The Sunflower

Prologue

Nothing but the concrete walls and connecting hall seems to exist. Perhaps nothing else does exist. The light is still dim, warm orange, but the air is cold. The steel bunk bed is the same. Only the top occupied, strewn in unmade sheets and a crumpled soccer sweatshirt, mixing her scent through the still air. Cinnamon and coffee. Everything is so familiar. It feels too real.

A man staggers through the open doorway he had been leaning on seconds before. He reaches the center of the empty room. His only movement is the slight shake throughout his entire body, even the small movement threatening to break him with how brittle he looks. Life had never been kind to him, but perhaps this was the event that would turn him to glass. Shatter him into a million pieces at last. No, he had been shattered before, he had put himself back together. She had put him back together. No, perhaps he would simply become powder. Perhaps his guilt, his grief, her memory, could simply crush him into sparking grains. Perhaps the turning clogs of his own mind would grind him into nothing but dust. Dust could never be put back together.

His blue eyes sweep the room once more and the tension in his body releases as his gaze lands on a notebook. A notebook he knows. Black leather cover bound around the middle with large rubber bands. It's small and fat. Plain, boring, and not in good shape, but it holds so much. When the man sees the book, a book he was barely ever permitted to see, it becomes final. This book, a book that was always snatched away with angry hands if found from it's hidden home, is unattended, as if no one cares who reads the content, because it no longer matters if anyone does. The person who cared. The author. The main character, is gone and had left it behind. It being an echo of herself. And now that it was the only thing left, the book was also the manifesto of her life.

The man moves once more, but this time to the desk where the journal rests. His arms extend to pick up the book. Inches before touching it he freezes. Something that had once been so personal, was now the best way to remember her. And he wants to read it. To invade privacy that no longer matters. It makes him sick. Still, he needs to remember old times, before the universe's laws were broken, and even more confusing, apparently their bond as well. And so, driven by a need to know how this had happened; what events needed to take place for everything to be so thoroughly ruined, he scoops up the small book and opens to where he knows the beginning of both their beginning and end began. 

Ahh this is finally up! So scary, but I'm excited and I hope you are too.

I find it so difficult writing in the present tense, so I hope this made sense. Anyway, most of the book from now on is in past tense.