Til Death Do Us Part

chapter seventeen ~ i am afraid

I sat in the back corner of the hospital room, and watched Faye watching me.

My body was lying on the bed, and I'd long given up counting the amount of tubes and needles sticking out of my body as it lay beside the monitors which were apparently the only things keeping me alive.

She was hard to read. Her face was almost expressionless, but definitely not impassive. She was feeling something.

I just didn't know what.

Eventually, I forced myself to move closer to her and gauge her reaction from closer up.
Still nothing really came of it.

Her eyes seemed to be scouring my body for answers. For anything.
The heart rate monitor was beeping steadily, and the mask over my face ensured my chest rose and fell just as much so.

My body was almost beyond recognition to me. I looked like a bag of bones, my skin yellowing and pale. The sign of a dying person.

I remembered a few weeks into my coma when my father had bellowed to my mother in this very room that I was wasting hospital space. That someone far more deserving could be using this bed, someone who wanted their life to be saved.

Back then, I had agreed.
I never asked to be put in here. I had wanted to die.

Over time I'd become regretful. Watching my mother visit me every day, watching her fall apart every day, it just made me want to come back.

I'd tried everything I could to trigger it. Even going as far as diving off the cliff where I'd been sat the night I'd done this. The same place I'd found Faye in the early hours after we'd stopped talking to each other.

I didn't even know anyone else knew about that place, and yet she seemed to have come across it by accident.
Perhaps she was drawn to it, because of me. It's where I had been.

But when I'd jumped, I hadn't even hit the bottom.
I'd simply blinked, and I was back hanging over the top of the cliff. I was still dead.

I had tried lying beside my body; tried lying inside it and closing my eyes, waiting to wake up into it. But it had never done a thing.

Faye finally reached out and touched my face.
It was sunken and hollow, almost like it had morphed into someone else's.
Her fingertips brushed my cheekbone, the one that now seemed to stand out too much through my skin.

Part of me resented doing this the most for her. Knowing that if she'd moved to this town, and I hadn't done this to myself, she wouldn't have to see me this way.

But I also knew that, no matter what happened, whether she existed in this town before or after what I did, even she could not have changed a thing.

And perhaps it was good she'd come after. Or I'd never have had her to stay with me, to help me. To understand me.

Somehow, even with me living here for my whole, and very short-lived, life, it was as if Faye knew me better than anybody.
And I liked that.

An outsider was seeing in. Not another one of these weird, small-town people with small minds and small aspirations. A city girl with a dark past and a meaningful future.
It made me want to be a part of it.

It made me want to be alive.

Of course, as an illegitimate being, I could go wherever I wanted in the world. But I would always be lonely, never able to experience jobs, love and a family with anybody. I was alone, always. And that's what kept me here, even with all of those years of me complaining about wanting to travel the world and get out of the small murky town of Sebring.