sand by the dry heat.

Everything palpable, yet silent. I looked down again, glanced to the left, the right.

And then, something to fuck it up. Another girl was there.

You’ll say I’m lying – everyone does – but no-one could have come up behind me. Yet there she was, close enough to touch. And the funniest thing? How much she looked like me. Not identical – now that would have been weird – but the same colour hair, skin tone, the same nose, even. She stood like I knew I did, slightly hunched to hide my height. The bitch even wore something I’d been admiring in a catalogue the day before: a bone-coloured linen dress with thick straps.

So like me, yet different. Older? More sophisticated? She looked out towards the sea, letting the golden rays of the late afternoon render her way prettier than I was. Her eyes were shut. 

“You’re being reckless,” she said.

It was an unfamiliar voice; frosted as though she’d been up all night talking people off cliffs. But she had a gentle way of speaking that someone less cynical than me would warm to. I liked the construction of her words. If she looked like me, she sounded smarter. That was the vibe I was getting.

I cleared my throat and said I’d be as reckless as I damn well pleased. 

She smiled. In the distance, behind me, descending tones of an ice cream van somewhere, selling things I'd never have. Kind of ironic.

“You don’t love yourself, that’s what you need to fix,” she said, in that gentle, throaty way, still looking out to sea.

She sidled up then, held her arm against mine, as if comparing tans. I felt her prickly warmth.

I said, “How come you’re here? Do you need to escape everything too?"

“Not any more,” she said. “It gets easier. Not perfect, ever. But easier.”

I scratched my ear. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“The hopelessness? The lack of understanding? The hatred of yourself? I do.”

I looked at her. Maybe I nodded. She was different to me, really.

She said, “It will come good. Just love yourself first. That's what I learned.”

Now she moved in front of me, standing between me and the edge and the dying sun, so my face was in shadow. She must have been an inch from the precipice, but didn’t seem to care. She leaned in and kissed me, and it was all softness and salt from her lips, and, finally, all wetness.

She pulled away and wiped her lips. She said, “Someone said to me, when I wasn’t much older than you, that ruins need climbing plants to make them beautiful.”

I felt an awakening of buoyancy. But still, I said, “I don’t know what that even means.”

She laughed. “I knew you’d say that. I’m not sure I know either.”

I took her hands in mine. “Maybe we could escape together?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. We can talk more then. But remember. The sin of love does not exist.”

*

When I came back down the path, the dusk had turned the caravan to a soft silhouette.

Before it, like a shadow, stood my mum, wrapping her hands around each other.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God. I've been so worried. So worried.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I've just been thinking things through.”

“You think too much,” Mum said. “Crazy ideas. I don't know.”

“I was just finding love,” I said.

I pulled open the door of the caravan. It was light in my hands. I felt mum’s eyes following me even as I closed the door behind me.

I knew, in the silence, that I’d never see that girl again. But that was okay. Things move on. We change.

I don’t know what became of her. Honestly, I don’t like to speculate.