Fever Dream Red

20

We sat down together and ate, exchanging sotries of our orphanage and the life we had led before our paths had crossed again.

That's how it started.

Me and Fae became fast friends mainly because we were both slightly mad. Fae never let on to me the facade she was wearing until much later. She opened up into a colourful and extravagent treasure chest. I had simply never before been concerned with opening it.

We used to go down to the beach and talk for hours on end about anything amd everything. We had never talked properly before, so we could have conversations for years before we ran out of things to talk about.

We were two scared young girls facing the world mainly on our own. We were terrified of everything. We were terrified of losing the little things we had. We all were, in the end.

Fae only had her baby and Connor. Her baby was obviously no help to her.

Aggie adopted them, but she had remained on the island years. All the kids at the orphanage had known her all their life. She adopted Lily and Fae when everything kicked off and the island rebeled against the people.

Aggie was nice enough, she just didn't take the greatest care of Fae. Fae came second to Lily.

Lily was Aggie's child through and through, even if she was a little odd. Lily never spoke much to me at all, and when she did it seemed to be to win some sort of war with Matt. She was always there, but she slinked in the background, rarely adding in to the conversation. You forgot she was there half the time. I didn't know what was so special about her.

Fae was the only one I thought got me, and understood me as a human. It was like she could see inside my mind in a way, although I was young and didn't know the true horrors of the world.

Sunny was nice, but being around her for too long made my heart ache in longing knowingness, so I much preferred to settle with Fae instead. At least she didn't make my heart race.

With Sunny I was constantly worrying about what I said and what it came across as. There was none of that with Fae.

Fae had an active imagination to say the least. She was stuck in it an awful lot, always muttering to herself when no one was around. I caught her doing it sometimes.

One time I walked down to the beach early in the morning only to find Fae already there pacing on the mellow sand, talking to her baby. She said that it couldn't sleep.

I made sure never to say anything bad about Lily in front of Fae. I didn't want to annoy her or make her angry or sad. She thought the world of Lily. I heard all about her from Fae. I couldn't help getting the sense that Aggie only really cared for Fae when it affected Lily.

It was little things, like when Fae joked that perhaps she would never have been adopted if Lily hadn't refused to go without her. She said it at the table on the first  day, between mouthfuls of salad, when we were talking about where we went after the break, as we called it. It was meant as a joke, Fae smiling nicely about it. I thought it was in bad humour.

I felt a pang of sympathy for Fae then, like a stab wound on TV that you can't help but not watch. I couldn't imagine living with people who only adopted you because you were part of a bigger deal. I wondered if that's what happened with me. Maybe I was just part of the package. Maybe Addy never really loved me, I wondered.

I shook my head of it desperately. Addy loved me dearly, and I knew that. Being away from her for so long had angled my perspective differently. That was no way to remember her.

That itself then brought on a painful rainfall of sadness. Addy was gone and I would never see her again in my life. That's what death really meant. It was the longest roadtrip of which there would be no return. Either that, or the longest long distance relationship in existance.

Flashes of memory appeared to me then for weeks afterward. I forgot about losing her in the shock of movement. I was awful really - how could I so readily forget about the woman who saved me?

In the bottom of my bag I still had the coffee cup she used every single day, stored precariously. I took it out one day and traced the lipstick stains that she had welded onto the china with delicacy, afraid to wipe the salte clean of her forever. I could still smell the strong stench of the black coffee she drank, like the ghost of a past woman.

In summary, I felt terrible, and guilty overall. I felt guilty about the fact that I was living and Addy was hopefully dead in a ditch somewhere. I felt guilty about the fact I had put my grief on hold on the forever line, and had forgotten to pick the phone up again.

I felt melancholic at best about the fact I would never see her again. Her smile and laugh would become stuck in my mind until they faded and I couldn't remember them, her face fading like candle wax. That couldn't happen. I couldn't let that happen.

The worst of the sadness would come to me at night when The Base had fallen quiet and the darkness made its home in me. It tore my heart out and plunged a dagger in it, turning my soul upside down along with it. The faces of those who had known me haunted me at my bedside, ghosting me with sadness surrounding death, not fear.

Sometimes I wish I had a firm and fierce belief in what would happen in my death. At least then I would have less fear about what would happen when I walked into it.

I wondered how much faith nuns and that really had to have, to invest their whole lives into something that wasn't universally known to be the truth. I wish someone had that sort of faith in me.