Amy's Bliss
Bliss Collins was a mistake.
No less so than Katie Bramich, it turned out.
As Bliss traversed the gloomy, muddy trail, enshrouded by a thick forest of giant Man Ferns and scented by broken, moss devoured Blackwood, she imagined the vista from the peak. It would be magnificent. The viewing platform jutted out over a rocky face, and far below, a cascading fall that bled into a river rabid with water that frothed and foamed around its snaking, tree-lined bends.
The morning was cool and cloudy, and Bliss’s breaths slipped out of her in white puffs, like exploded pearls. As one foot fell in front of the other along the steep incline, her calf muscles burned. But she didn’t mind that. It was an honest exchange between mind and body, a communication that couldn’t be forged.
Not like that of the chatter between humans. Humans who threw around words like ‘friendship’ and ‘forever’, until they became words like ‘I don’t understand you’ and ‘Let’s just call it a day.’
Talk was overrated anyway. No one really said what they meant, and barely a soul meant what they said. Everyone was just a bundle of lies rolled up in a ball of insecurity, slicked in sticky pretence and sugar-coated with hollow grins. None of that alleviated her loneliness. It only exacerbated it to… well, to this: a final trek up a lonely mountain.
Bliss had never been able to play the game, although she’d tried for an inordinate number of years. She had been abandoned by her mother, belittled by her father, and found temporary solace in fleeting friendships with people who never really understood her on a layer beyond the superficial. Finally, after realising she was unworthy of anything more meaningful, she decided she was probably never meant to exist in the first place.
But that was something she could fix. All of this other… stuff, she simply had no control over. She didn’t want what other people wanted, and she didn’t know how to pretend that she did. She couldn’t blend into the fold, always seemed to be sticking out of it like some raging, catastrophic tumour. She’d heard people talking about tribes, but no tribe ever came for her that she imagined as hers. Belonging was surely fine when you knew how. But what if you didn’t? What if people could be accidents; lived entire lives never having found their place? If Bliss was a mistake, she was also the fix. If she was the problem, she was also the solution.
Maybe it would hurt.
But it wouldn’t hurt for long.
Then all of this failure would be done.
As the dense canopy of treetops opened to a great grey sky, the metal platform appeared.
Two
But it wasn’t empty. A woman was there, pressed to the railing with her back to Bliss, staring out over the canyon. She carried no camera, as many visitors to the picturesque region often did. She only carried herself, in pewter puffer jacket and blue jeans. Her hair was black as crow’s feathers, long and taken by a cold breeze that swept Bliss’s own blonde locks across her eyes. The woman gripped the railing with white-knuckled intensity, and then lifted her head to the forbidding sky.
Bliss looked through yellow wisps over her own shoulder, down the trail and into the dark forest behind. No one had followed. It was just the two of them. All Bliss had to do was wait for the woman to leave. She turned to the loner, who evidently had no intention of waiting, because in that moment she hopped and lifted her right leg over the railing.
Bliss hollered, “No! Wait!”
The woman’s head jerked, the bar between her legs at her crotch; her hands gripping tight; her face at once pale and shadowed with grief. She stared at Bliss with her wide, suddenly familiar eyes, then threw her left leg over the railing. She lowered herself so that only her toes touched the edge of the platform, and then leaned back and peered down.
Bliss rushed three steps forward, and then halted for fright that the woman would let go. She raised her palms and begged, “Please, don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”
The woman’s features were not twisted with torment, but rather resigned to some harsh reality. A tear bled from her eye, and she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Bliss breathed. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
Green eyes narrowed. “Why should you be sorry?”
“Because if you do this, I’m following you right into this ravine.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I mean it.”
“If you throw yourself over this ledge, that’s nothing to do with me.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t even know you.”
For the first time, Bliss cared enough to regret her bobbed, bleached hair. “My name is Bliss Collins. I live in Ambleside. I… I’m really shitty at keeping indoor plants alive.”
The shadow in that gaze seemed to dispel, if only for a moment. “Killing indoor plants is no reason to throw yourself over this railing, Bliss Collins.”
Bliss shuffled closer, under a watchful eye. She looked out over the expansive canyon, backdrop to this woman who needed for her to say something that might invalidate her intentions; intentions that only moments before had been Bliss’s own.
“You think what you do doesn’t matter. It does, and it’s never mattered more than it does right now. If you let go, and I don’t follow you, I will be forever haunted by your face. As pleasing as it is, I don’t want that, and I don’t think you do either.”
“You think I’m selfish. Just like everyone else. I’m doing them a favour. Why do you think I’m hanging off this shitting railing? They don’t want me, Bliss. I’m faulty. A mistake.”
A mistake. How tragic it sounded coming from someone else.
Bliss said, “Not to me.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I do, actually. You’re Amy Briggs.”
Amy’s brow wrinkled. “You only know that because my father is Robert Briggs, in the paper every week with his infernal preaching.”
“That’s not how I know you.”
“Look, Bliss Collins, this has nothing to do with you. I am not responsible for you or what you decide to do with your life.”
Bliss stepped closer. Amy tensed like a boxer expecting a kidney punch. Bliss offered gently, “I know you, because we attended the same high school. I was a grade below you.” Amy’s stare was searching. Bliss said, “Maybe you don’t remember because I wasn’t popular. I spent most of my time hiding in the library to avoid the… the teasing.”
Amy muttered as if she were apologising for an entire grade, “There’s a lot of stupid in high school. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
“It was. And I’d forgotten something important about it until this very moment.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
Amy’s gaping surprise was coupled with a one-word whisper, “Me?”
Bliss explained, “We had both arrived late at the school gates this one day, both dropped off by our fathers. Only, mine berated me as I got out of the car. Maybe he called me dumb shit, or dim wit. Those were his go-to’s when I was growing up. I looked over at you, embarrassed that you’d heard, which I assumed you had judging by the look on your face.” Amy’s mouth opened, but nothing came out of it. Then her chin dropped to her chest. Bliss said, “Can I show you something?” Amy looked up and gave a tentative nod. Bliss reached behind and took the wallet from her back pocket. She removed from it a wrinkled bit of paper and dropped the wallet onto the deck. She unfolded the weary slip and shuffled close – to within touching distance – then held the note up to Amy’s eyes. Dark pupils darted across the page, and then those green depths filled.
Bliss returned the slip to her pocket and said, “I found the note in my locker that same day. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, but I knew it was you.” Bliss recited from memory:
“He doesn’t see you for who you are.
He sees you for who he isn’t.
Enemies lie. Loved ones lie.
They all lie the same:
With jealous tongues.
Don’t believe him.
You are magnificent.”
Tears sluiced Amy’s ghost-pale cheeks.
Bliss said, “I tried to find you the next day, but then I heard you’d been taken out of school. For medical reasons, they said.” Amy’s face twisted, and her cries pimpled Bliss’s skin. The sound travelled like a grief-stricken wind, bounced and echoed and carried to every corner of the canyon, all the way down to the churning rapids below.
Bliss wanted to reach out, to secure the woman from falling. But she was frightened that Amy would rebel and then plummet. Instead, she murmured, “Were you lying to me, too, Amy? Because I believed you that day. You made me feel seen. For once in my life, I felt special. Were you… were you just lying, like everybody else?”
Amy’s voice was thin with pleading. “No.”
“But you don’t remember me.”
Amy released a hand from the railing, driving a gasp into Bliss’s throat. Then Amy brushed Bliss’s wind-swept hair. “I do remember. You were a brunette back then, and your hair was longer. And your name wasn’t Bliss Collins. It was Katie Bramich.”
Bliss would’ve been pleased –thrilled, even – if not for the grim circumstance. “Please, Amy…” Bliss looked down. They were so high up that tree hoods looked like garden peas. Her voice trembled. “Please climb back over.”
A faint smile touched Amy’s lips. “You wrote poetry. And you cleaned the graffiti off the toilet walls; putrid taunts left by pubescent teens against other pubescent teens.”
“How… how do you know that?”
“Because I saw you, Katie. But you didn’t see me seeing you, did you? Perhaps you didn’t want to. Perhaps you saw me as others did; as a mistake.”
“That’s not true.”
“My father saw me as a mistake. To this day that’s how he sees me.”
“You are not a mistake, Amy Briggs. I’ve wanted to tell you ever since that day, you… you are magnificent. Please, Amy…” Bliss was sobbing. She’d been so empty for so long, but now she was awash with emotion. Something else, as well, stirred inside of her. Something akin to hope. “Please don’t let it be that I find you here after all these years, only to…”
Three
“My father saw me as a mistake. To this day that’s how he sees me.”
“You are not a mistake, Amy Briggs. I’ve wanted to tell you ever since that day, you… you are magnificent. Please, Amy…” Katie was sobbing. Amy’s heart was aching. What if everything Katie was saying was just a selfless effort to stop Amy’s plunge? But the note. Katie had been holding onto it all these years. It was in her wallet, for goodness’ sake. Amy had been so confused about her feelings back then, and when she’d finally confided in her parents, she had been outcast. Torn out of school and sent away, and never again comfortable admitting the truth. Now here was Katie Bramich, a.k.a. Bliss Collins, determined to make her face it.
Amy and Kate had only ever exchanged hello’s; smiling, kind, but not ever followed up with what could be called meaningful conversation. Amy had been drawn to Kate in a manner ‘unbecoming’, and the situation leant itself to only one solution. And so Amy had kept her distance. It had worked, right up until that day; the day that Katie’s father had treated his daughter with unapologetic disdain. Amy’s rant to the preacher that night had prompted an inquisition, an onslaught of accusation under which Amy finally buckled. Painfully aware of the holy man’s stance, she had hoped that being her father, he might come to understand things a little differently. But he would not let go his bigotry, sending Amy away and setting her on a path of self-destruction. She never imagined that Katie might have given her a second thought. After so many years of rejecting her own feelings, she doubted anyone would.
Time had changed them both. But damn if Amy didn’t still feel something of what she felt back then. A connection she had not since known; not let herself know.
“Please don’t let it be that I find you here after all these years, only to…”
Inexplicable. Powerful. Distracting.
Amy’s foot slipped.
