Prologue.
PROLOGUE ,
you would have never known
TESS
I did not remember a time before the world had died. Perhaps it had been erased, what little life I had, gone without error in the mind. In the sights I held, I could not see a life worth living in the coming days. I only knew of the misery I had been thrown into with little say, not a lick of worry to taste at my tongue. In a world deprived of a simple heart beat, I found myself in a case of wishing my own cavity was no longer beating. It had come to that, because of the guilt that shredded my lungs into gravel, because of how bitter each breath of air tasted. Land desperate for life was not what I wished to walk along in my time of dying. When there were no more words left to say, nothing left to preach, the only thing the world had spared was the unwilling fight for survival.
All of the innocence that had once caressed my skin was burned away with cremation of blood and gunpowder, and rusted blades. There was a grime that coated me, one far too thick to see anything but a monster underneath. A shake invaded my hands, cold hands that a weapon fell into so easily with each day that passed; you would have never even known I was once human.
What I was made up of now had been sculpted together by violence, a place where nightmares were birthed, I had become its spawn. Ask and I cannot tell, for I am no longer in this head of mine. The world had taken away my desire to live, it was not a home I wanted to exist in, a lifetime I wished to forget. It was only supposed to be imaginary, a fiction that fed in the dark parts of horror stories, but God and I did not see eye to eye. Let it be real and I will suffer through it.
To watch the souls of others leave their bodies, to witness someone’s life slowly die out, the world had not prepared me for the misery. I had lost everything I came into the new world with, a family that was no longer breathing the same air as I. My childhood, the girl I once was, it was all plucked and pulled from every direction until it snapped. These eyes of mine did not see the world the same as they once did; blue gone cold. I had been left in the grasp of a world that held no sympathy or security, no love and warmth spared for me. When there was no purpose parted for me, I turned into dead weight.
A world in which you were left alone was far more dangerous now more than ever. The silence was what killed all of us slowly, an invisible death I put onto myself. The forgetfulness of my own voice, the clog in the middle of my throat. After all, what was left to say? When there was not a soul to speak to, it was hard to taste your own voice. Let me ramble on, let my own ears hear, I won’t blink an eye. The days where I pretended it wasn’t me, but my brother and mother, and father listening in, I prayed each night the dreams would come true. To have a being to tell stories to, a heart I could confess all my fears to, it was far too much to ask for in the days I found myself in.
The act of being alone had seeped into me as the months and years swam by, there was no way around it. My heart caved in a bit more day after day, forgetting what it felt like to touch another human being, it was the kind of warmth I would never be able to find within myself. All of it, the good and bad, and ugly, it settled into me whether I accepted it or not. I yearned to hear another voice, to feel another person’s skin under my fingertips, to stare into a pair of eyes that were not layers of cataracts. It ran old, having nothing but the lonesome ways of my own fingertips to stare at. Above it all, I missed when breathing was not a hobby I used to pass the time.
Loneliness cradled my bones, tucked me in at night, talked to me in my sleep, the voice I awoke to. It had become my imaginary friend that lurked over me on my darkest days. When you were the last soul left on earth, you became your only friend and your worst enemy. Oh, what to do with me. After so many weeks and months, and years of waiting to be saved, there was no other choice, but to save myself. I was alone, and it seemed as if it would remain that way until the day my heart strung its final string.
Oh, how lovely it feels to be alone.
