A Drop In The Lake

fleeting feeling of control

    Alessa

Wind rushes past my neck, tickling my nerves for the race ahead. My hand's buzz and my knees shake. My lungs seize up, like swallowing a chip whole. I can't comprehend anything. My body feels like it's floating beside me, like the fleeting feeling of control. Every muscle in my body constricts as jitters jingle their way down my arms, past my stomach, and around my legs, like a snake. Heightened nerves never seem to work in my favor because it throws my performance all wayward.

Each sensation filters into me, like sand falling down an hourglass. Before the full force of this distraction can fully consume me, my seat slides from under me, and my feet are ripped out of the footboard. Screams fill my subconscious in a whirlwind of scraping velcro and clunking oars as I try to process what is going on. My thoughts strain to form into words but salty water stings my lungs like a bee.
There's nothing. Only darkness and splintering pain with the occasional burst of purple and blue splotches in my vision. I feel the rippling of my boatmates splashing in the water beside me. The doomed calls of officials racing around me.

Then I hear it, a blood-curdling, memory-haunting scream. As my eyes blur to the scene beside me, my head wobbles in every direction and rips me out of this hellish memory.

My heart's racing and my hands are shaking. Every emotion dissipates, replaced with fear and a growing heart rate.

Memories of the traumatic situation run over me like a semi. Memories I thought I'd suppressed a hundred and eighty-six days ago, but after my run-in with Cameron, have revived like a phoenix from the flames.

I sit up in my bed, the light of a lamp from outside peeking through the gap in the giant curtain that covers the floor-to-ceiling window in the center of our room. Dana's relaxed breathing creates a white noise as I creep out of my bed and towards the door. I quietly hobble down the stairs to the lounge, after sliding on my slippers, to get a glass of water. The whole action feels robotic as I wait for the tap water to fill up my cup and I float back up the stairs, soundlessly. 

When I return to my room, I sit down at my desk and open my laptop. Usually, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I stay in my bed and read until I fall back asleep. The only exception is when I have dreams about the accident.

I open my laptop to find the tabs of articles about Cameron and his parents that are still open. I open a new tab, and a Google document so that I can write down my dream.

Since the accident, I've written down any and all dreams I've had about it so that I can share them with my therapist. She reads them and helps me piece together the situation so that I can hopefully move on from it, and while I'm still seeing her, I haven't had nightmares like these for a while, but alas, they're back.

After I've finished writing down my dream, I write down how it made me feel, and, on a scale of one to ten, how similar to the actual situation it was. In the beginning, my dreams would veer into the dramatic; my mind fighting to protect me from the trauma. As I continued to meet up with my therapist, and the more she helped me to understand the event, the more realistic my dreams became. With the help of my parents, and multiple witnesses to the event, I've been through the realization process and, I at least thought, I've been through the grieving process, but it seems events like these never really escape you.

Now that I am fully awake, I open another tab and begin to dig more into Cameron's life. After falling apart in front of him yesterday morning, I feel ill-equipped in his presence.

    Curious about his reasoning for moving to Harvey Cedars, I look up his parents' retirement. In the articles I had previously read, it said that they retired and settled down in Chico California so they could start their family, but then why move across the country?

When the page loads, I click the first link, and an article with pictures of Cameron at a house party pops up. The heading: "Giving it all up for Their Child Only to be Disappointed" christens at the top of the page.

"Disappointed?" I mumble to myself.

As I continue to read the article, and more images of Cameron in various positions, holding a red-solo cup, filter into the article, a full-body cringe racks through me. The Cameron I met is so witty and confident, and even though he sometimes comes off as arrogant, he really just seems like a product of the toxic environment he grew up in, in the public eye. However, this article tells a different story, one of an ungrateful, party boy. While I know the article holds some semblance of truth, at the same time, everything feels so fake. 

I'm so confused. This article says his family moved because of Cameron's party habits, but in every photo, Cameron seems to be off to the side, not mooching with everyone else. And this still doesn't explain how this has anything to do with Cameron's parents retiring.

    I start fidgeting in my chair when I hear Dana groan in her sleep. Not wanting to risk waking her up, I close my laptop and head back into my bed.

While I thought looking up his past would help me understand him better and give me ammunition in my times of weakness, it only confuses things even more. So as I close my eyes to let the rocky terrain of whiplash dreams consume me, one question rings through all else, "Which Cameron is the real Cameron?"
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Hello, me again, so I just wanna say thank you for all the support you guys have been giving me. Whenever I post something on my story I'm flooded with messages of encouragement and it just makes my day. I do this for you guys and as a way to escape into a world of endless possibilities so seeing how much you guys are engaged in the story just makes me feel like I'm on cloud nine. Thank you so so soooo much and see you Wednesday for chapter 8!