ALONE | where our hearts sink into the earth.
― I don't want to be alone anymore.
The world had not been kind to us, the boy and the girl, and the souls within.
Made to suffer, minds that were created for this world, they do not sink; they swim.
but...
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CARL
The rusted bed springs creaked under my weight as I shifted against the mattress. Familiar in its tone, the sound echoed throughout my small cell, one that would eventually soak up into the walls. My cell and what made it up entirely, I returned to the mess it laid in each day. The decaying bed, the cold concrete, and the ceiling that held far too many secrets; my own and the prisoners before me.
The stone box had never felt more suffocating, a burning worry that bled through me. I wondered how it would've felt to only know the tiny bunk and porcelain sink as a home, if the barred door were to never be opened again. Sometimes, late at night, when the darkness got the best of me, it felt as if the door was sealed shut, even when it was wide open for my soul to seep through.
I sat hunched under the bunk, heart open for all to see. It had been hours, a few adding up under my belt, but my hands still shook as if I had just shot the gun that was never meant to find a way into my grip. A firearm I was familiar with, one my father gave to me long ago, I knew it well, but why did it feel as though I didn't know a thing about the weapon?
Trembling fingers dug deep into the ragged holes in my jeans, right above the knee, trying to hold myself together. I couldn't seem to control the shake, though. I never had been able to. Even today when I was right back into my element of holding a gun high at eye level, I still felt that trembling shake under my fingers.
My head wavered, flashes of the forest I was never meant to enter snapping through me. The cold gun, the deadly forest, the girl with nothing left. I was messy, and so was the day I found myself in. The day and the entirety of it was sloshed up into a spill I could not clean up, not even if I tried. A morning made up of bad decisions, an afternoon washed down into hours of waiting and watching the door of my cell.
For a moment, I was tired of being myself. The day hadn't even made its way through completely, and I was already wishing to shred the flesh I lived in, trade it in for another set of soles to walk through life in. I found myself feeling the trash of wanting a new set of skin daily, wishing I could be different, wishing to change myself the way my father had been able to change.
How easily he had been able to fall into the daily life we had created over the months, ditching his role of our leader, and leaning towards a quiet routine. Awake, care for Judith, farm, rest, and repeat. I wished to feel the same pull at my heart, to be able to follow his footsteps willingly, but there were still times where I craved the outside world.
In the warm hours of the morning, I had made the decision to dig into the gun box and steal the firearm that once belonged to me. I had snuck my way from the prison to the forest for what was meant to only be a quick trip. Down, down, down the rabbit hole I had gone until I couldn't keep up. When the sun was highest in the sky and the dead had struck the ground, I had saved the girl with a heart still beating.
