Infernal Redemption

Chapter 5

The flight wore my body out but the over thinking wore my head and heart out and the minute I reached my room, I crashed. I had to. It was the only way to turn my thoughts off which seemed to be stressing on one topic and one alone. I actually laughed when I chanted that I needed to embrace darkness more than I did him. I didn’t mean the evil; I just wanted some blankness, like a stroll in an empty garden of just being, under the inspection of the moonlight and the care of these stars. We pray to the falling stars and wish upon full moons not realising that their effects last only a minute and the hopes we attach to them burn out with every fleeting drift in their existence. My dreams of crashing cars and burning buildings built on strings of moonlight were disturbed by an annoyingly familiar tone.

I woke up to a ringing phone. “What?” I croaked.

 “I’ve been trying to get through you since forever, Ryan is missing, and we thought you might know where he is.”  Rose’s sweet voice sounded even more melodic when concern was induced and detected to be its main component.

I had no time for drama like this; I knew he’d be at one place, by the ocean soaking some peace in.  But if Ryan wanted to be found, he wouldn’t have disappeared in the first place.

“I don’t know where he is Rose, but he’s old enough to not get lost. I don’t see a cause of worry.”

“Look, his manager is flipping. You remember Jimmy? The tall, well not as tall as Ryan, but almost, slightly built tanned skin fella with dreamy eyes, a hard to miss tattoo on his bicep and rich black hair. They had a meeting today and he ran out for some odd reason, you know how moody Ryan gets when his phone is around, which is almost always. Now no one can find him and since you are the only person who might be able to tame his temperamental swing, we thought you might, maybe, faintly knock some sense into him. His manager thinks Ryan’s probably high out of his mind, singing in a dumpster with his passport and everything else stolen. Everybody is just so paranoid and you seem to be their only saving grace.  Can you please help? Call him; he might answer your call.”

“Rose, stop rambling. All right, I can’t promise you heaven, but I shall try.” I groaned as I left my soft cuddles behind me to face the tunes of sentiments. Something was weary and I needed to fix the puzzle without attaching a soul of me.

There was this strange feeling within me that sung the wrong war songs, like the voice of the devil sitting on my ribs over powering the one of the angel on my shoulders. I hated his guts but I was falling for his pain. As the weeks passed, the line between friendship and love seemed to disappear. I felt like he was the only one person who truly got me, like he was the missing piece of gaps in my fingers and holes on my heart. I was irrevocably glued to the feeling I had when I was around him and nothing (at least for that very instant) could make me see otherwise.

I walked out of the hotel lobby with zero makeup and my favourite track suit and headed straight for the beach, one place no one would even think about looking for Ryan. One might wonder how someone as famous as him could go unnoticed, but truth be told, he’s the master of disguises. Well at least he liked to believe that. He had told me about a couple of get ups he had used in the past and had marginally gotten away with it but let’s be honest, a person would have to be running with insanity to be by the ocean at this cold ungodly hour.

                                                                                                                 

The walk to the beach was about 10 minutes, and I could hear the crashing waves hitting hard upon the sand, washing every speck of dirt away with it whilst depositing fresh grains of dirt laced in sand. I think that was one reason why we both loved the ocean so much; every movement in the tide was carried out with such dignity and grace, as if the dance of rise and ebb, chase and fall was invented just for the waves.