Prologue

Life is dead. They don’t know that, yet, but the bridges have been burning for a year. Soon they will disintegrate to ashes. For it to blame is something out there. It first befell the flesh and afterwards: the hearts. Left is nothing, only fear. Of each other and of oneself: of all the things they might have to do, may want to do, are doing to one another. 

It's a year of longing. Every inch of the body yearns for something more. The limbs are caught in restless tremble, and soft sighs linger on desperate lovers’ lips. Like on Helen’s. In her life, she has loved many things, mostly trivia. Black coffee in the morning, smiling strangers in the park, and the sense of freedom that crashing waves on stormy shores would wash into your heart. 

What she’s always loved most: lost things that the rest of the world overlooks. Empty snail shells in the gravel. Old coins in muddy puddles, and - for almost two years now - him: Tom, more than anything and ever since then he has been what she’s been longing for most. 

She's at the abyss. After a year of longing and not for the first time in her life. Nevertheless, today feels different. The cold wind in her red hair. The quivering lights in the dark. The trembling stars above her head. The rocks beneath her dirty boots, and the million water drops that are nestling together in the lake down there, as if nothing and no one could separate them. Suddenly everything feels different.

Never before has she looked at the town in the valley like this. The night sky has never felt darker to her, the darkness never this painful. Not anything like in this frozen moment. If she could touch it, it would crumble. That’s how fragile it is -  a life- and once frozen:  every moment of it. 

Quiet up here, almost dead. From the edge of a mountain top, it looks tiny: the world that you flee here from. Looking down, you long for the bottom. For a bottom line in everything that’s happened just as much as for the rough and stony bottom below, which would immediately split your skull if you fell. Never would Helen have seen herself here. Until everything suddenly changed. The world out there, just as much as her own: the very personal one that you hide from others like a treasure, so no one can ever steal it. When she left the house this morning, she didn’t know where the night would take her. Neither did she know what she would decide. Until just now. 

Eventually, the dice are shaken and cast. Her knees are shaking too, and pale moonlight casts her shadow upon the edge, as if it could foresee the future. A few steps: that’s what stands between her and nothing. In only three, she will feed the hungry void. Deep and dark. There’s nothing down there, but black, and somewhere in between, the water of the lake keeps shining in the milky light of a moon that has started rusting. She looks up, and it's true. 

It has been rusting ever since last spring if you believe the papers, but who would still believe them nowadays? They have been lying for a year now. Except, when it comes to the moon. With its brown spots, it looks  marbled. As if someone had taken it off the sky by the start of the year in order to petrify it. Like what they’ve done with life. 

The rusty moon fits this year: the world’s and Helen's own. Her very personal one that she wouldn't even tell the diary about, because writing about it would be too painful. For the world it isn't over yet: the year of longing in which the moon began to rust. For Helen it will be soon enough. In three steps, beneath a rusty moon, in a rigid time, and someday it will hopefully be hollowed out by water, so the world can move again.

 Helen won't have to care about it, once she plummets: a fallen angel. Time slows down when you fall, they say and that, until you reach the ground, there is still enough of it to think about the reasons why you want to die. Helen doesn’t actually want to. But neither does she want to live like this. She used to think she would die happy, believing in destiny and brave enough to see the good in others. Unfortunately, the truth doesn't care what you think. 

Three steps. She's been waiting long enough and will  finally stop: waiting and, assuming it goes well, living as well. The first step, her legs start trembling. At the second she feels her heartbeat at her throat. Eventually, the last: breath, look at the sky, step forward. Her heart skips a beat. She can’t feel her skin anymore. Her muscles are suddenly weak, and her pulse pounds in her ears as she walks into the void. 

No more wind. The air is swooshing. No thoughts as she keeps on hurtling down like a shooting star. She’s falling past memories, all of which are reaching her in the same second. And only one question remains: 

How did she get here?