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☙❤︎︎❧
—It was an overcast day, the clouds were grey and bright in the sky. The kind of bright that you'd have to squint to see anything. My feet found each wood panel as I walked along the tracks. The winter was bitter and cold, I lost people, and every night I'd see them in my nightmares. It had been so long since I'd even thought about the train tracks. If anything, I did my best to avoid them. After that night, I let go of everything I had ever believed.
Why would a God do that to me? Why would a great creator ever want his children to suffer? God would not love me enough to save me, and if they did exist, they were a cruel, cruel being. My knitted socks kept the frost-bitten cold from my skin. If I had been keeping track, and I had; It had been five-hundred days since my mother was brutally murdered in front of me.
I could feel the weight of my backpack digging the straps into my shoulders. The cold morning air filled my lungs every time I chose to take another breath. Each morning, I would have those beautiful five seconds. Five whole seconds of pure bliss, amnesia, and not recollecting a single thing that weighed down on me like a ton of bricks. But then it would all collapse on me, tumble down, and bring with it that all too familiar feeling of dread.
It was a feeling I had become accustomed to, an emotion I had befriended. For I let it burrow deep into the tissue, the very fiber of my being. After those five seconds, I would think about ending it. Taking my life in the most interesting way. Life was a game now, I had no one and nothing to live for, so why care?
Then, my mother's voice would nag at me, creeping from the recesses of my mind like a thought you can almost remember. "You'll survive this world." She'd say, and I curse her every time for it. She'd say it if she still had the gift of her life in the clutches of her hands. Such a pure thing, a sweet soul that was cast away from its body too soon.
And not by the flesh-eating monsters, but by man—human beings. It brought that sick feeling to my stomach, the one that eats away at you as if it's ready to break down the very atoms holding you together. My mom, Katherine Wincott was always there, like a word about to be spoken, like the breath that you'd release from your lungs.
You could feel her, and I could see her. She was a palpable presence in life, and she was my greatest torment in death. Her love for me didn't last long enough to assure me, every second that I got to keep rotating oxygen through my lungs, that I was someone who had not failed her. Every time I closed my eyes I'd reorchestrated the scene in my mind like it was happening all over again.
I did it so that I'd always remember the greatest sin I'd ever committed. I stayed in that car, I chose to stay quiet while my mom was being beaten to death. I froze and I'd forever pay for that. One way that I would soothe my guilt was by talking to her as if she were standing right next to me. "What were you looking for?" My voice cut through the near silence of the forest. My gaze flitted from the tracks to the wind rustling through the leaves of trees.
