The Wings Of A Caged Bird | First Draft

chapter 33: the stormy october night

"Don't look there." 

He places two fingers on my cheek and makes it face away from the window to him. The threatening dark shadows still linger in the back of my vision as I swallow saliva through a dry throat.

"Those shadows feel like claws of a monster," I whisper. For some reason, I still cannot shake my fascination away from that image.

"It's okay. I'm here."

But he won't always be. Looking at the silhouettes of those tree branches swaying in the storm outside not only reminds me of the long, thin, pointy fingers of some monster, but also the hands of humans writhing in agony, desperately asking me to save them from whatever horror lies on the other side of that window. When did my imaginations become so dark?

"I think . . . I finally know how Dawn felt," I say. Fear can lie in the simplest of things, depending on how you see it. And if Dawn was always afraid of so many things, it means that he was never as optimistic and positive-minded as I thought he was.

How could I never realize something so important about him until now?

My heart is stung by a venomous insect. Dawn was always afraid. But not that night. That night, he was willingly staring at his object of fears, as if confronting them all by himself out of the desperation to retain his pride just before he ended himself.

"I don't know."

Oh no, it's coming back. That night is coming back to me, fragmented scenes arranging themselves sequentially against my will. There was a thunderstorm that night as well. In the flash of lightning, his image in my drowsy eyes glowed momentarily, as though his whole body was bathed in sparks of electricity. In that short-timed brightness of the thunderbolt, I had failed to see the melancholy in his eyes, the decision that had already been taken, the words that he kept unspoken, and the words he wanted me to not keep unspoken.

Or maybe I did see. I saw it all. That's why my hand had reached out to his.

But he had pulled away.

"But Ced, I hope."

No, no. I don't want to. I don't want to remember.

But I know I won't forget. With the passage of time, as Dawn becomes more and more blurry in my mind, as black ink is spilled on the past images, darkening portions of it without any way to fix it, as my happiest memories with him fade like the colour of a dress that has been washed too many times, as the most important chapters of my life are torn away from the book against my wish — the memory of that particular night, I know it will stay.

It will stay to haunt me, to stab me, to kill me, to destroy me. The sweet words that had left his mouth would turn more poisonous with every replay, because that is how my mind will force me to hear them. And I would wish again and again. I would regret again and again. I would scream again and again. I would die again and again.

The sound of the rain grows stronger. The nature is in turmoil, just like my heart. Our small room is illuminated by a flash of sharp lightning, and I see the boy in front of me looking dizzyingly alluring in that short-lived luminosity. Soon, the lightning is followed by the drum of thunder. I shiver, whether from cold or from deja-vu, I can't tell. It is like watching the remake of a movie — the exact same story, the exact same scene, the exact same soundtrack, but a different cast.

I move to the corner of the pillow, closer to him, already crossing the minimum distance I would keep with Dawn. The beeswax candle veils him in an orange lustre.

"Cedar," he whispers. "Don't."

"Hush," I tell him, my gaze completely unfocused. I was already being pulled back to the stormy October night, when my pitiful, confused silence would lead to my endless regret. I don't want to go there.