ASUNDER (I) : tmr newt

12: I'm Small

12 Ella

It is darker out than usual. It makes the white seem black, so in a way everything becomes clear. In the night, it is so dark that I can see past the haze, and past the smoke man, and here. It's why I could breathe in the lift, and it is why I can breathe here.

They don't want to me to breathe. At least, not when they can't monitor it. Here, I forget all about them, and I don't even know if I wanted to forget. Sure, there are memories to tap out and weed through, but my mind is blank, and my hands have lost my shovel.

The blonde boy with the fake name and the fake smile took back my shovel before we ate dinner. It's easier without the smoke surrounding and suffocating me, but I do not wish to live a life of ignorance. My best interest is in finding out the truth, once and for all.

If not me, no one will. There isn't a person around here who seems to care as much as I do. I need to save them, but my shoes are filled with boulders, and I am very small.

The smoke man may be gone, but I can feel him waiting. As soon as the sun rises, the light will shine through his grey ghost, and he will be staring at me again. I am surrounded by walls, and I have been since I woke up. Not the ones you can see, but the ones you can't. They hold me to the ground, and they hold me to the shovel, and they hold me to this place.

The white is gone, and I can see the stars. Like our fake names, I know they are not real. Stars have power, and fire and burning. These are dull, and ache away at my skull as I stare at them. Maybe I will never know if anything is real. It certainly feels like I am not.

"Hey."

She is calling to me, with her blonde hair and her blue shirt. The other boy has the same shirt, and the same smirk, but he doesn't notice anything past her. Somehow she is real, but everything she sees and feels is fake.

One of us is moving closer to the other one, and I can't tell if it is her or if it is me, but like magnets we circle closer together, until there is no distance nor any time between us. She speaks to me, but the words circle around my ears and bypass my mind altogether.

If the smoke man is not here, it seems I am lost. We cannot exist one without the other, but I am trying to speak even though I can feel my shoes sinking into the ground, and my ears being swallowed up by the tall grass.

"So you liked the Gardens?"

"Yes." The Gardens are nice. The ground is thicker, so it is harder to sink, and there I can dig around looking for answers that I wouldn't find otherwise. Now, however, I can't seem to escape nor seem to push through the earth and find what I am looking for.

Am I looking for myself in this jungle? What is my name?

"Oh Ella."

When I spin around, his voice only echoes. I can't see him in the dark, but he is still there. White doesn't burn to black in the absence of the informed. It simply maintains its dull awful colour, but becomes near impossible to see. In this light, I am blind.

Which makes me more vulnerable.

"Zart is a bit off, isn't he?" The fake boy asks, and the girl hits him playfully.

There is a universe between their eyes. Though it is dark, I can tell that in the light they can see through the smoke and find each other. Because behind it all, though they do not know themselves, they know each other.

Tied together like balloons floating in the wind, by a frail blue ribbon ready to snap at the slightest touch. Though we are all held together flimsily, they choose not to cling on to each other for dear life. They don't know what is going to happen. They don't know we are in life or death circumstances.

I should tell them.

The smoke man doesn't object, but I can feel his breath on my shoulder. If I shrug him off, he will just bring me closer. There is no escaping from such a man, with worse intentions than anyone I have ever met.

"Did you grab dinner?"

Did I grab breakfast?

I don't think I remember the last time I ate something. Water passed by my lips the whole morning in the gardens, but never food.

That is something I should go do. The two are too wrap up in each other to notice that I am slipping away. I manage to sneak out from between the blades of grass, and crawl my way out and over to where the food is.

I take an apple, and bite it. It's warm and hard, and everything good that I imagine should happen when you bite an apple, doesn't. There is no juice, no sweet taste or cold tingle. There is only a hard piece of fruit in my mouth that I chew and swallow. It scrapes down my throat and so does the next bite, and the next, until the apple core is in the compost bin.

The apple is grey and fake too. There is nothing here that is real, not even myself. We are all fake and figments of our own imaginations. Why can't I know my own name? It seems nothing can belong to us. We are just used and taken and stolen again and again, until there is nothing left except bodies that now have no titles. They have made us swim in a sea of John Does.

When I look across the field, I can see the brunette. She is sitting on a log, talking to the one that is their leader. It seems serious, but there I nothing to be serious, because there is nothing.

He is faded but she has colour. Unlike the apple, her shirt is green and bright, and tucked into her dark pants. The blonde's blue shirt was tinted grey by the presence of the washed out boy beside her, but in turn he was tinted blue. The colour is being sucked away and stolen from them by the second.

I do not see the other girl, and I do not know her colour. She seems like the kind to be tinted grey as well. The longer we stay, the more our colour will wash out on to the masses. I wonder if I even have any colour to me.

Hope is something I cannot maintain in a colourless Glade. It seems as though every single fraudulent star is fighting against me and everyone else. Patience is something that I have. If I want to, I can wait and wait and wait for days and months and years to get the truth. Believe me when I say however, it will surface soon.

All it takes is an earthquake to shake the secrets out of the dirt. And I am nothing if not ground-breaking.

~~~~

Ella is so sweet and so pure. She is tiny and mighty. Oh Gosh, I would want my children to be like Ella, you know? Smart and kind and determined.

What do you think is the best quality in a person?

Be strong until Tuesday.