Cara Evelyn

Chapter-14

~Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.~
-Donna Tartt-

Self-destruction. It was an art that I had perceived Cara Evelyn to be perfect in. Over the span of five months that she had spent lurking in the shadows of moonlight painting the alleys filled with numerous mysteries, I had seen her destroy herself silently. Despite of no further suicidal attempts, I had felt her dying in front of my eyes..slowly and gloriously.

I had absorbed the depth of her words and the scars hiding behind the crashing oceans of her blue eyes but what haunted me the most was her everlasting smile. While drowning deep into the waves of insanities and nostalgia, lost in her tears and pains, fighting for her every breath, one thing had always remained the same; the slightly upturned right corner of her rosy lips.

Walking the path of a wilting life with her, I had formed an opinion that somewhere in the middle of that night when she had crossed my paths on a rushing train, she had hit the point where one either changes or self-destructs. Looking at her with each passing day, I had felt as if she had embraced both of them with open arms.

There had been moments when she had radiated this eternal sunshine and played about like a little child whose laughter ringed our ancient library. This Cara Evelyn had given me the illusion that she had changed. Then there had come days that she had spent hidden in the shadows and this had brought further damage to her soul in various ways. This Cara Evelyn had haunted my dreams and reflected self-destruction in its true essence.

However, it was in the middle of a very rainy night when I realised that she had embraced neither change nor self-destruction because 'destruction' itself had intertwined into the sketches of her fate and all she had been trying to do was deny it. Cara Evelyn had been in a severe state of a painful denial and the dreadful moment of epiphany had finally arrived to shake her out of it.

"Please wake up.....please!! AARON TROY! WAKE UP PLEASE!!!!!!!" A strong jolt went through every nook of my body as trembling hands shook me repeatedly. My mind started whirring like a train engine and instantly, I absorbed constant sobs around me. Opening my eyes to the most horrible scenario, I jumped off the mattress hurriedly. There she was, trembling and crying and completely lost. Cara Evelyn had always been a mess but never this much.

"Cara..are you okay? What's happened? Hey...relax." I held on to her shoulders firmly and tried to steady her. In the blink of an eye, she pushed me back with extreme force and I fell on the mattress behind me.

"DON'T YOU DARE RELAX ME, AARON TROY!!" Her swollen eyes flashed furiously at me as she raised a finger to my face. A broken sob escaped her throat and she closed her eyes in agony as her teeth bared and the veins in her neck throbbed violently.

"We are...leaving. Take me...oh my God. Aaron...take me please. Please TAKE ME THERE. I NEED TO GO THERE!!!" Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks as she fell to the ground and snatched the silver mess on her head wildly. I got up quickly and enclosed her scattered frame in my arms.

"Okay okay. We are leaving. Right now. Cara, calm down. Right now, I promise." I nodded repeatedly but she didn't even look at me. She was helplessly lost in a terrible pain and I didn't know what it was. Getting up, I picked up my notepad that was placed under my pillow and tore out a page roughly. My hands shook as I scribbled down following words on it with my pen blindly.

Leaving with Cara. Don't worry. Call me when you wake up.
-Aaron-

I stuck the note under my pillow for Rob and turned around to pick up the broken mess on the ground in my arms. It worried me that she was light as a feather and weighed impossibly less as compared to her age. Stepping out of the library, we were hit with a heavy downpour and I squinted my way hurriedly towards the car that I had brought two weeks ago from my savings in the last two years. Tucking her in the passenger seat, I ran towards my side and entered the enclosure hastily.