The Girl He Forgot (Book 2)

Chapter 11 - How It Feels

The next day took a long time coming. Sleep had forsaken me yet again, you see, and I'd resorted to sitting in front of a blank canvas all night willing myself to draw something on it. I hadn't painted in a good few days. I missed it terribly; the feel of a freshly sharpened pencil gliding across the paper, the sight of the lines it made as it went and the accomplishment I felt when they all joined up to make an image.

Perhaps I missed it because, right now, it felt all so out of reach; my nan always said 'we all want what we can't have' and I knew now how true that was. I wanted what I couldn't have so badly that it hurt not having it...

I'd thrown the pencil across the room in frustration. I'd then walked over and carefully plucked it out of the open paint pot it had fallen in to. Thankfully the paint had dried and turned to dust long ago, and I'd been able to the polish the pencil clean. It was on such close inspection that I'd realised where I'd gotten this particular pencil from... or rather, who had gifted it to me...

-'I managed to get some shopping done while you lounged about on that couch'-

I'd felt the tears threatening to spill over the rim of my eyes and quickly sucked in a breath meant to brace myself. I marched defiantly to my bedroom, threw on some slightly more work-friendlier clothes and strode down to the gardens. The sun had barely risen yet and here I was, hacking away at the land, my upper lip stiff as I snipped the stems of the tomato plants. I worked hard and through the pain. I kept my head down as if the answer to all my problems lay in the earth beneath my feet.

I was a mess, I thought, as I viciously tilled at the soil of the corn beds... Carl's words the day before had completely devastated me and I felt, once again, like an empty husk of a human. No better or more worthy of movement than a walker itself... never in my life, pre or post apocalypse, had I let someone so far into my soul that they could destroy it so utterly.

Sure, I'd wandered about like a homicidal, emotionally detached, sociopath for a year or two before, but I'd bounced back, hadn't I? I'd done what I'd had to do to survive. I'd preserved my sanity by putting it on hold until I was in a better position to cope with such traumas. Since then, I'd dealt with my past and I'd even come to feel normal again, like I was truly capable of experiencing all the emotions other people felt. I was capable of caring again...

But perhaps I'd chosen the wrong person to care about... perhaps humans were so broken now that it wasn't worth caring for anyone anymore.

Then again, do we really have a choice in such things?

Could I really have ever chosen not to fall for Carl Grimes?

I wished I could now...

The emotional turmoil I felt whenever his words replayed in my head, when I saw the way he'd scowled at me yesterday printed on the backs of my eyelids every time I blinked, was torturous. I couldn't turn it off, I couldn't shove it to the back of my mind like I usually did, it simply wouldn't work. Not with Carl... I'd tried when he was comatose, I'd tried even harder when he'd woken up and forgotten me and now?

Now we were certainly on the same page... the same screwed up, twisted and torn page...

I could almost feel my sanity unravelling... and I knew there was only so many activities I could pretend to preoccupy myself with until I snapped.

I could feel it...

Right now, in fact...

I could feel the urge to run building up inside me like a pot boiling over...

I was so close...

So very close to doing something regrettable...

"Hey" said a strong southern voice on the other side of the garden's fence. I looked up to see that Maggie had been walking past. She'd stopped now, clearly a little surprised to find me here so early and probably inspecting the work I'd done so far.