Erasing Faith(68)

He didn’t.

I wanted to call after him, to beg him to wait. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that this was just wrong, all of it.

But as I opened my mouth, I was overtaken by the most intense pain I’d ever felt.

Harsher than the smoke damage in my lungs.

More painful than a gunshot wound to the stomach.

A pain so great, so intense, my body couldn’t cope. My heart beat so fast, it simply couldn’t sustain itself.

It shattered to fragments inside my chest like shrapnel — cutting me open, flaying me into a bloody mess.

Rivers of blood filled up the hollow space beneath my ribs and poured into my lungs.

I struggled for breath, drowning in the damage inflicted by my own shredded heart, as the dream I’d been living for the past month fizzled and faded into dust.

Wes was gone.

He’d never existed in the first place.

My fingers trembled as they unclasped the horsehair bracelet he’d given me and hurled it across the room. It hit the far wall and fell behind a particleboard table, out of sight. Tears streamed down my face as I tore the dirty rope cord from my ring finger and threw it to the ground beside my hospital bed.

Looking down at my empty hand, I felt my last vestige of hope slip away.

The pain — inside, outside, everywhere. It was too much.

As I let go of the dream that was Wes, as I awoke from the fantasy, I felt myself lose consciousness.

This time, as I faded back into the dark, I prayed I wouldn’t wake up at all.





***

THREE YEARS LATER

***





“And I am done with my graceless heart.

So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart.”



Florence + The Machine





PART TWO

New York City





Chapter Thirty-Seven: WESTON


END OF THE TUNNEL



I hate that phrase.

There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.

Supposedly, you’re in the darkness, and you look up and see it — a faint ring of light in the distance, marking the end of the moonless, lonely night. Drumming in the dawn.

But my tunnel wasn’t just dark. It was an abyss.

A tomb.

After a while, when all my hopes for rescue missions and recovery teams had been abandoned… when I realized that my screams would never, ever be heard through the dense-packed rock blocking my path back to the surface…

I stopped waiting for rescue.

And I embraced the dark.

I learned to like my cave. That bleak, bereft place became a comfort, instead of a burden.

I stopped trying to claw my way back to the surface and wrapped myself in a blanket of shadows.

Then one day, years and years later, when I least expected it, when I least wanted it, when I’d been alone in the dark for so long I’d forgotten what the light looked like… an explosion shook the walls of my cave, blasted open the crypt of my own making.

And I finally saw it. The light at the end of my tunnel.

But she wasn’t the dull glow of a flashlight I’d been expecting. Not the dim luminescence of a solitary streetlight, or the dull flicker of a lantern in the starless sky.

She was a f*cking sun-ray.

A flare. A fire. A detonation.

She was C-4.

She blasted her way into my life, into my heart, and hauled me from my nightmarish void onto the streets of Budapest. I kicked and clawed at her the entire way like the wild thing I’d become in my isolation, unable to readapt to the world of the living or play well with the masses.

She dragged me out anyway.

She blew up my life.

I hated her for it.

But not as much as I loved her.





Chapter Thirty-Eight: FAITH


A CLEAN SLATE



Time heals all wounds.

Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

I used to believe these things. Used to find comfort in the pretty words, the clever phrases. When I was eighteen, I’d walk through the aisles of my favorite superstore, cooing at the utter cuteness of every embroidered pillow and canvas mural with an inspirational life affirmation scrawled across it. In a sad, childish sort of way, it had comforted me to know that for only $19.99, I could be the proud owner of a cheap Target wall-quote sticker, that would adorn the cinderblock of my freshman dorm room and remind me every day to believe.

In fate.

In good.

In love.

As if reading a bullshit Audrey Hepburn happy girls are the prettiest sentiment on a pink duvet cover would somehow make it true.

In case you were wondering — it doesn’t.

And that girl, who loved those pretty phrases?

I don’t believe in her anymore either.

***

The pad of my index finger pressed firmly against the cool metal of the trigger. My eyes were unblinking, my hands steady as the shots rang out, each finding their mark in the thin red circle of the bullseye.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

I stared across twenty feet of open space to the hanging paper target, examining the holes my bullets had made with a remote sense of satisfaction. Three years ago, I couldn’t hold a gun without shooting myself in the foot. Now, I had a license to carry concealed and you’d be hard pressed to find me without my tiny Smith & Wesson pocket pistol shoved into my purse or tucked somewhere else as I walked the streets of New York.