If We Survive

Chapter 25

I wish I could get a nice whack in the head, and never dream again. 

I guess it seems dumb that I'm bitching about this; they're just dreams, and that one wasn't even that bad. I've seen violent movies, people getting shot, and that sort of deal, but these things make my mind go off the tracks. 

I wake up, like my brain is dislocated. There's not a pain, really, aside from the usual, you-drank-like-hell-last-night feeling. It's like evrything is worng, like the train is off it's tracks. 

"Do you always stay in this neck of the woods?" I ask Drew over breakfast, enjoying a thick stew. Where the hell does he get this stuff? It doesn't taste like it's from a can, which for those of us who have never had the chance to compare, isn't exactly a subtle one. 

Were the hell else would one get veggies in the middle of Fedbrary, though? 

I should really shut up and eat my food. 

"Yeah, usually in this campsite, unless I'm running low on something." He replies. Standing up, he looks at me. "You know-" 

"Yeah, yeah. I'll be gone this afternoon." I know were he's going with this- the wonderful gut feeling has stuck again. 

He looks the tiniest but relived. "Well, I didn't mean today, but-" 

"Yep, I get it." Why do I sound so bitter? I'm not bitter, I'm not, I'm not...

As for being in denial, well...

"Thanks for the food." I say, tossing aside the bowl, and heading over to my bag. For the first time, since camp, I go through it. 

I take out everything, and I mean everything. 

I have three shirts, two of which are torn to hell, the other has a disgusting blood stain down the front, from a creeper with a bloody nose. Apparently, that happens when you snap someone's neck. I also have two pairs of pants, that still fit (God bless sweat pants), my sunglasses, and an old necklace that I from the King Soopers checkout line ages ago.

At the botton of the bag is all the stuff I haven't used yet. I open up my leather wallet, which used to be my baby. Inside is a fifty doller bill and two twentys, my debut card, my house key, and ten pesos. I have apicture, in there, too. It's of Jacob and I, standing in Arches National Park, fake grins on our faces. You can still see the vauge outline of a scar on my temple, were I got punched in the place by the guy, not an hour before that.  

In all truth, I hated him. 

I mean, we beat the shit out of each other, from like twelve years old on. 

So maybe I'm a little alright with him gone. 

Boy am I a bad liar.

After tucking my wallet safely away, in the outside poket of my duffel, I come across my weather-worn Bible. It's got an outer layer of camoflage duct tape, which was totally the shit three years ago. I flip to the inside cover, where another photo, this time of a rather more happy memory lies. It's of Dee and I, in front of a missive treehouse we build together, not all that long ago. It was an ongoing project from when we where six, and it turned out pretty awesome in the end. I place the photo carefully back in. I look at the closed cover, half longingly for a moment, before tossing it back. 

But I don't keep sifting through the rest of my crap, I just stare at it. I don't remeber the last time I cracked that thing open, filled with God's knolage, or something like that. 

It's representitive of a life that I hardly can remeber, a life that isn't mine. Not anymore, at least. 

I dig a shallow grave. 

It's off the graveyard, about twent feet, near a copse of trees that keep it just in sight. I roughly construct a wooden cross, like in th old movies. I dig down about a foot and a half, gently placing the book at the bottom. On a torn out page from my notepad and a nub of a pencil, I write, "Look like heavan and give 'em hell." I think I saw that on Tumblr, once, and it's the only thing that I could come up with in such a short amount of time. 

And that's all I have to say about that. 

I feel empty, again, with a hole in my head. 

This used to happen to me after watching television. I just felt cosmotose, like I could just stare at yonder tree for the rest of my days. 

I left that afternoon, just like I said I would. I left, without thinking. Something inside me went on auto-drive, while I thought. 

In all honestly, I'm stuck in a rut. As to get out? I don't know. I'm stuck doing the wrong thing, going the wrong places with the wrong people. 

And God, I've been lucky. 

I wish there wre other words for it, so I could be self-loathing and bitch about it, but the truth is, I've been so freaking blessed. 

I have food, water, I can kill creepers without a thought, which should bother me (but it doesn't), and I talk to people enough not to go quite insane. 

Suprisingly, I haven't become an homocidal maniac. 

Oh, thank God for that. 

Although I don't doubt me running about with a chainsaw isn't far behind. 

I can see smoke rising from somewere in the distence, around dusk. I have a deeply-humane longing to talk to someone reas up inside me. 

I just saw someone today, someone that I knew. 

But I want someone to talk to me, and tell me that I won't go insane, that what the world has become is a great thing, someone to love me. 

I know I sound like a sopping 15-year-old emotionally wrecked girl who doesn't have direction, which I do. 

I'm very clearly going north. 

But I want to be like everyone else again. I want to have troubles with my locker, and have calculus homework every night that I can't do. I want to be alone on Valentines Day, I want to make inaproprate jokes about the mandatory Langage Arts reading book with my friends. 

A little part of me want to be dead. 

I could do it- Drew gave me a hatchet and a cooking knife. But that's not quite my style. I like keeping myself predictable, because that's how I work. I get up with the sun, go to bed with the moon. 

I'm not quite tired of life, yet.