To Share You (manxman)

Chapter 45

***SLIGHT TRIGGER WARNING***

The steady rhythm that is keeping me alive and lets me hold on to what little sanity I have left is all I can hear. It's slow, comes and goes like the tide, never quite enough to engulf me completely, but enough to make me wait until it does. My mind is hazy, barely grasping onto what is now my new reality, simultaneously shackling my thoughts, keeping them from making me want to destroy everything. Time seems to not move at all and too fast all in one and my mind keeps fluctuating between which one is worse - to never move forward, or for time to keep moving without being able to change. Every breath I take feels heavy, as if I was underwater and I physically feel the air move through my body, too thick and heavy and too painful. And it feels like it happens all over again, in a constant, unending cycle and, at same time, like it never stopped being the first breath. Sometimes, I want to claw my lungs out to make it stop, but my arms are heavy like lead and won't move and even if they could, there is no strength in me to make them. They stay where they are, wrapped around the only piece of life I still have. Both my body and mind have given up and were it not for what lies in my arms, it wouldn't matter either. My eyes are closed as I listen to the rhythm ebbing and flowing, tying me to what I must protect, the singular rhythm, all I have left.

My arms tighten marginally, but he doesn't react. He hasn't, since then. He's in my arms, where he should be safe and my lifeline is his lone heartbeat. I don't even hear my own anymore, it doesn't matter, it simply follows his with blind trust, never changing pace unless his does. But that never happens, it always stays the same, the same rhythm, the same pattern, almost as if to reassure me.

When I tighten my arms just slightly more, my hand accidentally touches one of the numerous welts and immediately I see that woman behind my closed eyelids. Her arm as she swings it back and forth to the music of her own manic laughter, not fazed by the deadly impact of each of her swings and I feel the shock settling in the pit of my stomach as it did then, so sudden and so heavy that it took me too long to move. And I see blotches of other people and wolves move around me as my eyes finally lock on and my legs finally run. But even then, even when my mind finally catches up and even when my body finally moves, even then it feels like I'm treading through mud, like something is physically pulling me back, away from him, like long, spindly fingers slowly tightening around my body, refusing to let me go to where I need to be. And I can't remember whether this is true, whether it felt like that then, but it feels like it now. Maybe I'm imagining this, maybe, in reality, it only took me seconds to be there, but even if that is the case, I was still too slow. The only difference now is that the longer I take to get there, the longer this invisible force can hold me back, the more I have to see his eyes as he waits for me. But even while I look at him, unable to move my head or eyes away, too fixated on what I wasn't able to stop, there's nothing recognisable in his eyes. Maybe there's despair, pain, fear, longing, maybe he's angry, I don't know and I didn't then. His eyes look empty and maybe they are and maybe that's why the fear in me grows worse with every painful breath I take until I get to him.

I thought getting to him was the only thing that mattered. Once with him, things would be alright again, would work out because they always do. But I was a fool, I still am, because this tiny glimmer of hope tells to me to believe that should he stir in my arms, somehow, there will be a way. However, his body is motionless, hasn't moved since his eyes closed in anguish just before I got to him.

This place I'm in now is surely dangerous. I know it, it's somewhere between helplessness, anger and pain. And maybe this place is called fear, too. I don't know what I am capable of in this state, in this place that I seem to know, but don't, at the same time. What keeps me grounded is his lone heartbeat, bringing me back with every audible contraction of his heart, letting me drift in between, but bringing me back every time I'm ready to just jump off. At this point, I'm convinced that should his heart skip just one beat, delay a beat, or stop altogether, there is no hope for me. I wouldn't know where I would go, where I would end up, but I know I would lose myself completely. Now, there is nothing else, there is only him, his fragile, steady heartbeat that leads my own.