My feet carried me without a register of thought, and I found myself underneath the noisy silence of the Murky Lake.
The silver-black expanse stretches out much further than I imagined, it was a vast bruise against the earth. It isn't the manicured blue of a postcard; it's a brooding depth that suggests secrets held tight beneath a skin of silt. The shoreline is a jagged hem of bone-grey rocks and skeletal grass that shivers in a wind I can't feel. There is a profound loneliness here, an isolation that makes this park feel like a pocket of forgotten space.
My shoes crunch against the grit. The sound is unnaturally sharp, an intrusion into that "noisy silence." I drift toward the edge until the ground turns damp and gives way to the mirrored stillness of the surface.
The water looks less like a liquid and more like a sheet of dark glass—a solid floor promising I could walk right across it to the other side. But I know the nature of water. I know how it yields. How it parts. How it eventually swallows.
I stand there as the sun begins its slow, bruised descent, and my mind finally hushes. I feel suspended between the sky above and the sky reflected below—a silhouette caught in the seam of two worlds, belonging to neither.
How deep is it?
Deep enough to hide a body. Deep enough that the light will never find the bottom. Deep enough that once I go under, I become part of the lake's long, cold history.
I take a step. My heels sink into the soft, black mud. I am at the very lip of it now, close enough for the ripples of my shadow to touch the real thing. I watch my reflection—a distorted, wavering ghost that looks more like a smudge of charcoal than a person.
I could just...
The lake offers a seductive simplicity. It's an end to the walking, an end to the frantic performance of normalcy, a silence that won't ask me why I couldn't open my door.
I move. The first touch is a needle-sharp chill that soaks through the leather of my shoes. Another step brings the water to my ankles, then my calves. The temperature clarifies my senses in a way the entire day failed to do.
The bottom is a treacherous, yielding velvet. My feet disappear into the silt, and I have to heave my legs forward. My wet clothes—the blazer, the silk, the skirt—are beginning to drag like a heavy, sodden anchor. The water rises to my waist, the subtle current tugging at my hips. I don't fight it.
As the cold reaches my chest, my lungs spasm. My heart hammers a frantic rhythm against my ribs—a primal, biological protest that my mind ignores. I am focused on the horizon, on the fading light, on the sensation of being slowly erased by the dark.
I keep walking until the earth simply ceases to be.
One moment, my toes are curled into the mud; the next, there is only the terrifying, weightless void of the deep. The shelf drops away into nothingness. As the buoyancy takes me, the world above vanishes.
The darkness found me.
Silence takes me.