Beating hearts

Chapter 18

Ara sat in an old wooden chair by the window, she watches as snow falls to the naked ground, slowly being covered with snowflakes.
She grips the ceramic cup in her hands and feels it's warmth.
She focuses on the outdoor surroundings of nature. She didn't want to think, thinking led to remembering and she didn't want to remember.

She didn't want to slip back into the comforting hole of her mind. She refused to fade away. She had to remember that memories aren't always reliable, or safe to lean on, especially when they are shadowed by pain.

But today was also a time to remember all the good times you shared with the person you are grieving for, to think back on the past when they were alive, to imagine that smile they had on their face, to hear them laugh, to remember the feeling they gave you when they were around.
That wasn't the case with Ara. Lilly is gone, she thought of her lying there on the street, bloody and lifeless. Murdered, just a couple stores down from her.
She didn't try to picture her as the smiling and happy girl she once was. Because she wasn't that girl anymore, she was a rotting corpse in a casket. She couldn't let herself think of her as anything more, she couldn't think of her as her sister, or she would completely crumble.

She took the last sip of her coffee and got up from her chair by the window.

She walks into the kitchen where Zac stands talking on the phone. He's voice calm and comforting. He hangs up and turns to Ara.

"Everything's prepared. Morgan is going to meet us." he says.

Ara crosses her arms and sucks in her bottom lip. "We should get going then."

As they walked out of the front door the wind plays with Ara's black long-sleeved dress and nips at her legs through her mesh black tights. She puts her head down blocking the little flutters of snow from flying in her eyes and grips her jacket closing it tighter in the front as she walks to Zacs old rusty truck and climbs inside.

The whole ride there was reticent, neither one of them so much as cleared their throat, it was completely and dreadfully silent.

The cemetery was even more quiet, there was no sound of bugs, no birds calling in the distance, even the wind that blew, made no sound. Friends of the family stood, one by one and side by side. They all starred at a deep empty whole. An empty whole that is to be filled with a coffin, and a coffin that holds a lifeless 16-year-old girl. Water gathered behind here closed eye lids as she breathed calmly, 6ft felt like an eternity away.
Ara examined the death box, the color and the design. She had a strange thought,

'What if Lilly wouldn't like it, what if she preferred something different.'

She quickly shook that thought out of her head. It didn't matter.

It's not Lilly in that coffin. After all, the body we are borrowing right now doesn't last forever, we are slowly rotting away, wrinkling down to a pile of bones. We are not our bodies; we just use this form of skin and bones to contain the bright and powerful soul that we are.

A body in a casket that is all it was, Lilly wasn't in there anymore, she left her skeleton home and went to a new one. It helps her cope with the situation, it helps her not to think of her sister as dead, even if she really was.

Before the ceremony started friends of the family and long-lost relatives that she barley new, kept touching her, and patting her on the back, saying how sorry they are for her loss. She didn't want anyone to touch her or talk to her, she didn't care that they were sorry. She wanted everyone to just leave her alone, but then she felt a comforting hand touch the middle of her back and felt warmth to the side of her face, her body relaxed, and she let out a breath, Zacs forehead rested on the side of hers.