Thirty-Six Hours of Self-Imposed Exile
by
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I didn’t sleep at all that night, and when the morning light began to creep in through my windows and across the hardwood floors, I got up from the chair in the living room and left the apartment. Outside, the city was paralyzed by a foot of still-falling snow, while the wind picked up the light crystalline flakes and scattered them in the endless white haze of an icy fog. There were no cars. There were no people. There was just the snow and the wind.
I walked around the city all morning, knowing Lawrence was at home packing up his things. I thought about what the apartment would feel like when I returned. The closets would be empty, and the hangers would clang like wind chimes against each other. The antique radio Lawrence’s grandfather had given him would be gone, and I wouldn’t be able to feel the smooth mahogany wood edge that I used to lightly trace with the tip of my finger. My life would be just as it was before I had fallen into the river—and I felt numb. It wasn’t because of the wind or the cold; I had been numb from before I had stepped foot outside.
At the age of twenty-eight, I had managed to take only three steps in my life. One was being cynical, one was being bitter, and one was being jaded … but as I walked, I took another step—a fourth step. It was the step of nihilism. At the realization that I was back to where I was last winter, that I had come full circle, I suddenly didn’t care about anything. I didn’t have any values. I didn’t have any morals. There was nothing left for me to lose. I had nothing. I was nothing. All I had wanted was to feel genuinely moved, and that’s exactly what I got. I had wanted so badly to believe in fate. Perhaps it was foolish. Perhaps it was fate that brought me here to begin with. I don’t think I’ll ever truly know.
Daisy was right. I am just a child in this world.
I stood on the Mass Ave. Bridge, which straddled the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, and I felt the cold sting in the air. I looked down at the river below. The water’s surface was choppy and looked cold, and for a moment, and just one moment, I had the feeling of regret. I thought of what Leonard Cohen had once sung: “The wind, the wind is blowing. Through the graves the wind is blowing. Freedom soon will come … Then we’ll come from the shadow.”
I stepped over the railing of the bridge, took a last sweeping look at a sleeping city, and jumped into the cold river below.
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About the Book
It’s nighttime and the air is cold. It’s brisk as it washes over bare skin, a reminder that it’s winter. And as you walk beneath the clear midnight sky, the moon casts a shadow ever so slightly, it reminds you that you’re alive.
At the age of twenty-eight, the Narrator has taken only three steps in life: one for being cynical, one for being bitter, and one for being jaded. But an extraordinary thing happens after a life-saving encounter with a stranger leads to an adventure of self-discovery and reawakening to the world. The journey brings the Narrator into the lives of a past love, a pregnant neighbor, and a churning river that nearly claims the Narrator’s life. Are the relationships that develop after the accident mere coincidence, or part of something greater, and perhaps, driven by fate?
thirty-six hours of self-imposed exile is a novel that poses the question, “What does it mean to be alive?” Through the changing of the Boston seasons, this novel explores the cyclical nature of the human state, from apathy to understanding, and from love to loss and back again.
About the Author
Trained as a writer at Boston University’s College of Communication, A.M. Ferguson graduated with a B.S. in Film and Television in 2003. A.M. remained in Boston to write a novel, thirty-six hours of self-imposed exile, written during one of the coldest winters in New England in over a hundred years.