DIVE

 Before I get this shindig started, let me preface it by saying this happened oh, about twenty-some-odd years ago. It was the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I had graduated king shit of my little high school and was off to a minor football scholarship at a small college up in Indiana in the fall. It was gonna be the best years of my life, but before that, there was summer. My daddy said I had to get a job, so I found a job doing as little as possible. In the area, we had a small but very popular theme park. I figured I could spend more time flirting with girls than I would be working. Perfect job for a 19-year-old guy more concerned with where the next party was than actually doing anything with his life. I had always loved diving, and with a recommendation from my former swim coach, I wound up the newest performer in their high diving spectacular. I got to work on my tan, show off my abs, and I got paid for it. All it cost me was jumping into the water from high places. Heck, that was something I did on my own, anyway. I thought my life was going to be perfect. Easy money, for sure.

 And let’s be honest, it was. I didn’t have much in the way of responsibilities. The choreography of the shows was easy, and I could usually weasel my way out of any behind-the-scenes work.  There was only one trick that wasn’t cake walk and it wasn’t even much. Basic it came down to putting on a flame retardant suit and climbing to the top of the dive tower.  Up there, you just light yourself on fire and jump. Man the crowd always ate that one up. Still do, from my understanding. I didn’t really like doing it, but after I realized the amount of tail it pulled in, well, let’s just say it didn’t bother me THAT much.

 The first time it happened was roughly in the middle of the season. I had climbed up to the second tallest platform and was preparing to jump when I stumbled. I’d eaten platform before, it happens, but when I looked up, everything was different. I don’t mean like I felt different, or the audience booed me or whatever. I mean everything was different, like physically different. It was like I was in a whole new world. Or old world, maybe? I only had a second to look around, but it was as if the theme park had been abandoned for a real long time. Everything was in ruins and overgrown. The carefully manicured walkways were cracked and mostly overtaken by plants. The two massive wooden roller coasters surrounding the show area were still there, but the tracks peaking up out of the tree line were rusted and collapsing.

 It was only a couple of seconds before the platform underneath me collapsed and dumped my ass into the slimy murky water in the remains of the dive pool. Just before I went under, I caught a glimpse of a woman: tall, leggy, blonde. Beautiful in a cruel way.  At that moment, half unseen, I knew I loved her. You might say I fell hard.

 When I surfaced, everything was normal. My ass was ragged hard for tripping, but it was played off, and most of the others forgot it. Hell, if it wasn’t for her memory, I would have forgotten it. At the very least I would have laid it off on the weed I smoked before the show being bad or something.  Maybe hallucinations from the heat? Whatever. I knew there was no way in hell I was going to tell anyone what I saw.

 I say what I saw and not what I thought I saw because I know 100% she was real.  I could not get that girl out of my mind. Even so,  I kept telling myself there was no way that happened, and I had just imagined it. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t see her standing there, a shocked look on her face. Her hair was long and so blonde it looked like cream. It was wavy and messy, but not in a matted kind of way, but the kind of way that you see on action movie posters. Her clothes were rough and well-worn. They looked like they were handmade out of some kind of hide. Deer, probably. It shocks the hell out of me how much detail I took in in such a short amount of time. It shocks me even more how well I can still see her right now.

 It was a couple of weeks before it happened again. We were fooling around after hours, and I was trying my damnedest to show out for a girl. I was on my way to the top to do what I sure was gonna be a panty-dropping trick when the world lurched, like an earthquake. All I could do was hang onto the ladder and hope I didn’t fall onto the concrete below. When the shaking stopped, I realized I was back in the other world. Instinctively, I went to climb down, but a wave of wrongness hit me. I had the impression that some bad shit would happen if I tried to climb down.  I don’t know what, but I just knew it would be bad.   Hell, just remembering it now makes my skin crawl.   I did the only thing left to me, and climbed to the lowest platform.  I just sat there, feet dangling into the air, staring out onto the ruins of the theme park I worked at. In the twilight, I could make out the remains of the tracks of the other towering coaster of in the distance. Around the park, most of the rides could still be made out, though that may be because I knew what they were. I was trying to judge how long it would have to take for the park to get into this shape.  I remember thinking fifty years, maybe a hundred.  Things were bad but everything was still pretty much standing.  I did noticed that there wasn’t any graffiti anywhere, which thinking back was odd.  I started to realize that something felt off and it dawned on me that the walking paths still had maintained trails in them that were too big to be deer trails.   That meant there were people here, at least somewhere. 

 Sure enough, I could barely make out small columns of smoke scattered across the dim sky. I ain’t a very smart fella, my wife will tell you that straight up, but I knew that whoever made the fires wasn’t worried about giving away their positions. That meant this was some kind of community, hopefully a peaceful one. I wondered what it would be like to live here. It’d be rough, but it’d be doable. The winters up there get bad, but the hunting is usually good. The land is mostly good for farming. In the words of Hank JR, a country boy can survive.   

 I found myself falling into a daydream. I’d live almost native style there. I could make the nearest coaster’s loading platform into a shelter. It wouldn’t take much, just a few pieces of scavenged plywood to throw some walls up. Heck, there were parts of the queue that were already walled in. I’m sure we could find furniture somewhere. I’d live off the land, me spending my days hunting deer and maybe tending crops.  We’d meet and she’d fall in love with me.  We’d start a life together.  I’d take care of her and she’d take care of the house and the kids.

 Kids. We’d have three. Two boys and a little girl. The boys’d look like me. My baby girl, well she’d be the spitting image of her mother.  I’d teach them to hunt and fish. She’d teach them to cook and do other woman-type stuff that I don’t know how to do. We’d be a hell of a couple.  No matter what happened, we’d always stick together.  

 I don’t know how long I dawdled in that bullshit romanticized fantasy. By the time I realized what I was doing, fantasy me had started rebuilding American society. Hell, my imaginary kids had families of their own and I was a grandpa. It had been an amazing life with my precious wife at my side.

 I remember shaking my head to clear out the cobwebs, feeling slightly embarrassed by my train of thought. I don’t know why I felt embarrassed, it’s not like anybody knew what I was thinking. By my reckoning, I had been sitting here for thirty minutes and no one even knew I was here. Hell, I really didn’t even know if there were people here. I could see what looked like firelight in some spots, but I had no clue what was there. It could have been anything.  All I knew was I was trapped on that ledge, and it was dark. I still knew deep down if I got off that platform, I was fucked. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did and I was not about to question it.

 The night stretched on as I sat there, just taking it all in. I never saw a soul. I heard all kinds of animals and saw what I thought might be a raccoon, but I never saw any people. Sometimes I thought I could hear people off in the distance, but I wasn’t ever really 100% sure.  Most importantly, I didn’t see her. After a while, I realized that my butt had gone numb and my eyes were heavy. All I could do was lean back against the pole and hope I didn’t fall off if I fell asleep.

 I woke up to hitting the water. Lucky for me it wasn’t the stagnant, murky water from the other world. Unlucky for me, it was the highly chlorinated water of my world, and it burned like a sumbitch when it went up my nose. Coop, who was my best friend at the time, gave me hell for falling off the platform again. The cute little redhead I was flirting with wasn’t very impressed. I did not get laid that night.  Honestly, I didn’t really care. There was only one woman I wanted, and she sure as hell wasn’t in this holiday-themed podunk town.

 Time passed, and the summer was coming to an end. I still worked on the dive show. Every day was now a routine. During the week I’d get up around noon, usually hung over, and haul ass to the park. The first show was at 2, last show was at 6:30. On the weekends, the first show was a little earlier. We had a few rehearsals during the week. Most of ‘em I showed up for, but sometimes I didn’t. I thought nobody really cared as long as I was there for the shows and wasn’t too messed up to perform. I was mostly right. The rest of my time was spent partying, drunk, or daydreaming about her and the life we were going to have. Sometimes I did all three at the same.

 In those days the internet was mostly new, and I went through I don’t know how many AOL hours trying desperately to find anything about traveling to other dimensions or time travel. I’m still not sure which one it was, but I didn’t really care. One was as good as the other as far as I was concerned. I never found anything but a bunch of crackpots. Even back then people were crazy on the internet. Since I couldn’t find much, it didn’t take long for me to give up. I’ve always been more of a practical application kind of guy than an egghead.  Hell, it’s not like I could have understood anything I found anyway.

 Since the world wide web was a bust, I threw myself into diving at the park. After all, that’s how I got there in the first place.  This wasn’t a job I wanted to spend a lifetime doing, so it wasn’t like I was looking to improve. I just hoped that the more that I dived, the more chances there were that I’d fall into that other world. Sometimes every now and then, I’d get a flash of that place. Usually, it was right as I hit the water, but sometimes I’d see more as I fell. Never anything solid, just a quick glimpse of the place I wanted to be more than anywhere else.

 It all came to a head at  the last show of the season. As part of the act, I was to perform a dive where I jumped with a flag bearing the theme park’s logo.  They had a setup where it had shoulder straps, and then the other end was connected to you by ankle straps.  I never really understood the point of it, but it's what I was told to do so I did it. Of course, I always had to add that ole razzle dazzle, so I decided to jump from the very top of the dive tower.  I knew something was up when my feet left the platform. It was like the world shifted, and as I came down,  I felt my flag get tangled up on the ledge. I guess that’s when I must have shifted over, because I realized I was there.  I also realized I was in deep shit as I was dangling over the concrete edge of the dive pool and not the water. I knew that flag wouldn’t hold forever, and I was right. It didn’t take but a few seconds before I was falling towards the concrete. I’m sure you could hear the thud from the impact a mile away.

 I remember lying there just trying to breathe.  My lungs didn’t want to work and was sure I couldn’t feel my legs. There’s no way I was just gonna walk away from that. That tower was real tall.  Hell, the platform I was on was about sixty-five feet above the water. That’s a long fucking way down.  I was lucky I didn’t bust my head open.  Shit, I remember thinking I was gonna be damn lucky if I could walk after this.  

 It took everything I had to make myself move, but I was finally able to sit up.  As I was reeling and trying not to black out from the pain I remember hearing something off to my right. I looked over and it was like a light shone down from heaven itself. She was standing there. It was like I forgot all about my injuries.  She was everything I remembered, and more. She was everything I dreamed of. Most importantly she was looking right at me. In my dazed state, I stretched my arm out, reaching toward her. The pain from that just about killed me, but I couldn’t stop myself.

 She slowly shook her head and smiled. Before, I would have done anything to have her smile at me, but I didn’t want what I got. If I had to describe it, I’d say it was the kind of smile you see at a kid’s funeral. It was so full of pity it still rips my heart out to this day. Even now, I feel ashamed of the look she gave me. It was like I wasn’t a man; it tore my pride to pieces. Time seemed to slow, and all I could do was focus on that absolutely perfect mouth of hers as she formed words. Her voice was soft, sultry, and husky. It did things to me no other woman’s voice has ever been able to. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like that first drink of a cold beer when you’ve been working in the yard all day, and it’s hot and muggy as fuck.  The sound was refreshing and made the pain dim.  

 “You are a ghost and I am sorry.”

 The paramedics who fished me out of the dive pool said I cracked my head open good when I fell off the top platform. Intoxicated was the term they used, but I wasn’t.  Not really.  I mean, I had smoked a little before the show with Coop, but it wasn’t much.  Not nearly enough to make me stagger like that.   Didn’t matter what I claimed, though. The company didn’t have to pay worker’s comp and I still lost my job. The park managers had gotten word of my bullshit, and they weren’t found liable for any injuries. My daddy kept me mostly out of any legal trouble, and after I finally healed up,  I went back to school. A month later I dropped out and started working construction. I never saw that world again.   

 I met my wife in some dive bar back home in Kentucky and accidentally knocked her up. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding, but it was pretty damn close. My wife doesn’t believe in divorce or birth control and I wasn’t smart enough to get snipped.  We ended up with a slew of kids, about two more than I wanted. We’re still together though.  That won’t change unless one of us dies.  I get up every morning and go to work. I come home and tell my wife I love her. I take care of my kids. I do everything I’m supposed to, even if I do drink too much most nights. I’ve never been mean to Heather. There are married couples out there a whole lot worse than us.  I’ve never hit her, and  I sure as hell never laid a hand on the kids.  I can’t say I’ve ever really been there for any of them, though. I just… I don’t know. Even though I promise her I do, I don’t think I’ve ever loved her.  I don’t think I ever will.    The kids, they’ve never felt like they were mine. In the back of my head, I’ve always felt like they were all supposed to be someone else. I was supposed to be someone else. Instead, I am just a ghost and she is sorry.