introduction
[present]
He always wondered what dying felt like, what happened after you died. Many people had their own thoughts about what would happen, but his thoughts of it were this: you live, you die, then you live among your memories watching each one you have. He wasn't afraid of death, though. He already felt dead; as if he was only a walking corpse in this world. There was a time he knew a girl who wanted to genuinely be there for him, a time when he felt alive. The time where his heart seemed to beat, his organs functioning, and blood flowing through him. The time where he didn't feel much like a walking corpse.
She made him feel alive.
Kai never felt delighted, he felt bereft of life. It wasn't until he met her that he began to feel some sort of warmth in him. Kai struggles with the condition of Cotard's syndrome, he's had it ever since his teen years which most doctors found to be strange. There had been a crucial car accident around his teen years that triggered a reaction into Kai. In the car accident, were his parents and not one person remained alive from the horrible wreckage. After hearing his parents didn't make it, he fell into a deep depression and was always occupied with his anxiety. This later developed into the syndrome. He coped with managing some parts of the Cotard's syndrome, but not all of the effects completely.
Dakota had been the anchor for Kai, sort of like his focus. She met him during the summer of the both of them graduating high school. It was at a movie drive-in where she noticed him sitting on the hood of his red classic 1970 Chevelle, not even watching the movie. She found him to be strange at first but was intrigued by him. Dakota's parents had never been there when she was younger causing her to put up a barrier around herself and pretend to be someone else on the outside. She was an expert at doing this that people always saw her as the happiest person in the world. Kai was her own anchor, her own focus to stop pretending.
They complemented each other, helped each other, they were unbreakable even through the worst moments.
