Being

3 - Desire

I  just wanted to remind myself and readers that this is a rough draft. Many plot holes and grammatical errors are to be expected haha okay yay third chapter.

Desire (n) - want, longing

Fern had her intentions straight from the start. She didn’t mean for it to get so lost after she exited the simulation. All motivation was lost – she was lost.

The depression came back like a hard smack to the face. In the middle of walking home, Fern was gasping for air, “reality” catching up to her. Tanner had sped home, not speaking a word to Fern. She was just left alone with the night guards marching back and forth in those straight lines and her uneven breathing.

Home arrived, thankfully, because she was extremely tired. Her shoulders slumped as she limped through the door. Warmness welcomed her full force.  Her parents were flipping through a newspaper. Fern’s mom looked up at her and smiled, but Fern just went straight to her room.

Fern knew her mother wouldn’t follow. Her mother understood her pain. It was best to leave her with her thoughts and not interfere. After all, Fern’s mother went through the same depression of the leaving the simulation when it first came out only a few years ago.

Fern was in her room, lying on her bed. She stared up at the ceiling, her hand reaching down to grab her notebook on the floor. She opened the book, with the pen in her hand. As she put the pen to the paper, she couldn’t remember what she was going to write down.

Of course she remembered the party, how could she forget? But the feelings were gone. Fern knew they were pleasant and happy, but those were just labels. It wasn’t the same as experiencing the emotions.

Fern furrowed her brows and threw the notebook to the floor after scribbling a large hole into the paper. It fell onto the empty space on her desk. Fern sat up. Wasn’t there something there before?

The picture, she remembered, and she gave it to Paige. Paige cried for seemingly no reason, and Fern recalled on the incident with a twitch. Why were they laughing at her? Was it some kind of joke inside the simulation that Fern didn’t get?

Fern got up to change into comfortable flannel pajamas, returning to her sheets that welcomed her with open arms. Rest came not as easy as she hoped. Thoughts stirred in her heads of the party and how dull she remembered it to be.

The sky had darkened to a mystical black, and strange creatures of the night could be heard moaning and howling from outside Fern’s window. She was asleep, peacefully, after her endless train of thought derailed and she didn’t realize what she was thinking about anymore. The parched land begged for rain that rarely came, and when it did, it came in short bursts. In a way, Fern’s mind resembled her environment. Dry most of the time, boring and dull. Sometimes, however, a spark of emotion allowed the waterworks to flow down her face, unable to comprehend or know how to react. By now, the land rejected the water that was sporadically given out, letting it pool out into distant green lands far off. Way too far for Fern to see, or travel for that matter.

A few hours pass, as Fern rustles in her bed, dreaming about god knows what. From time to time, a small whimper can escape from her lips, but she quickly turns over as if to silence herself. The sun crawls up the sky, making morning seem to drag on forever. Fern turns over once again, only to be so shaken that she wakes up, once again gasping for air.

She puts her hands to her little heart, feeling it pound against her chest. Her nightmares weren’t worthy of sharing, just run-of-the mill nine-year-old fears. Like death, as it repeated in her mind plenty of times. Death didn’t scare her, but the remains of it did. Fern didn’t like to think about the future that much, only when she knew she had something to get done.