Please read the note at the end. It is vitally important.
Oh and comment cos this is the last chapter and I want to know what you think.
19
I walked into my apartment not even bothering to switch on any lights. It was dark but not pitch-black and from the living room window I could see dawn just breaking out on the horizon. Alex's sullen steps echoed mine as I walked to my room striping of the sweat soaked blood splattered clothes that clung to my body like a drowning man to his life saver. I collapsed on to my bed in just my underwear. Too tired to change and too tired to slip in between the covers. I felt the mattress stir as Alex collapsed on the other side. We lay next to each other in complete silence. Neither of us sleeping. Our hands moved closer to each other slowly until we were holding hands. We stared at the ceiling and watched as the room slowly grew lighter and the shadows shifted. Maybe we drifted off or zoned out but we didn't speak. What could we say? What conversation could we hold?
The events of the last twenty four hours kept playing itself over in my head like a silent movie until just at the end there would be a whimper. Just a whimper and then it would start all over again. No questions or sarcastic comments thrown in to break the monotony. Just silence. In my head and in my room.
Sometime after it had gotten dark again my bed creaked and Alex left. A small piece of my brain registered this fact and envied his ability to leave me. If only I could abandon myself for just one second. I knew though that he had his own demons chasing him. Any small sense of normalcy we had ever dared to feel was lost forever.
I walked to the bathroom and back every now and again. The phone rang, the answering machine got it, and someone left a message about something that concerned nothing.
I tried to eat but threw it all up minutes later. Every now and then my body would be racked with convulsions as I dry heaved. I had no idea how much time had passed since I had returned to my apartment. Time had become a grey concept to me. Life had become a grey concept to me. There was really only so much a person could see in the world before they shut down. I, apparently, had seen my limit.
I forced myself to take a shower, some part of my brain still striving for normalcy. I turned on the faucet and stripped out of whatever it was I was wearing. I stepped into the cool water letting it cascade down my body raising goose bumps. It was cold enough to numb my body just a little but not cold enough to make me hypothermic. I stood under the water not moving letting the water sooth the pain of the bruises and cuts.
Catatonically, I watched the rust coloured water spiral down the drain until it ran clear. I wrapped myself in a towel and pulled my wet hair into a messy bun. Rivulets ran down the back of my neck, some curving with the contours of my body and running over my collar bones, others running down, tickling the small of my back.
I stared at myself in the mirror avoiding my eyes. Shallow cuts marred my arms, shoulders and face, a large bruise blossomed on my cheek bone, another bellow my ear. My nose no longer resembled a ski slope but rather a rock fall, swollen, bump and purple. My lower lip was split right in the middle and a scab had already formed nicely. I probably needed to go to a doctor for a few stitches over the deeper cuts that had been roughly bandaged.
I suppose it was shock that had prevented me from feeling everything to their full extent. But the more reality sunk in the more I felt the pain and the exhaustion.
I was exhausted. A soul deep exhausted. It went beyond my anything I had ever felt before and I knew no amount of sleep of caffeine would lessen it.
All I could think of was how I had been wrong about Kale and I had killed him. His face was plastered to the back of my eyelids, a running reel of him played in my head and all I could think of was that I was a murderer. I couldn't quite comprehend it though; it was too surreal, too abstract to be true. Yet it was.
