Offshore side stories
To drown alone
"Even now, as yesterday, the tides did not drag her down." Jinai struggles to cope with everything.
This story describes a suicide attempt and suicidal ideation in detail. I'm serious, it's not just a passing mention! It also contains spoilers for Offshore Chapter 13.
She wrenched her head under the seafoam, one kick at a time. The sun ribboned over her face as her toes dug into the sand.
She snapped her eyes shut. It’ll be easy, she thought gently, as the seaweed curled around her ankle. Tangle my foot, breathe the water in. Breathing in is the important part.
This time, she thought as she knotted handfuls of fronds around her ankle, she would not thrash. She’d go quietly—gold dancing with blue, lights trying in vain to pry her lips apart.
Five knots, six, each one a prayer to make this swift. As she worked away at the vestiges of her breath, her shoulders ached. She watched her vision bruise, felt the air go still in her lungs.
Then she breathed.
At the first skull-aching shock of water up one nostril, her air-hungry body snapped.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, it screamed, thoughts and visions and feelings blurring into one. She was puppeted by her own muscles, legs and lungs spasming, tearing, bucking, wresting her up through the water column, faster than a rising cork.
She only began to sputter when her face broke the briny bubbling surface. Not one second sooner.
Every sinew roared with tremors. Saltwater stung her eyes, tasting like a broth on her lips. The dry blue sky spun, not one cloud within her grasp, and she screamed without tears.
She was sprinting through the night mist, watching the top of the Tienshi Tower dip in and out of the fog above, and for seconds she longed for the warmth of someone else.
Millions across the world watched the sport, so millions knew her face. A sixth of the Helfi populace supported their team. Hundreds of thousands of fans—straining at the cables, breathing on the glass. They vivisected every one of her sentences, speculated upon every frown.
But here, in Wulien City in the dead of night, there was no one. Times like these were the only ones when she could do anything she wanted. And she mostly spent them trying not to fall apart.
Her bag bumped on her shoulder as she tore through the streets, stumbling and shivering in the wind between the skyscrapers. Through these neon-washed alleys and all their hard edges, silhouettes breathlessly swung in the windows, but here, there was no one.
She couldn’t—no, she wouldn’t—tell her team anything. What would she say? That she had tried and failed yet again? That even in this, she couldn’t succeed?
Her feet chose this street to stop on; there was no saying why—under a flickering shop sign that lit her hands blue. She crumpled on the drain cover and howled like a wounded dog, the clarity of every sensation—the biting air, the edges of clouds, the cigarettes at her feet—as much accusation as solace. Every sob hurt like drawing water into her lungs.
It never brought her any comfort to think she had been through worse, yet invariably her mind clung to the thought, like a half-drowned survivor to a rock.
Back at eighteen, when she had seen before her two paths—stay put in the warm embrace of her parents' home, or chase a scintillating hope on the horizon so bright she couldn't look away—she had cried three nights, making her choice at the ticketing booth, and again, and again, with each step up the gangplank.
She had split her life in two right then, like a cliff split by lightning, or gourd on a beach on a summer day, broken to quench a parched throat.
She'd broken her life again when she had told the company she couldn't work with Oojima any longer. And now she had found another way to break it, when Josa had left without collecting his things. Yet for her team and for the world, she had to continue to pretend to be the rock, not the one drowning at sea.
The first drop of rain hit her square in the middle of her head, and in that same moment, a window creaked. She glanced up through tear-frosted eyes—a third-floor window had slid open, and a face peered down, head shaven bald, a security officer’s epaulettes on their shoulders.
“Oi, you down there,” they called down, their voice bouncing off the facades. “Whatever’s going on…not worth getting caught in the storm for.”
As if hearing the augury, she saw the raindrops thicken, bringing the blur of city lights with them.
She stood there as they began to soak her—felt the ghost of seaweed ripple up her legs, the saltwater pierce her throat.
“Come on, ma’am, get out of the rain!”
“Who cares?” she screamed back, raindrops hitting her eyelids. “I’ve been through so much worse! So much fucking worse!”
They muttered something, but did not pull back. “If that’s true, then you deserve better than a 2 A.M. storm.”
Their words twanged her heart. Reverberating with the ache, she turned tail and dashed away, up the street while the drops kept pelting down, soaking her t-shirt and jacket, soaking her to her bones. Her hair lay in heavy tangles on her shoulders, stray curls plastered to her neck. Shivering and gasping, she stumbled into a skyscraper lobby and curled up into a dusty corner, among the granite pillars.
She peered listlessly about. The lobby vaulted high above her. The blue glow of the sleeping floor-to-ceiling screen gleamed off the terrazzo, just beyond the glass wall.
The noise of the rain muffled out the sounds of anything outside, and she could hear only herself—her heartbeat and the irregular metre of her breath. Now, it began to sink in that she had chosen this. She had severed herself from them, methodically as slicing skin with a scalpel, and she had decided none of them needed to know, if she simply chose to disappear.
So how foolish that anyone thought she deserved more than to be trampled by the storm. She should have stayed and taken her punishment. And yet she could not bring herself to return to it. So instead she lay down and hugged her legs, letting the wracking shivers swallow her.
It took one missed training session before Anqien started asking where she was.
It took four before she replied.
Sorry, I’ve just been having the worst two weeks, she wrote.
Do you need help? Or anything else?
Staring at the screen, she couldn’t tell if they’d figured it out: why she’d been hiding, what pain she was crawling through, all the junk she now had to donate away. But she sat there and studied their cursive writing, mouth slightly ajar.
What difference did it make now? With Josa and Kaori out of the picture, Anqien was her best friend. Why shouldn’t she let them in? Hadn’t she had enough of nursing her wounds alone?
That is what she had thought, anyway. But she had failed to anticipate just how quickly seeing Anqien on the inside of her apartment, among a week's worth of dirty clothes and food wrappers, would turn into messy bawling on her couch while they, quietly and lost for words, held her by the shoulders.
"Jinai," they said, voice too kind for her shattered-glass sorrow. "I didn't know there was so much happening. But please…" They paused in a way that pulled her gaze to them, as if a string had tugged her head upright.
Sitting in the shadow of the skyscraper lobby, she fought to draw a steady breath, the marble smooth and cool against her cheek. You deserve better. She had never thought so; she didn’t think she deserved much more than to melt into the rainwater and never be seen again.
But someone had. What quality of hers could they have seen in those ten seconds of quarrelling, that they should think so? Skill? Beauty or charm? No, they had seen a stubborn, crying wreck and they had said, get out of the rain.
Her teammate's eyes glistened wetly, like an ocean bay that could harbour another ship yet.
"Don't do it again, please?” they pleaded softly. “The world is better when you're in it."
Yes, she had been through worse. By all rights, she should be used to it by now. Lifetimes had come and passed like so many storms battering the seaside cities, and tsunamis had visited these old coasts that could only be dreamt of by the newcomers.
Yet even now, her body came up for air. In those seconds, flung by the waters, her feet felt nothing, and she hung weightlessly adrift, rippling in the cool around her. Even now, as yesterday, the tides did not drag her down, and her body floated, yearning for the sky when she did not.
It was irrelevant, she thought, whether her life was better than it had ever been, when she was sleeplessly lost in a city she did not know, collapsing into the hollow that had opened in her.
Then the waves were rolling her towards the shore again. Once upon a time, this coastline had been a cliff. The sand was all that was left after centuries of waves had worn the stones to nothing.
It was warm and rough against her palms and knees, shells cutting, grains scouring, warmed by the spring sun. She was the sand, crumbling in the sun. And she lay there and sputtered and kept gasping for air, and there was no one—no one but herself.
🥺
(Don't worry, she's ok)
