The Figure-Eight

I don't feel anything anymore.

Nothing.

I feel as though I'm floating on a cloud, or on a body of waves that feels like air.

Or, maybe I do feel something. Maybe it's what I'm feeling that feels like nothing. Maybe what I feel is nothing. Not knowing how I feel is the question, but what I need is answers.

Just looking at it makes me feel something. Touching it makes my feelings stronger. Not knowing what it means makes what I feel fade. 

I watched as my fingers traced the white shells that wrapped around the white string, leading to the silver infinity figure-eight symbol placed in the center. I watched as it lapped perfectly around my wrist, the silver center shone in the moon's reflective light through the corroded skylight above. It used to belong to Syra, my younger sister.

Oaklynn gave it to her after she turned twenty. She said she didn't want it or need it anymore. Said she was too old for it, it didn't match with her aura or shade. But, silver was always my favourite colour! Jack liked silver too! He liked how it shone in the sunlight and looked like the metal tap in our kitchen. Jack was four, he didn't know much. He was my favourite sibling, aside from Oaklynn. At home, Jack and Syra would always be together: they were the two youngest in the family, four and seven. Then you saw me and Oaklynn: the two oldest aside from mom and dad, fourteen and twenty. Overall, It used to be all of us together, as a family. Nothing could split us apart, or, so we thought until the apocalypse forged upon us.

It's been five months.

Five months into hiding.

Five months since I saw my family.

Five whole months into this disastrous invasion.

I thought about the word, disastrous. I like that word. I like how well it describes how I feel.

Disastrous.

Maybe that's not such a good word. What about catastrophic?

Or unlucky?

Unlucky, that's the word!

Suddenly, I found myself thinking about all the unlucky things in my life. How unlucky the world was when scientists discovered the abundance of lost dinosaur eggs located on island Maui in Hawaii, near a volcano. They said the eggs took about 100 million years to hatch. Now we're in the year 2300, the year the eggs hatched and took over the world. Thinking about all the unlucky things made my head hurt, I switched my positioning on the cot I laid on and tried to focus my mind more on the good things. With that, a thought appeared in my mind.

"HDHO," I said, speaking my thoughts out loud.

No one bothered to look my way. Everyone just shuffled in their cots that consisted of a single white blanket and a small twin-sized mattress. I looked down at my bracelet, then back up to the ceiling. The thought reappeared in my head.

"HDHO," I said again.

It was silent. Then suddenly a girl sat up and looked straight at me. Her auburn hair all tangled. Her pale white skin had been almost identical to the see-through spreadsheet she lay on.

"Household Disorientated Hiding Organization?" She asked with a slight shack to her voice.

She was about my age, fourteen. The more I looked at her the more she kind of looked like Syra, besides the brown-tinted hair.

"That's what I'm lucky for," I told her without an explanation.

She looked at me without a word. Then another girl sat up from where she lay and faced us.