Content note: this passage contains themes of suicide, sexual-assault accusation, and emotional distress.
I stared at the cracked ceiling above me, tracing the spider-web fractures with eyes that felt foreign—watched but not mine. I lay sprawled on the sagging couch, the fabric damp with last night's spill, the room a small, suffocating world scented with stale beer and the sour tang of old smoke. Light from the television frosting the walls in the blue-white pallor of late-night news. The hum of it was a low, mechanical heartbeat in the apartment; a cruel metronome that measured out time I hadn't asked for.
I took a drag of the cigarette between my fingers because my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking, because breathing felt like an optional chore and the smoke made a thin, temporary curtain between me and the thought that screamed the loudest. Each inhale burned like an accusation and each exhale was a surrender. My lungs filled with chemical comfort; my stomach knotted against the bitterness that seeped from cheap liquor. When had I last slept and actually woken up lighter? When had the nightmares stopped visiting as if they had residence rights on my mind?
The television voice flattened into the room, bland and relentless: "…It's just been confirmed: Astrid Vale, a young artist formerly with 4Hope, has been accused of raping a high school student. More details to follow." My name—my face—projected larger than life, scooped from a headline and repainted ugly under studio lights. It was a photograph of a life I barely recognized: hair done, smile clenched, eyes that had once had a spark now hollowed for public consumption. I could feel the word 'rapist' like a physical thing crawling along my ribs.
My phone vibrated beside me, insistent, a small animal trapped under glass. I knocked over a scattering of empty cans when I reached for it; they clattered like tiny verdicts across the coffee table. Notifications stacked themselves in a neat, merciless pile: calls, texts, social media—then the bright, contempt-laced comments that always found the fastest route to the skin.
"Bubbles123: I always knew she was trouble from the start."
"45Layla45: I guess she likes them young. So disgusting."
"Cateater@killer: If you need someone to sleep with, you know where to find me."
"Astridtherapist@89: I hope she dies a slow, painful death."
The words were little knives that found purchase where the old scars had thinned the most. I slammed the phone face-down, the vibration settling into the couch like an aftershock. Tears waited behind my eyelids, honed by habit; I had learned how to contain them, how to fold grief into a quiet, practiced shape. But the containment was fragile. There were so many ways to be disbelieved now that disbelief itself had become normal.
It started, they said, with a meet-and-greet—a boy with ink-smudged hands and an eagerness that sat too close to hunger. I remembered the press of the crowd, the perfumed confusion of people wanting something that had once come naturally to me—attention, applause, something that made the hours worthwhile. He'd stood at the end of a line with a poster too big for his hands, cheeks flushed, eyes like questions. I had smiled. I had signed. I had spoken a few sentences and meant them. His persistence, at first, felt like admiration. It warmed that cold, giddy place where compliments used to live.
But kindness, for people like him—or maybe for me—was easily misread. The things I do as routine, the gestures of a life spent performing intimacy for strangers, recomposed themselves into something else in someone else's retelling. He kept following me online, then in person. He lingered. I told him to back off. I was clear. He heard rejection as betrayal and, like a match to dry tinder, set the story ablaze.
They arrested the narrative and framed it in a way that fit a hunger the public had been nursing for a while: a fall from grace story, complete with a villain who was easy to hate. My industry—sponsors, labels, the people who once sent me friendly texts about new gigs—slowly, surgically, excised me. Contracts were rescinded with the same bland language used to terminate a faulty appliance. The role I had played in people's evenings, the little relief my songs sometimes offered, the rooms where strangers had whispered my name like a spell—all of it dissolved into rumor.
I dressed in layers that meant nothing and everything—clothes that could hide the shape of my ribs, the new hollowness of my cheeks, the bruise along my temple always called up in my mind. Winter wind sliced through fabric and patience alike. My boots scuffed across frozen pavement, leaving tracks I didn't bother to examine. With each step, the city made new sounds at the edges: car doors slamming like the finality of a judge's gavel, laughter that didn't know me anymore. I left a thin line of crimson in my wake where a misplaced fall had opened my skin—silly, petty proof that my body continued to register pain when my heart had learned other ways of breaking.
Memories crowded like uninvited children, loud and monopolizing. My father's laugh—once big and forgiving—now echoed against a background of bottles and arguments. The shards of glass he hurled once glittered like bad constellations across my childhood. I remember the shape of his hands when he reached across a table for something that wasn't there: a promise, an impulse control, a man who kept gambling his warmth away. My mother had left when I was ten chasing something bright and distant; fame, maybe, or an idea of herself. She sent me a song once, a voice mail called "Regret" and the irony of the title was cruel when she finally died of an overdose that everyone called tragic and I called inevitable. My aunt, who had styled herself my guardian, had been practical about love—she'd sold pieces of my trust as if they were vintage, pocketed the earnings, and smiled the kind of smile that never reached her eyes.
Auntie's voice cut through the wind when she called. I could hear her teeth in the way she spoke. "Astrid—where the fuck are you?" Her words were designed to wound with the precision of a surgeon who had long ago given up on stitching.
I didn't answer right away. There was salt in my mouth, the taste of everything gone wrong. I imagined her watching the news, eyes glittering with the same delight she showed when profit margins rose. "Your boyfriend is moving on, engaged to someone else—who would stay with a rapist? Go apologize to that child! Go to prison!" The sentences tumbled out and struck me like pebbles. I tried to tell her I hadn't done it. My voice came out thin, a small animal caught under glass. "I'm… not a rapist," I whispered and the words felt like foreign currency—weighty but somehow useless.
She ended the call with the sort of finality that erased family ties. Her abandonment landed with a dull thud inside me, like another clean cut that didn't bleed outward but hollowed the center. I looked at the photograph on my phone—Jacob and me, teeth bright, arms wrapped, four years folded into a single smile. The memory of him used to be a heat that thawed me; now it burned with a different ferocity. He answered when I called: "If you'd confessed…" he said, the conditional like a blade. He was getting married, he told me. "Just… don't do anything stupid. Come clean." And then he was gone from the line, and the click of the phone sounded like a door closing for good.
The cliff came at the edge of the city like an old friend you stop returning calls to. Up close, it was colder than the map had promised, the edge ragged and indifferent. Stars pricked holes in the sky as if they were watching a private show they hadn't been invited for. The ocean below roared as if in answer to some question I couldn't remember asking. I stood there with my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my coat because it seemed like something sensible to do. Sensibleness felt foreign, like clean laundry.
My heart kicked a rhythm that I couldn't sync to anything familiar. The moon hung thin and accusatory; it did not coddle me. For a breath I imagined the fall would be relief: a clean arithmetic where a life was reduced to an equation, where wrongs might be balanced by absence. I thought of the boy—of the way his face might have shaped the lie he'd tell—and I thought of all the others who had looked at me with a judgment already made, like spectators who had come to watch a hanging. And I thought of Auntie's voice, Jacob's casual dismissal, the headlines that had remade me.
My phone slipped from my fingers, a pathetic, ringing exile, and tumbled into black water. It disappeared with a small, bell-like sound that the waves swallowed. For a moment the world tasted of copper and regret.
I stepped forward not as an act of courage but as a negotiation. The wind stole the sound of my breath and the cliff opened to receive me. For an instant—so fleeting that it might have been imagination—I felt something loosen; the grip around my chest that had been tightening for months unknotted enough to let me go. Then gravity took over. The world inverted, air filling my ears, water rushing up like an old, familiar enemy.
The first strike of cold was a shock that rewired my thoughts. Salt burned my eyes, and the rocks found me with the intimate cruelty of someone who has known you a long time. Pain was a language simpler than shame; it translated in muscle and heat. I smashed against stone and then again, the sea indifferent to the reasons of the broken. My lungs screamed for the one thing they had been denied—air—and for a dizzy, miraculous second, the screaming faded into a silence so absolute it felt like forgiveness.
Underwater, suspended in a world that refracted light like fractured glass, my body became a paper thing folded too many times. Time unspooled; memories uncoiled into long, slow scenes: my mother's voicemail singing a tune I hadn't dared to play, my father's laugh turning into the clink of ice against glass, Jacob's hand releasing mine. There was a peculiar peace in the weightlessness, as if the accusations could not follow me here, as if the world above could not drag its headlines down into the deep.
And for a beat—just one fold of the silence—I believed maybe this would be where the story ended and something else, somewhere kinder, would begin.