mark ryan
Eleanor’s final days unfold through the fragments she leaves behind; pages filled with longing, disquiet, and the quiet ache of someone standing at the edge of herself. Her walk into the ocean is not framed as tragedy but as a culmination, a final gesture shaped by a lifetime of searching for meaning in a world that kept slipping from her grasp. The stars she once admired become symbols of a distant, unreachable clarity, and her journal becomes the only place where her inner world remains intact.
As her words pass into the hands of a police officer assigned to understand her disappearance, the story widens. What begins as an investigation becomes a meditation on how a life can fracture, how love can erode, and how a person can drift so far inward that the shoreline becomes both refuge and ending. Through shifting forms, poetry, journal entries, and narrative; the book traces the contours of Eleanor’s unravelling and the quiet beauty she still manages to hold.
This is a story about departure, but also about the echoes a life leaves behind, and the way one person’s final pages can alter another’s path.
[9am, Elwood beach]
Who found the book?
The journal…it was found by some guy walking his dog. He said he found it over there, near the trees. It looks newish, not overly full.
Anything else there, clothes or anything?
Only the journal and a set of keys.
House keys?
Looks like they are for an apartment complex yeah, fob with a keyring.
Okay, good. Be sure to log both when you get back.
How long do you thiank the body was in the water?
Not long I’d say, she probably went in last night. The tide was pretty low it seems. She wouldn’t have gone far.
Think it was accidental?
Aren’t all suicides? (A flick of the eyes up to god) Hopefully the journal can answer some of the questions. What goes through people’s minds, why do we do half the shit we do.
I’ll head back now and take a look then. You okay?
Thanks, and yeah; I’m fine. Never gets easier seeing this though.
At least they are at peace now, however troubled.
Gone, changed forever. Peace….
(A look out to sea)
SCRATCHES INSIDE THE SKULL
Hear the clouds, rolling and calling.
Rumbling across your spine.
Vertebrae by vertebrae it moves you.
Like a little child crying out in the dark.
The air gets heavy. And the rainbows die.
Anything you wanted, falls back.
Turns into time.
The rain you feel on your fingertips.
Are the tears you cried as a child, busting the dam.
Flooding your spirit.
Marking a way to the funeral of a childhood friend.
The one you wished for the most.
Built those dreams with sand and innocence.
Play back the videotape in your mind before the
lightning burns the image.
Filling your eyes with fog and fury.
Of a lost dream, crumbled and put to sleep.
Snatched by the monsters and left to die in a factory.
Alone, in a hourglass.
Covered each second in the sand of regret.
ESCAPE
She ran into the sea, she flew into the trees.
Wandering like a ghost, too anxious to please.
Who she left behind, and who she carried within.
Beyond the bones of love,
trapped now beneath her skin.
How she tied to shake them, before she fled her mind.
A sanctuary above her, grown fragile over time.
For they had now invaded, and refused requests to leave.
Confessing words of affection,
too hard for her to believe.
So now she sped into the sky, and dove into the ocean.
Killing them most quickly, but guiltily in slow motion.
She hoped she would escape the thoughts, now running through her mind.
Of being held accountable, condemned now for all time.
With a blood on her hands, and sadness in her heart.
Leaving this earth the way she wanted,
her end now has a start.