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[0.3] C H A P T E R T H R E E
Wind rushes through my hair, and the moment between the jump and the fall, the brief pocket of time where everything is suspended in slow motion somehow makes me feel flushed with life. Alive. I revel in the feeling. The sunlight is not enough to warm me through, but as it strobes down from the parted clouds and hits my skin, I refract into thousands of diamond like reflections that dazzle amidst the darkening foliage. For the most fleeting of seconds I push aside the true meaning of my glimmering skinㅡthat I'm anything but alive and everything comparable to that of a statue sentenced to eternity in this stone hard cageㅡand allow myself to find some beauty in the way my surface gleams under the light of the sky.
My shoes meet the earth in a much more graceful fashion than I had intended, and without so much as a second thought I dart into the woods, the glistening of my derma subsiding as I disappear into the protection of the canopies above. I don't look back.
But I would come back later. I always do, after I've had time to think, despite the troublesome voice in my head that tells me I should keep running and never return. She always whispers the same things.
You could do it, you know. Urges my conscious. You could go right now. Start again.
But I never go anywhere, and I always end up right back where I left off. My family's used to it by now, me disappearing for hours at a time. Then reappearing as if I'd never even left.
"It's kinda your schtick." Uriel had said to me months ago.
I just hope the Cullens don't think I'm rude.
I'll try tomorrow. Make an effort, as Joesph would call it. No more nodding and quiet smiling from the back of the room. Though the thought of me going out of my way to make conversation with strangers is laughable, the Cullens seem nice, sweet even. So unlike everything our kind stands for.
And if I'm going to be here for a whileㅡNo more or less than foreverㅡI might as well attempt to, I don't know, bond?
But I decide to cross that bridge when I come to it. For now it's just me and the trees and the haze of the setting sun.
I don't have to be anyone here. I don't have to try, or pretend, or convince, or smile. Here I don't owe anyone anything. The never ending stretch of trees provides the closest thing to privacy. I'm too far for Annie to hear my thoughts, too submerged in the greenery for anyone to stumble upon me by chance. It was the perfect escape. I'd always loved the forest.
The cicadas start singing as the sun sinks lower into the horizon, orange hues trailed by an inky wave of ebony and indigo. Soon enough the woods are blotted by shadows, but I can still see everything in distinct clarity as if it were the middle of the afternoon.
