To Love the Rain

Chapter Eighteen

Gray.

It surrounded me.

Trapped me.

Held me against my will.

It was the only thing I knew.

The world held no color, no traces of blue, red, orange, or green.

There was only gray.

I had crawled home, shaking from the storm that drenched into my bones and cut through my skin. My mom found me, half-dead, passed out in the living room, dripping blood, tears and rain into the carpet. It probably wasn't pretty, but I couldn't bring myself to care. I'm pretty sure I contracted a pretty bad case of hypothermia, but I couldn't bring myself to care. I scared my mom half to death, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

I didn't care about anything.

School was meaningless.

I mean, if I'm gonna die in two months, why bother with grades?

Why waste my time on meaningless subjects that bored me to no end?

So, I just ditched.

For a whole month, I didn't go to school, and I didn't care.

Religion was meaningless.

It was pretty sad- I mean, I had spent countless nights praying to a god that doesn't exist.

He doesn't exist, plain and simple.

If he did, why would he give me life and then take it away with some bullshit lung disease. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

What was it that Alex had once said?

For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Thinking back on it, that literally made no sense.

How could he give me a future if he was gonna kill me off?

Why would he make life as hard and complicated as it is if all he wanted from us was glorification and faith?

I did everything a Christian is supposed to do; I prayed, and I glorified him. I worshiped him, and I even cleaned his house for him. But in the end, it doesn't matter.

Because god isn't real.

So, I stopped believing.

Simple as that.

Everything was meaningless.

From the chores I stopped doing, to the food I stopped eating, to the tears I stopped crying; nothing mattered.

My mom had started crying, pleading on her knees for me to eat something. She clasped her hands together, faced crumpled into a broken, sobbing mess, and begged for me to eat.

"Meric, Baby. Please!"

But I didn't.

I couldn't.

I had lost my appetite.

My face had grown gaunt, and my framed thinned until I looked like a mere sack of bones. I should've been alarmed by the ghost staring back at me every time I looked into the mirror, but I wasn't. I should've been pained by the hunger gnawing at the paper-thin walls of my stomach, but I wasn't.