HALF HOPE

PROLOGUE (I)

Your voice was like a white horse on a carpet, made of ashes. There's always half hope. There's always half........ Dustin woke up to the sound of a washed-up shore. It was near evening and you could see the sun dying and filling sunset with meaning. A few rough clouds and howling wind. His back translates a long and reposeful journey. His head chords were heavy. His memories were blurred. He looks tired and hurt.

"Hope.... is that you?" He saw a faint, wistful shadow through his right more swollen eye that he can now open a little more than his left, he started breathing fresh air around and tried to breathe in as much as he could. It felt like he was suffocating all this while. Coughed nearly a minute his lungs out. He looked beat up and a downer. With a gruff husky tenor, he tried to bawl, but his vocals were dread peachy parched. His clothes looked rugged and dry, the sweat chapped nodes in his clothes showed scars and blood, like he was tortured in Vietnamese hell. With his breaths taking up all his leftover energy his body could flu, he tried getting up.

"I don't remember how I got here," Dustin murmured in his nearly self-conscious tone. How did this all happen? Where am I? All these questions aroused in his mind, which now began to surface.

He wore an oversized Burberry jacket and old khaki Carhartt ripstop cargo pants. Old navy glistening Thursday boots that covered his scarred toes. The shirt looked old and lacerated. You could almost see his body tone and crunches beneath and you could see a low fat ripped muscle shifting when he pushed himself to lift over the ground under his now thin jacket. It was now a body capable of enormous leverage and pain. His eyes squeezed as he rose and stood with his back straight. He looked through the corner of his eyes towards the sun that was now turned into red clouds. The redness spread all over his head. I want vengeance. He screamed to almost his high. I am going to kill everyone responsible for this. For making me feel like this. For even the slightest of pain, they have caused me. They'll be begging for their lives but retribution is all. He turned to walk away from the beach. He looked around himself to remember what he could. "Where do I start? He asked himself. I don't even remember myself."

He sat near the bank of the ocean, the waves could now touch his shoes. He tried washing his blotched and scarred face. But the salty water made it even more agonizing. He was a fine-looking husky young man, the scars tried their best to cover his face but you could still see his pointy straight beguiling nose, it wasn't too small and wasn't too obvious either; it fell right between where it shaped all his face into perfection. His jawline was sharp and the slight beard trimmed to showcase it as Eddy Brown for the old age trivia. Two shining aggressive eyes established a choir of arrogance over his face now. The pain made it difficult for his lips to form their shape, reddened skin reflected sorrows. He sat there for about a minute, mustered all his emotions into anger, wrote hope in the sand and got up. He felt weak and woozy. But he had to do it. He has to find people that have done this to him. His inner intuition shook him a bit.
A trail of blood filled the H of hope he wrote in the sand.

He started drifting in the sand towards the end where he could see luminescence. A few lights covered in orange dials. It was dark now. No matter how hard he tried, where he gazed, he couldn't even find one person. Where are all the people? His mind started venting around its memories. But there was no point. That's how people are when you need 'em. He thought to himself tucking his shirt in his cargos.

He walked for almost an hour. Sweaty and tired he rested by a palm tree in the middle of nowhere. He lied down to rest a bit. Even at this hour of the darkness, the tree looked green and artistic. Like he could see the leaves grow, it was a time lapsing moment. The one where you could even see how it grew up to be this big. He focused to see a bright big ball trapped on its top. Wait. This moment shook the inner dust in him. I remember this tree. How can you be nostalgic about something you haven't seen ever. I can, he told himself. This means I know this place. I know this tree. I have known it for all my life. I played rugby with my old man here, right here in the fog, in the rain even when summers shook the poles of light to dim. This is that same rugby ball we bought on a weekend at Nana's. He felt mere happiness and hope at this very moment. It was like now he can find places. Now he remembers part of himself. The ingenious, autistic, and confirming suddenness. What's a place of a man in this world who can't even remember himself. He stood up and looked around to find his house. Out of nowhere and all obscure garble, a house appeared far in the dust. His house, he remembers this elevation. His face turned auspicious and swam through all that redness. He could smell the new paint job from across the street, the terrace where they used to sit during the influenza outbreak, the lawn that rode around the house and the Gummy apt and pungent dark roses that his mum planted his old lighthouse of a tent in the garden. A tear tried losing itself through his left eye. "Finally!" He exclaimed.