All Your Wishes Will Sink Like Stones
Slowly Down A Lonely Well

I sat on my couch, sorting through my mail. Pete Wentz. Pete Wentz. Pete Wentz. I had learned to resent the name, despite it being my own. In fact, I hated myself. I hated everything about me, and I wasn’t quite sure if my life was worth living if that was the case. I had rolled suicide over in my mind numerous times now, only tried that one time that everybody heard about so many years ago. But now I felt it necessary, like I needed to take myself out of my misery before I hurt someone else.

Pete Wentz. I read it over again, thinking to myself how much I wished that it would just leave me alone. I just wanted a small part of my life to be peaceful and tranquil, but everywhere I went I heard my name. I despised it for following me around, a shadow spelling out the wrongs and the mistakes that I had made so frequently during my life.

Who were they to say that I had no right to be who I am? To tell me that I don’t deserve the friendships that I worked so cumbersomely for, that nobody was able to see past my cold exterior and find the flame burning within me? They are nobody.

And neither am I.

I have up sorting through bill after bill, hate mail after hate mail, threw them on my coffee table, and sighed long and hard. I let my head rest on the back of my sofa, clamped my eyes shut, and tried to listen to the ocean just outside of my new home.

Make it all go away. The pain, the heart ache, the hollow wishes and terrible discontent. Just make it leave me, find another poor soul to inhabit and torture relentlessly, driving them insane day after day, minute after minute.

I imagined that I was nobody, that Pete Wentz was a mere falsehood and that I was outside myself. Nothing restrained me, nothing threatened to restrict emotion and feeling that I longed to have now. I felt like a cold hearted robot, putting my friends in family in agony for my health. And I didn’t care at all. Life was barely worth living if I couldn’t figure myself out, if I couldn’t find a way to tell them all that I was sorry.

When I raised me head, returning to the abnegation that reality thrust upon me, I saw her.

The ocean was still and contempt. Not a wave stirred, not a gust disturbed the calm. It was mystifying; it wasn’t the sea I was familiar with. And neither was the elegant young girl dancing, floating atop the serene salt water.

Not a gust brushed past her face, but her hair blew in every direction, beautiful, silvery blond and flowing. She was graceful, elegant and regal, but at the same time, she was horrid and appalling. Everything that I was witnessing at that very time was a sheer delusion. Her beauty was not real, but the lust that overtook my body and propelled me out to the shore was.

Curiosity drove my body, from my front door to the edge of where the sand met the water, as she glided over the solemn ocean with the softness and mystique of a dove. Thoughts cramped my mind, only growing larger and more distinguished as time passed. I told myself that she didn’t really exist, that I could never understand who she really was or hold her on my arms, all to my myself. I could never be sure why reality was playing such a cruel trick on me, but I made myself believe that it was just returning all of the hoaxes and scams that I had played on it. I had fooled the world itself, in harsher ways than intended.

She is not yours to hold, Pete. She isn’t now and she never will be.

But as I repeated it over in my mind, it became much too real. The girl approached me, sophistication emanating from her navy blue eyes with depth greater than the ocean itself. She wasn’t the most attractive I had ever seen. Her features were fragile and delicate, her skin was a pale ivory color, and her body was quite frail.

Her ghostlike hand reached out to me. Anxiety overtook me now as I took it in mine, like I could break her with just a movement of my bones. Dressed in a raggedy, sheet like dress, the girl lead me out into the vast ocean, soaking me up to my shoulders. She attempted to take me farther, but I halted and remained where I was.

“I can’t go any further,” I told her. I felt insane. I felt strangely dead. And yet, I felt like I had a reason to listen to her, that I must follow her out onto the ocean. A flame deep in the pit of my stomach wanted her more than anything I had wanted in my life, but another half of me said to drive myself in the opposite direction. She tried once again to lead me, still gripping my hand with her adroitness and fragility.

“Just believe,” She said. At first, it seemed like a whisper, but as I rolled it over in my mind, I felt it had been a scream as well.

“I-I can’t. I’m sorry,” I told her, with a tone that I hoped would not hurt her. I couldn’t pin point her age. She had the body of a woman, but a strange innocence to her face that appeared almost child like. Silvery strands of hair cascaded down just past her shoulders, and giant, magnificent eyes outlined in a thick rim of eyelashes beat toward me.   

“Believe.”

This time I was certain she had whispered it. It was on the edge of being almost inaudible, a mere whimper telling me to trust her. And, as she clasped her feminine hand in mine, I believed. I trusted, and I was faithful. As she continued to hold my limb, I stepped out on top of the shimmering sea. She was a reflection of its majestic beauty and its profound nature. Ripples originated at the base of my feet, firmly planted on the liquid below me. At the same time, I felt that without her hope, her trust and secrecy, that I could no longer find strength to find a foothold. For this reason, I squeezed her hand like my life depended on it.

She didn’t give off body heat at all. Her hands were freezing, but at the same time, they comforted me beyond belief. It was exactly what I needed to bring myself back down to what seemed like reality.

“Come with me,” She instructed me, as we seemed to walk miles in a matter of measly seconds. She was sprinting now, silver hair brushing past her, glancing back at me with quizzical eyes. She wanted to see if I had it in me to go completely against my better instinct, and rely completely on devotion to her, testing my loyalty.

“Where are we going?” I questioned her, as we ran over the nonexistent waves that inhabited the ocean.

“You tell me,” She giggled, flashing an exotic smile that left me with a thousand mixed emotions.

And at that moment, I was reliving memories that both haunted and highlighted my tormented past. To my surprise, I saw things that had never happened; that only left me with one conclusion. I had seen both the past, the present and the future.

We were running through things that had been, were happening and were going to be, and strangely, every though and every sense had fled my body, and had been discarded.

And among the things yet to happen came something terrifying, to haunt and wander my dreams at night for years to come.

I saw myself with a knife, separating the skin at my wrists. I saw myself in a bathroom stall, relieving myself of my meal. I saw myself in a bath tub, submerged and challenging my lungs to take on water. I saw myself, a belt not around my waist but my neck, attached to a high branch of a tree in my back yard.

Moon light cast over my distraught face. Stars twinkled, small and proud in the night sky, I couldn’t let myself see what was coming next, but my curiosity held my eyes fixed upon my later self.

I won’t do it. I won’t kill myself, I though, over and over again.

And as I gazed at Pete Wentz soon to be, I kicked the chair. I couldn’t blink. I tried to scream out in horror; hot air filled my lungs and my vocal chords, but no sound erupted as I watched my own suicide. Blood then filled my vision.



It was a cruel, harsh comeback for the wrongs that I had done. And, as I realized she was still running, I followed, however corrupt and distressed I might have been. We seemed to be fleeing from my memories, monsters that lurk in the dark, under my bed and in my closet, creating fictitious thoughts that forever loom fresh in my mind.

We ran, we drifted away from reality once again, and stopped in the middle of the calm and tranquil ocean. I held her hands in mine.

“Where are we?” I asked her, gently and puzzled.

“It doesn’t matter,” She replied, sparking my imagination.

“Why did you take me here?” I continued.

“You’ll know.”

With that, timed seemed to speed up, and I watched as heavy, grey clouds rolled in. The water churned, yet my body stayed completely still. Rain began pouring down in swift torrents, soaking us. If I had been alone, I would have given in to the pressure and let myself drown. Thunder clapped after lightning struck far off points that were not here. Despite the fear that was balled up in my throat, her presence kept me composed and honest.

I blinked, and in the snap of a finger, a breath of a lung or a flash or terrible lightning, she was in a beautiful rose colored gown. She had color in her frail cheeks, and she seemed much more capable of supporting her own weight. I looked down at myself; I was in a handsome, flawless tuxedo, perfect in every way, like she was.

I wanted her; in fact, I was positive I was head over heels not in lust but in love. I needed this girl, needed her to keep me living and keep me sane.

Before I knew it, we were in each others arms, slow dancing in the middle of a mammoth storm. This was the way I had seen her before, earlier when the skies were clear and the sea was content.

I began to close the gap between our mouths, the start of a well anticipated kiss. But she stopped, not even an inch away from my lips, her breath fresh, incredible and horrifying on my skin. I yearned for her lips on mine, holding me like she needed me too. Just some reassurance that this was all too real, that I wasn’t dreaming and that I could keep her slender body in my arms. Instead she just gave me a small giggle that seemed to echo in the silence of my mind.

“Good luck,” She said to me.

“What?” I wondered. “Good luck with what?”

Instead of answering, she held my hands and backed away gently in her amazing gown. She gave a mysterious smile and whispered, “You’ll know. Just believe.”

It was a curious thing; I could hear her over the thrashing waves and booming thunder, when I could barely hear my thoughts.

“Wait! Are you leaving? You can’t!” I told her.

“I must,” She replied, simply.

“No! I-I…I need you.”

“Believe. You’ll be okay.”

With that, every part of her body turned to water, as she rushed deep below me.

She was the ocean.

Her elegant rose petal dress sunk deep into the sea, and I struggled to grab something small and shimmering below my feet. I grasped it and pulled it from the water, realizing that it was a small, silver locket. I didn’t notice it before, but she had been wearing it, not that I recalled her appearance. Inside was writing that said, ‘Juts believe. You’ll be okay.’

The last words she had said to me.

I held it tightly, turned and began towards the shore once more. No matter how afraid I was, no matter how close the lighting struck, I believed.

I woke up on the shore where I had stood earlier, watching her dance. The sky was a brilliant blue, just as it had been before she had spoken to me, and the ocean was once again calm. She no longer danced, as she was nowhere to be seen.

She had made me realize that life is always worth living, despite challenges and corruptions. I must keep going, stay determined, no matter how bad things get. Suicide was never an option now, because I was living my life, and I was living it for her. She would be the one to keep me going from now on. I could relieve my family of their worries, take the stress off of my friends’ backs, because now I could say that I was fairly content with who I was.

As I sat up, I rubbed, my head. It all seemed to be a dream; a horrible, yet magnificent dream that would linger on in me for years to come.

But I unclasped me hands, and the locket fell to the sand. She was not a dream. She was a message.
“Just believe. You’ll be okay.”