Live a Little

Sara was the most popular girl in school, the valedictorian, but most of all, my best friend. Sara also liked to party quite a bit and had her fair share of one-night stands before I could even summon up the courage to talk to a boy. In the town that we grew up in, in the middle of nowhere Missouri, we would get in cars with boys that we knew from school and would drive around looking for trouble most nights.

Sara also suffered from terrible depression that she chose not to deal with. When she was in her darkest moments deep inside the gallows of her restless mind, she would call me, and I would take the backwoods trail that led to her house to let her vent and reassure her that everything would be okay. Her parents didn’t understand her mental health issues, as most parents didn’t back then, and thought she was just a normal teenager.

One night, we ended up at a barn party in the middle of nowhere, fueled with a raging bon fire and stupid teenagers with nothing better to do. There was also loud music, and the last time I saw Sara, she was dancing freely in the middle of the crowd under the luminescent country night sky.

I was sitting with our friend Eddie, and I saw Sara walk away with a boy who I hadn’t seen before. They were holding hands as he escorted her into the woods, each with a cup of beer from the keg in their hands, from what I could see.

I should’ve chased her. I couldn’t have known though, right? How was I going to stop her? I knew there was no stopping Sara.

Eddie and I sat on a bench underneath the stars and continued to talk. I looked up at the stars. I turned to the left, then to the right, and observed everything and every person within my site. I looked at everyone, but still could not find Sara within the crowd of drunken teenagers.

A few hours passed. Eddie and I decided that it was time to leave before we got in trouble, but he knew that I was not leaving without Sara. We started to look for her. I saw the mysterious boy that she disappeared into the woods with and asked him where she was, and he told me that she had lost her mind on him, and he left her out in the woods. My heart and mind went into an immediate panic. After I gathered myself and my thoughts, I then asked him where they went, and how I could find her.

He told me to take the path through the woods, past the first huge Oak Tree, make a left at the sign that read ‘CAUTION – RAPID WATER AHEAD’, and to follow the trail for about a half of a mile. He also told me that right before they disappeared into the woods together, Sara asked him if he had any rope so they could “have some fun.” He thought he was in for the time of his life with my beautiful, afflicted friend.

Eddie and I had no form of light and entered the eerie, mystifying woods. The entire walk there seemed like forever. We were screaming Sara’s name, but she was nowhere in sight. We walked past raccoons, through spider webs, and had been searching for Sara for about an hour at this point. I thought back to the sign about rapid water. I heard the soothing sound of a waterfall just ahead on the trail, so I navigated Eddie and I toward the water.

And then I saw her.

We walked over the hill up to the side of a two-hundred-foot waterfall, and there she was hanging by a rope from an old, rotten Willow Tree and I immediately fell to my knees.

“Why didn’t I chase after her?” I started screaming out as tears and snot ran down my face. Eddie reassured me that I had no way of knowing that this was her ultimate plot, but I felt like I should have known, as her best friend.

I laid on the grass beside the waterfall for a while as Eddie ran back to the party to get help. I looked at Sara, now a pale shade of blue and white. No warning. No caution signs. No note. Nothing. One minute she was dancing in the crowd at the party, the next minute, she was gone.

About an hour later, the police and ambulance arrived and started to untangle Sara from the tree. It took them hours. “Just like Sara,” I thought to myself. She never was one to half-ass anything. The meticulous way that she tied the knot in the rope that killed her made me realize she had been planning her demise for quite some time.

That entire day still haunts me, especially in my dreams. Sometimes I see Sara and she will say catty things to me, other times, she is dancing freely in a field of Sunflowers. On the outside, she was sunshine and rainbows, but on the inside, she was a lost soul with an anguishing feeling of self-doubt.

She came to me in a dream the other night. We were walking through the woods and we came across a tree that Sara thought we could turn into a swing, so naturally she did. She started swinging across the river from the tree branch, got off, and told me to hop on and give it a whirl. “No thanks,” I told her. “Oh, come on Christina, live a little.”

I woke up immediately after she said this simple, yet profound statement to me in my dreams. Why was I so sad that she died and dwelling on the haunting ghost of her, when I was so afraid to live? I got out of bed, made a cup of coffee, and made peace with the ghost of Sara.