Saige Gale

There's a fine line between what some of us are unfortunate to know as reality, and what the rest of us are lucky enough to know as fantasy. The two are fairly broad topics, ones that greatly repel each other because of their differences, and yet they still meet a line where they are the same.

When Saige walked off the edge of the highest cliff on the beach side, she did so with the intent to leave reality behind. Quite frankly, to die. To experience a fantastical Heaven where problems were solved, but she would even take an adventurous Hell over the world she was forced to walk with her own two weary legs.

But like I said. Not all of us are lucky enough to experience fantasy.

Saige stares out the window that looks over the ocean that she expected to land in just twenty six hours prior to the now. The white walls around her are stark and bare, a bizarrely fearful setting for someone who so desperately wants to see color other than the black and white of life and the gray of politics. She stared at the bandages wrapped in dozens that surrounded legs she didn't want. She ignored the constant beep of a machine meant to keep her alive, and hated it with everything she had. She tried to rip off the beams around her head, but steel is stronger than flesh.

The blue of an ocean hundreds of yards away seemed to beckon her, for one last dangerous swim, and Saige daringly hoped to reach it, to see something other than the barren wasteland her life had always been.

When people try to explain her illness to her, Saige just scoffs. She knows there's something wrong in her head. She knows that the thoughts of a madman don't belong in a body only fifteen years new. But she can't help it. She knows that there is help, but who can really help bring color into a black hole?

She sighs, disappointed that she was not worthy of death.

Some people gain depression through a series of terrible, terrible events. Some lose parents, best friends, siblings, some are abused, some lose a perfectly good life to one wasted of love and attention and purpose and need.

But not Saige. Illnesses can be born with a person. They can plant themselves long before the human body has a chance to fight them off. And with her, the coin just landed on the wrong side. Maybe it was because Dad was never around. Maybe it was because Mom ran away months after having her. Maybe it's because of the neglect from students and teachers alike at school.

Or maybe it's the way waves of homesickness for a nostalgia she can't have rolls over her every time she looks at beautiful things. Maybe it's because that thrill of freedom only experienced in color and hope die when she touches them.

And she tried, she really did. To hold onto some sort of life, without coming near enough to kill it. But the reach of something so big for something so small can only be held by the fiercest of warriors, and as she just proved, Saige is no warrior.

It's ten days of medicine and therapy before Saige is allowed to be discharged from yet another hospital, and the move to somewhere far, far away happened almost immediately soon after. This time, Saige managed to stay a total of nine months and seventeen days, a record on her behalf. The cliff kept her there, begging her to come closer. Now the most beautiful thing she ever almost had was gone again, and Saige had no idea how she was still alive.

Little did she know the about the change the next move would bring. And no, it's not a boy. That only happens in the scripted stories. But I will say, it is color. And perhaps purpose.

This is the story of Saige Gale, a girl caught between depression and longing. Try to remember the romance of these lyrics is merely for poetry; neither to add glamour to illness, nor to belittle it.

Last, I beg you to remember; blood was not always beautiful, it was once just red.