Dear Delilah West

Chapter One

Almost six months had passed since I found Delilah’s note on the cliffs. My mother noticed that something was up, and sent me to many psychologists who all asked me to tell them the truth.

“What’s wrong sweetheart?” they would all say. “You can tell us. What happened to your girlfriend?”

“She’s dead,” I would reply flatly, looking them straight in the eye. “She’s dead, and she’s never coming back.”

I went back to school after they all said I was just grieving. In a state of shock. But they had it wrong. I was scared.

But it faded a little, over time.

Everything was normal…or as normal as it could be without Delilah there. We were so close. So close that sometimes I felt that we were one person. Two souls, together as one.

We used to tell each other everything, or so I had thought. Apparently she had been keeping something massive from me, something that scared her enough that she would commit suicide. But she had asked me on the note not to think about it because it is too dangerous.

But of course I can’t help it. I’ve wondered if she was a runaway, or part of a gang, or an orphan. I’ve even thought that she may have done drugs, but that thought exited my head as quickly as it had entered. Delilah? On drugs? That's crazy.

I had dreams, too. Nightmares, one may call them. Dreams where I would watch Delilah throw herself off of the cliff, over and over again, and me, standing by frozen, powerless to stop her. Dreams where I would be inches from the discovering the truth, but it would slip through my fingers. Dreams where I would discover the truth and it was something terrible. Horrible.

My mother didn’t help.

“Sam,” she would say. “I know that you are upset because of the tragedy. But there are other girls out there. I know you thought that what you had with Delilah was love, but maybe it wasn’t. You are a handsome, sixteen year old boy. Try and forget her. Give the other girls a chance.”

And I would scream and yell and throw things at her. Because I knew she was wrong. No other girl could ever make an impression on me. What I had with Delilah was more than love, we were soulmates. Meant to be. Two souls destined to be together, forever and always. Almost supernatural…

Most of the kids wouldn’t talk to me; they thought that I had gone crazy. Every so often I would get a sympathetic glance shot my way, but most of them were smart enough to know that I didn’t want their sympathy. So they stayed away.

There were a couple of girls in the beginning, though. The ones with tiny skirts and even tinier brains. With blonde hair and long lashes. The shy ones, who would sidle up and sit next to me in the cafeteria. The sporty ones, ones with bouncy red curls and ones with soft black hair like silk and ones who had absolutely nothing attractive about them at all. But I rejected them all. My heart was for no one but Delilah.

With my other half dead, I began to slip into a depression. A deep, crushing darkness that penetrated my mind and forced me to doubt everything I had ever known. Even my memories of Delilah began to distort, making them dark and cold and lonely and terrifying.

I didn’t realise what was happening until it was almost too late.

I was sitting down, with my back leaning against my unmade bed with a knife to my wrists ready to re-open last week’s slashes. These scars were marks of my unhappiness, the torture inside of me. I was just about to make the first slice when a memory suddenly came to me. No, not a memory. It was a scene that I had never seen before. But it surged into my mind, filling the space, forcing me to watch as it unfolded.