Celeste's childhood wasn't something she loved talking about. It was filled with nothing but painful memories. Whether they were the ones from when her father, along with her brothers, left, or the ones from her mother's death and her stepfather's a...
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TIME FELT agonizingly slow as it passed by.
The continuous ticking of the clock was loud. Deafening, even. It muffled along with the beeping noises emitted by the heart monitor and filled my ears, both sounds acting like a single barrier and both temporarily holding my exhausted mind from drifting back to the images it had once buried away. To the memories that were so powerful and ruthless that they forced the barrier to grow higher and higher, the sounds surrounding me seemingly increasing in volume along with it.
The clock's hands moved around, over and over again. They rotated in circles as the seconds and minutes passed by and they never stopped, not even when I thought they did. They continued to move at their normal speed right before my gaze and I still succeeded to believe that they had become so much slower. That every second had turned into a minute and every minute had turned into an hour.
That time had crushed its components into an endless infinity and collapsed at once when turning so heavy, scattered all over the place, and swirled through the air. Crept into my lungs as I inhaled and settled on top of them. Engulfed them as a whole and squeezed them so tightly even as I exhaled.
Burning tears tainted my vision and stained every corner of my plain surroundings. They danced freely across the edges of my eyes and bounced against my freckled cheeks as they gradually trickled over them. Some dried off at the edges of my lips, refusing to fall any further, while others won the race they had held among themselves and fell onto the pillow beneath my head. Got absorbed by its warmth and eventually dried off. Vanished as though they had never existed, to begin with.
All of them, however, flickered along with the clock my gaze had locked with. My sore eyelids fluttered as a result of my continuous blinking. My eyes got burned with more tears when their only attempt had been to get rid of the images they couldn't disregard, no matter what. The ones that so mercilessly stung my heart, belonging to either my mother or Enzo; the people I needed the most at the moment. The family I could neither find in reality, nor within my dreams.
A shaky sigh passed through my lips as my head sank further into the pillow it had been resting on. The noises that had engulfed the entire room seemed to dim into nothing. They got muffled along with my breaths or perhaps my heartbeats. Time turned steady again, neither moving too fast, nor too slow. Normal. Seconds only lasted for their destined periods and so did minutes. Infinity no longer existed.
The thin blanket wrapped around my arms was entirely useless, showing no effort to shield any organ of mine from the cold air swirling around. My hands shivered slightly beneath its surface, and the blood running through my veins and my arteries seemed to freeze. To numb my entire body, along with my heart, as though only attempting to shield me from registering more pain I wasn't capable of handling—to shield me from the flames leaping across my skin and the ones my heart had fallen into.
"Shit."
My neck craned toward the door where I had heard Enzo's voice originate from. A white blanket was held tightly to his chest and his eyes were scanning over the floor, wandering from a corner to the other until they landed upon his phone. He sighed, a faint groan escaping his lips once he bent to grab his phone and a frown that reflected his pain embracing his face as he straightened up, letting his irises shift towards me.
