I had control. I didn’t have to wrestle it away from him either. It was left out for me. I was still cautious, like a rat reaching its hand into a loaded trap. But no swift blow followed. The moment passed, and I was walking the streets of the city, a slight hitch in my step as my feet found the pavement.

It was all I had been working for, and yet, I hardly registered the world around me. I wonder if this was what A had felt when he found the box of painting supplies. Perhaps I was going the same road, one that could only end in doom. I hoped not.

Horns blasted from either side of me, the sound rippled the air, crashing into me in waves. I only half registered the cars as they slammed their breaks to avoid me. Maybe it would have been better if one of them had run me down. With each block, I was building speed, and before long I had reached terminal velocity, falling toward an unknown end.

Unknown because I wasn’t sure where I was going. I could picture the place, but it floated as an abstract island in my mental map of the city. It was along the river, so that was where I went.

It was rare to find such discrepancy between the thoughtful design of a space and the thoughtlessness of where it was put. I walked past the streets that were lined with designer stores and the frenetic pace of too many people marching down a single thoroughfare.

I followed a smaller concrete tributary that spilled off to the left. As the blocks blurred past the surroundings began to feel rougher. There were large unmarked buildings and parking for said unmarked buildings. The streets were more or less deserted, and the people I did pass cast me furtive glances, mutual suspicion at what brought an individual to a place like this.

Then, turning down the next corner, I found what I was looking for. A long brick building with loading docks studding its façade on one side, and the rusted metal of a warehouse on the other. The street was a dead end that ran perpendicular to the river, and tucked to the side was a familiar metal railing and ramp that led down to the river below.

I looked around to be sure that no one else saw me walking that way. I wanted it to stay our secret. It had been random chance that led Clara and I to this spot all many years ago. We would sometimes leave that little hill and take the train into the city, walking around without any specific destination in mind. It was like her words cast a veil over me, and I could walk miles without once noticing where we were.

It had been a sunny winter day, the warmth of the sun counteracting the wind that kept searching for an opening. I would have walked right past it, but Clara had turned, and my feet fell in line with hers. The ramp led down the bank to a boardwalk that had been built on the water.

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There were a few benches, a trash can, and an odd sculpture in the middle of the boardwalk that was an abstract cluster of oxidized copper lumps. After staring at it for over an hour, I began to see the rough outline of a figure being pressed into a ball, being crushed under a great weight. Clara thought looked like a seed starting to germinate.

That was the memory that led me here. That afternoon spent sitting side by side with her. It wasn’t just the one time either. Once we found it, we kept coming back here. It was because of those times, wasn’t it? I could see it so clearly, and yet it didn’t quite fit the urgency that had carried me here. I began to slow as I walked down the street.

Something wasn’t right. I had known it all along, but it became undeniable as I crossed some unseen threshold. There were good times in this spot, but that wasn’t why I was here. Somehow, I had known this all along. After all, I hadn’t even been around for that moment or any of the others. Why would I be so invested in such ancient history?

The grey clouds above me had condensed into an impenetrable layer that erased the sun. I had been here before, lived through the moment and not just a memory. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I heard him start to laugh. It was a mirthless laugh, bitterness packed into every exhale.

She had been waiting for me. Maybe we chose that spot because it reflected the precarious place we were in. The solid ground we would meet on was always being undercut by the flowing river below. Each step I took down the street opened the flow wider, all coming from the source that she was waiting for me on the bench that we had sat at many times before. Better days, when our relationship hadn’t felt like it was on the edge of collapse.

This was how young love was supposed to end, wasn’t it? How rare is it to find someone who can grow along with you, especially once you’re both planted in soil so far apart? Even if I had never doubted it, I knew that A was constantly in doubt. It could have been what had fully formed me. The anger at him for feeling like Clara was closer to the past than to the future.

A burgeoning mass of insecurity, and blame had driven our relationship here. One last chance. We had both graduated from our respective schools, and we had agreed to meet here to discuss the future. But there was something very wrong. I felt it again, the railing getting closer and closer, something that felt like a barb had pierced deep into my side. It rattled about every time I took a breath. It was his conviction to end things with Clara for good.

My mind flitted back to the rat, now ensnared, screeching and desperate to avoid the end that is looming ever closer. When cornered, and the walls begin to press in, until reality begins to warp, and you question what you’re willing to do. Even if it means chewing through flesh, and bone, pressing untold horrors into your head, the rat takes its only way out.

I was still young at that time. Struggling to maintain my own form of reality. I couldn’t stop him from breaking things off with her. I did the only thing that I could think to do. I flooded his mind with a single thought. Run.

I finally reached the railing, and I half expected to see her there. A repeat of what I saw that day. She sat there, watching the water drift by. As I turned to go, I looked back once, and I thought I saw her turn around and see us running away.

It all came rushing back to me, not a memory, but a betrayal I had played a part in. Crystalizing with the image was his laughter that I now knew was not a trick of my imagination. No one was out there today, so no one saw as I vomited into the river below.