Anchor

Chapter Twenty One (Part 2)

The day I left the orphanage was one of the saddest of my life.

That day was different from any other. It was special, somehow. Different. Extraordinary. That day meant more to me – for multiple reasons – than every other day of my life had ever meant to me. That day changed my outlook on life and everything I believed in.

That day changed me.

Ryssa and I had been joking around the entire afternoon together, bickering at each other and talking like we often did. Summer vacations were always like this. I always wandered off to the meadow a couple of hundred feet away from the orphanage to spend my time with Ryssa – she was the person I spent more time with and the only one I usually enjoyed spending time with.

We were the kind of best friends that seemed to have been created with the same mold. We believed in the same things. We loved the same books. We fangirled over the same celebrities. And we listened to the same music. To teenagers, I assume that meant we were soul friends. But more than that, Ryssa saw me differently from everyone else in my life. Everyone I knew thought I was a freak. The ones who didn't were too invested in pretending I didn't exist to even acknowledge my presence. She didn't. She was the only one I could talk to at the time. The one who believed me no matter what I said. The one who trusted me beyond human understanding. The one who stood by me even when I screwed up. She looked at me like I was a real person – a normal person. She saw me as just a girl.

A friend.

I remember looking at her and thinking that despite still looking like a child in looks, Ryssa had grown unbelievably in the course of our years together. Ghosts didn't age physically and they rarely evolved psychologically but Ryssa had been the only exception I knew. She had grown as much as I had in all these years after we'd seen each other the first time. She might still look like a seven year old but she was way more mature than that psychologically – a true sixteen year old.

No matter how much I really did love Ryssa and thought she was part of me, even then, I knew the truth. I might not have wanted to accept it fully but I knew. She wasn't going to be there with me forever. She was a ghost and ghosts do technically live forever but I knew our time would come to an end one day. One day, she would have to leave me and go over the Veil, just like ghosts were supposed to. One day, I'd have to lose my best friend – the one person who had always unconditionally loved me and supported me over everything.

One day, I'd have to lose the only good piece of me.

Ryssa had shown me real happiness. Greatness in small beginnings. Happiness in sad beginnings. She'd taught me what it felt like to live for a purpose or a person. She'd taught me how to believe in myself and recognize the good in me, no matter how shadowed it was by the bad. She taught me how to love myself despite all my flaws, because they too were part of me. She'd shown me how happiness was sometimes in the small things – the smiles, the hugs and a simple touch. She made me understand that life wasn't all about boys and boys weren't all about girls. She taught me to see beyond what I wanted or needed and dared me to see through the glamour of life's illusions and futilities.

She showed me what it was like to love.

That's why letting her go was so hard for me. I'd tried to hold on to her for as long as I could but I knew now that I couldn't anymore. It wasn't fair to her. Or me. But mostly her. It wasn't fair of me to keep her locked over the Wall with me when I knew how that pained her. She wanted more than this severed existence and I knew I couldn't keep her from it anymore.

I owed her that much.

The sun was shining high in the sky in that summer afternoon, bathing our small meadow in the golden light that sprayed through the tall trees, immersing her porcelain colored skin in golden light and kissing her long golden locks that shook in the summer breeze that rolled through the air.