Grieve

Chapter 2

I have two days off work, and I'm not sure if that is a good thing. Instead of trying to clean the disaster I have at home, I watch movies and order delivery for a pizza and some snacks. I laugh until my belly hurts while I watch the movies, but when the credits start to roll, I stare blankly at the screen in front of me. I'm consumed by the silence around me; the voices, all the fake stories end, and I have nothing to hold on to so I can pretend I'm happy for a while.

I don't know if I'm actually capable of feeling something. Maybe I laughed by inertia because right now, without the voices mingling in the air, I believe I am incapable of doing anything like it.

My eyes start to burn, but I don't understand why. I don't want to cry. I'm not sad. I'm not feeling anything. Why do I want to cry? I cover my eyes with my hands, tears flowing freely from my eyes in a delicate way, until it's not at all. Until I start sobbing and screaming silently in my living room. My throat becomes sore from all that contained pain, my eyes hurt, and a headache starts after minutes of letting it all out, or almost everything. If I don't control how much pain I feel at once, I would destroy myself, for even the slight memory of a smile makes my soul ache. The fact that I let myself drop some tears means that now I am unable to stop them. I have to wait until it's enough. But is it ever enough?

I grab my chest and press into it because it hurts. My mouth is open, not letting out a single noise, but taking out the pain in a subtle, broken breath. The tears run down my cheeks till they touch the old carpet where I'm sitting, my back against the couch.

"Stop. Stop. Stop." I manage to whisper through my hoarse throat. It doesn't work.

So the words come to me, one by one. And I want to scream so hard that my ears start bleeding. Maybe I do.

08/16/20

Maybe I should die before he kills me. Maybe I should do it myself, I don't know. I don't have anyone to talk to. He took my phone, and I haven't been able to talk to Aster or mom and dad. He is someone I don't know anymore, and it kills me to know I was fooled. Now I'm locked in a fucking room like a prisoner because I'm supposedly cheating. My face, my arm, my neck hurts. He's too strong, I'm too weak. I can't get out of here. I feel like I'm going crazy. I don't want to die. Please. I don't want to. I want to see my family again. But he doesn't care. And I don't think he'll ever do it again.

Why did I have to read that? Why did I have to find Athena's diary? I don't want to know. I don't want to remember. I shouldn't have read that.

She didn't deserve it. She didn't. I didn't deserve losing her. I want her to come back. I want her to tell me everything will be okay. But it's impossible. And like a lover coming back from far away, Grief hugs me tightly until I feel the need to grab that broken piece of glass a few meters away.

I wake up hours later. I feel empty. My arm hurts, and I think it is bleeding, but I don't care. I get up with the last strength I can gather and head to the bedroom. From the orangish lights in the sky, I realize it's about to darken outside. I take a look out the window, just when I feel a warm tingling sensation in my arm. I look down at it and realize the cuts are healing. Fast and unhumanly-like. I freeze when I spot it.

A little etheral being with delicate, iridiscent wings. It is wearing a long white dress, I believe, made from silk, with an incredible amount of decorative details on it, and it wears so many gold accessories in the nose, ears, and arms that she's completely covered with them. I think it's a she. Or that's my best guess what with the androgynous features in the fairy protector face. When she looks up, eyes black like the night focus on me, and instead of smiling at me as, I would say, a protector has to do, she frowns.

"What have you done?" she says in a low pitched voice that surprises me so much that I scream and slap her away from my arm as I would do a mosquitoe. I run to the other end of the bedroom, I trip with the bed stand and grab a pillow on the way. To protect me or defend myself, whichever is necessary.