Stolen Voices ✓

December 15th

never let your fear decide your future.

- anonymous

December 15th:

Mara wakes up to the other side of the bed being barren, feeling the brisk chill of Elias's absence. She'd woken up every morning wrapped in his arms as he messes with the tangled ends of her golden hair; his fingertips tracing up and down her sides. He always manages to wake up before her- no matter the day- six in the morning, his eyes will fly open, the sun not having risen to it's peak.

Today, though, when Mara wakes up, Elias isn't next to her but sitting at the end of the bed, hunched over a computer. The sound of his fingers flying rapidly over the keyboard and a strangled groan that escapes him, filling the small quarters of his room.

It is like a heat box, this room, Elias turning the radiator on high to stop a teeth-chattering Mara. It only furthers the tension, however. His back muscles flex as his hands ball into fists.

Sitting up from her lying position, the plush blankets fall from her shoulders and pool in her lap. She beams, rubbing the tire from her eyes. She yawns, crawling towards Elias on the bed, kissing the back of his neck where his hair curls. Rubbing her hands up his back, towards his shoulders.

Elias slams his computer closed, turning in Mara's arms so she is straddling him. Kissing her properly, a morning lazy affection.

He doesn't want to tell her about what the email reads, what will inevitably be the upshot to whatever honeymoon they are experiencing. An opportunity of his life, he is torn between his future possibility and staying here with Mara. He can't tell her, either, knowing she will push him away for a better opportunity that the one he has here.

She never feels good enough for him. Elias knows this, even if she never speaks the words.

He can see it on her face when she sleeps, her lips pulled into her mouth, her eyebrows furrowed. The melancholy she will whisper unconsciously, rolling away from his arms. When sex has become more than pleasing themselves but satisfying the other as well- that is love, and it terrifies her even if she won't admit it.

The lines between passion, desire, and wanting a future together have become so blurred that it terrifies her. Mara never figured she would live past eighteen, that she would ever have a future, children even. She doesn't want them, not really, but with Elias, it seems conceivable. The sense of normalcy, a nine-to-five job, picking up the kids from daycare and watching her husband cook dinner.

She can imagine it, and it doesn't turn her off- that's what scares Mara, who wants freedom, not to be locked down.

Elias, on the other hand, always dreams of a bigger something. What he always has wanted is to see his name in print, what he writes to be published. His name to be seen amongst something genuine, not to be the label for the boy who'd been mute two years of his life.

It is the opportunity of a lifetime, something that will kick start his career if he really wants to be a writer. But he just got Mara back, and he isn't quite ready to leave this euphoria, so he doesn't tell her, kissing her back to silence her words. Letting it be buried behind other emails from his professors and classmates, Elias leaves the elephant in the room. Watching it all shrivel, like a flower in the absence of the sun.

Instead, he hides all his worry behind a smile and lovelorn words. "Good morning, beautiful. I have a surprise for you."

---

Elias's parents purchased the cabin when he was five years old and a terror. The first memories he has of this cabin was tripping up the creaking old stairs, trying to reach the door. He'd scraped up his knees and chipped a tooth, but that didn't stop him from rending through every corner of the house. The wind left in his trail as he weaved in and out of the rooms of the dank hallway. Splintering his fingers as he dragged them across the railing surface, towards the basement, old shag carpeting and scented of mildew.