Final Truth

Chapter 46: Choices

I wonder if they intend to leave me to die in here. It would surely explain the lack of water, and I can't even remember the last time I've eaten anything.

I thought they needed me for Julia's torment, but maybe they've grown from that and found some other way to do it. They don't need me anymore, so perhaps this is the easiest way for me to go.

If only it didn't have to be such a miserable death.

A low whining sound resonates from my throat, and I find myself feeling more like a lowly dog than a human, the subject of cruelty where there should've been tenderness.

I don't want to be like this anymore. I want to be me, the real me, the boy that everyone keeps telling me I was. His life was simpler, easier; nothing was a lie for him. People loved him and cared about him, and he loved and cared for others. I both hate the idea of him, for he's everything that I'm not, and also wish that I could find him so I wouldn't be so confused anymore.

I don't love anyone, don't care about anyone, but perhaps if I did, it would fill the terrifying void inside of me that eats away at my mind. If I could learn to care for others as much as I want to hurt them, perhaps I'd be getting somewhere.

But it's too much, the need for carnage that boils inside, to act on that small wish. I'll never be able to help someone, never be able to feel real, beautiful, unmistakably human emotions that make life worth living.

And I pity anyone who thinks otherwise.

I cry out again in despair, knowing that I'm condemned to die here both despised and utterly alone. I've driven away the only person left that cared about me, and for that, I have no one to blame but myself.

But oh, how I just want to see her one last time.

I want to get one last look at what it means to live by one's own conditions, and to see what it means to love someone, if Julia still can. I also, of course, want to blame her for all my troubles, want to scream at her for all the pain she's brought me.

And if she really were to come visit me again, I know I'd do the latter.

"I want...I want to go home," I mutter, surprising even myself at my words.

Home? You have no home. Your place is here.

But even as I think those thoughts, an image, no, a memory, enters my head and consumes my void mind.

It's as if I'm suddenly transported to another planet, free from the confines of that horrible little room to a world that I didn't know I remembered. And as if I were watching a movie, I see myself walking down a street in a city with a girl next to me.

I look healthy and very happy, smiling slightly at the girl next to me when she's not looking. It's Julia, and I'm struck with the very sight of her and how beautiful she really is. Her hand is entwined with mine, and every so often, I see myself raise her hand to my lips for no apparent reason until I realize that it's making her smile.

I follow the two of them through criss-crossing streets, no one paying the real me any attention, until I see them duck into what appears to be a little coffee shop.

Making my way inside behind them, I'm startled a bit at first by shouts of welcoming resonating from a table where a group of strangers sit.