The Mindless Man's Paradise

Chapter sixty-three

  After hours and hours of beauty prep, I was deemed healed and pretty enough to die.

  I felt my hair, soft and straight; someone had taken it between two hot panels. I was worried it would burn, but instead, it turned out flowing and elegant. I couldn’t stop running my fingers through my hair, rubbing my legs, and feeling my nails.

  All were so soft, so feminine.

  I felt back to normal again, aside from the unnaturally straight hair, of course, but nonetheless, it was the first time I had felt clean for a very long time.

  When I saw Cyrus, I gasped. I had almost forgotten how handsome he looked when he was clean. Someone had given him a much-needed haircut, as well as scrubbed him clean of all the dirt, blood, sweat, and tears that had accumulated over the past week or so. His brilliant blue eyes seemed to glow, alight with nothing other than happiness.

  He smiled at me, and even though we were tailed by two burly security men, we ran at one another and embraced, as if we hadn’t seen each other in years. I smelled the clean scent of cologne on him, and smiled, as if we weren’t going to die, or our government wasn’t the biggest screw-up ever. I just hugged him, and he hugged me, as we got high off of each other’s presence.

  One of the security guards, a big blonde-headed one, grunted, wordlessly asking for us to separate. We did so, but only long enough to intertwine our fingers, almost like a pact not to leave one another’s side until we were dead.

  I didn’t want to attend any “preliminary affairs”. I wanted to stay with Cyrus, wrapped in his arms, soaking up his aura.

  If I could choose, I would do that for all eternity. But eternity was not an option anymore.

  But, the more I thought, my doubts began to augment. There was always a way out. There was always a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Where my light was in this tunnel, I did not know.

  But it was somewhere, somehow. Something told me that I wouldn’t be dying anytime soon. I wouldn’t need to plunge a knife into my chest. I wouldn’t face thousands of people as the lights in my eyes went out.

  There was a choice.

  There was always a choice.

  You see, if I had learned anything in my time with Cyrus, it was that fate, or destiny, is only that of which you make it.

  I chose to stay with Cyrus.

  I chose to kiss him.

  I chose to believe him.

  I chose to become an Infractor with him.

  And now, I choose to die with him.

  But something that is more powerful than any of those things combined, perhaps, was the fact that I chose to love him.

  And as the thought crossed my mind, I knew it was true.

  Even though I had grown up my whole life, having the illusion that I loved my parents, and that they loved me, I willed myself to find it wrong. I defied everything I knew, which was set in stone from day one, all of this, because I had met a boy.

  It was as if I had been blind, and Cyrus had given me vision. For, without him, I would never see the world as I see it now. If it weren’t for Cyrus, this boy that I was holding hands with, I never would have realized what love truly was.

  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right about HQ’s devious ways.

  HQ was scared of what true love can drive people to do. The purpose of the Soul Mates was to extract love from people’s lives, therefore, extracting the constant fear of rebellion from HQ’s.

  And only now that I could truly understand the essentiality of love’s vise, did I understand the crime HQ was committing by not giving them the opportunity to have it.

  Not only did they take away that, but they took away the ability to create; the ability to be individual.

  I was still learning, but it takes a while to learn who you are, especially after years of denying yourself. Years of telling yourself that you are disgraceful; that you are not special; that you are filth. And now that I am realizing that some of my skills are valuable, and no, I am not disgraceful, I am finding myself. I am finding my true self.

  I am finding Aspen.