With Arms Wide Open

I don’t have the time to wonder what his scowl means, because I realize quickly the mistake that I've made. I was so focused on helping Eddie that I didn't stop to think who would help me.

Eddie had been the one to catch me last time, stepping up after a silence that felt like it stretched forever. It had been the first time someone had put themselves out there for me, but that wasn't an option this time since he'd already had his turn.

Now I was all alone.

I swallowed, looking over the group and knowing with absolute certainty that this time no one would step forward. This was going to be the beginning of the end for me, the beginning of the same path I'd walked before but possibly worse this time around. But it was with a bitter sort of amusement that I pulled on the blindfold, a certain resignation to reality. After all, I didn't have a choice.

The blindfold had a certain finality when it was settled down over my eyes. And with my sight blocked out it felt, really, like all the rest of my senses were heightened. I think that's probably just an illusion though, some kind of lie that people have generally accepted as a truth without any sort of proof to it. Akin to the idea that we only use ten percent of our brain, when the truth is far more nuanced than that. I think really your brain just imagines more sensations. Your mind fills in the gaps by making you believe that your other senses are amplified.

Regardless I was certainly more aware, or at least believed that I was. I felt the touch of the clothing on my skin, the breeze on my face. I could smell the cut grass and the scent of something faint and difficult to place on the air. And when the whistle sounded I swear I could hear people moving, but I knew that had to be a lie.

Because it sounded like too much movement. It sounded like so many people rushing forward. But that couldn't possibly be truth.

I waited. I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited. I waited for the second whistle and it took an eternity to sound off, each moment stretching on for an infinity as I knew one poor unfortunate soul, surely, was being press ganged into stepping up and filling the place behind me.

The whistle sounded. I took a breath and fell. I felt gravity embrace me, certain that it would carry me all the way to the ground.

What a fun start to things that would be. What a fun bit of humiliation. If I did this trust fall and no one was there to catch me, if I hit the ground hard and the sound of laughter came all around me. It would be a fitting way to kick things off here, the real final nail in the coffin to the idea that I could have it any other way.

That would at least be a definitive signal to me that second chances weren't really an option for me. Destiny is a fickle bitch but this would surely confirm her existence, her stretching through the veil of whatever counts for reality and smacking me down to put me in my place.

How presumptuous of me, to think that I could have it any other way.

And how oddly comforting.

The world was weird, weirder than I'd ever thought possible. I'd been plucked out of one timeline and dropped back in my own history but it was actually the history of someone else and I had a thousand and one questions and no answers and one answer alone wasn't going to help anything at all, but it would be a start. It would be a message that things could never change, that I could count on one type of certainty.

It would be some small comfort, to know that I will always lose and always be a loser.

So I let gravity embrace me and with it the inevitability of my fall. I braced, as well as I could, for the impact from the ground and more than that the peals of laughter that would follow. I was ready.

But I wasn't ready for arms to close around me.

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