Her Safe Haven

Chapter 47 - As The Deer

"She left by foot, she couldn't have gone far," Caleb had said, and though Lakeside was indeed small, and Caleb and Gray had about a dozen people working under them and their entire friends group to split up and look for her, it had been almost two hours since Caleb called him, and still no one had even seen any sign of Winter.

"At this rate, they should start looking at the possibility that she might have left Lakeside," Seth had said, and Jonah wanted to scream inside, to scream at him, to scream at everyone, to scream at himself.

He hadn't talked to Winter these past few weeks because he had been trying to "move on". But his mind was going crazy about the thought of something bad happening to Winter. He swore, if something bad had happened to her, anything bad at all...

He shook his head and pressed the gas to make his sedan go even faster than before.

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Winter thought she had never felt happy in her life.

Sure, there were moments where she felt a short reprieve, like when she went on a holiday with her family. Or when she beat Seth in Mario Kart. Or when Rohan held her hand. But there was always something on the back of her mind that made her feel restless, that made her feel anxious, and now that she thought about it, those moments were just seconds of feeling at ease before that feeling of deep sadness and emptiness returned, threatening to drown her with each passing moment she tried to leave it unnoticed.

She always tried to figure it out: where did this sad, empty feeling come from? Then on moments like this she always ended up resigning to her fate — her fate that because of her childhood, because of what happened in her past, she had been broken forever. Like Rohan, who will always have that mysterious darkness and walls around him because of his father; or Seth, who will always have that streak of distrust towards women ever since his mother left him and his father when he was five. All products of what adults and society forced onto them as children — they had no choice. They were broken forever by things in their childhood they had no control over. Faulty byproducts of irresponsible error.

Yet ironically, Winter could not remember the part of her childhood that supposedly "broke" her at all. She could not remember her entire life in China. When she tried to remember, she could only hear the voices.

So she cried bitterly because what a cruel, cruel world it was. She was broken by something completely out of her control, that she could not even remember; and no one could save her, and she did not know how to save herself. And in these times when she felt hopeless, when she felt all the unfairness, she could only call His Name, again and again.

Winter was raised a Catholic, but over time she lost her faith, because how? How could an "ever loving God" let this happen? How could an ever caring God let her perpetually suffer through no fault of her own? She asked these questions a lot of time to Caleb, who, despite also suffering maybe just as much as her inside, still kept his belief. Yet till this day he had never given her a straight answer. So she thought that there was no point holding on to something that she could not understand.

But on days like these, when she felt the most alone, when everything was falling apart, and all she wanted to do was just to disappear from this world, that hope for the promise that she was never alone in this world was the only thing she thought was keeping her alive.

"If you talk, you are dead."

She thought it was ironic that though she could not remember who said that in the first place, the sentence still applied today like people spitting it into her face every day.

Life was unfair, yet she could say absolutely nothing to anyone about that helplessness she felt. She would not even know what to say in the first place.