To Keep You

Chapter Fourteen: Lost and Found-

     Have you ever been awake, yet at the same time felt like you needed to wake up? I was sat in my bedroom with Connor, Jaime and Kina. Except it didn't feel like it was really my bedroom, but a cardboard box folded up around me and I was almost convinced that if I reached out and touched the wall on my left, it would drift to the ground much the same as a piece of cardboard would.

    I stared at my surroundings with wide eyes and a tightly closed mouth, jaw tense. I could feel my heart beating in my chest and I could hear it in my ears but it didn't really feel like it was there. My head spun in and out of the conversation that the people around me were having but I couldn't focus long enough to join in.

    If I did talk, would they even hear me? Would it even be a conversation? Were we all made of cardboard, and our words just cut-out cardboard letters drifting through the air, from mouth to ears and ears to mouths? I felt a sting of pain chase its way up through my left arm.

    The room was silent. Dark. I couldn't see. Then I opened my eyes and saw my fist against the wall––the wall that was solid brick and not, in fact, cardboard––and I looked between the three faces that were staring at me with crumpled brows. I felt overwhelmed from their questions, despite no one daring to ask them out loud. They didn't need to. I knew what they were thinking.

    I was fine. I was absolutely fine. "I'm fine," I said as reassurance that my words were indeed weighted with a voice and not simply cardboard cut-out letters of a god damn dream world. "I'm totally fine."

    Kina's expression turned to one of sympathy, "Do you want us to leave? You look a little tired." And I think what she meant to say was, 'Can I leave? This is a little awkward.' 

    "No, I'm fine." I nodded, trying to force a smile that didn't look, well, forced. "I just got a little lost in my head for a moment but I'm fine, I promise." The word tasted bitter on my tongue.

    Please wake up, Rob, I heard in an echo around my head and I wondered where the hell it was coming from and why it sounded a lot like Parker's voice, yet not at the same time. I started chewing on my bottom lip nervously. Suddenly, the thought of them all leaving me alone seemed like a relatively good idea.

    Then Connor picked up the square box that had been sat in the centre of our little circle, where we were all crowded on my single bed. With myself at the pillows, Connor against the wall on my left, Kina directly opposite me and Jaime, well, Jaime couldn't actually fit on the bed so he'd dragged the bean bag over and sat on that instead.

    The little square box was still wrapped up in its Christmas paper, and had remained that way since Connor had first brought it over. It was the gift he'd bought me for Christmas. I didn't want to open it until I next saw him. This was the first time I'd seen him in over two weeks.

    It was January the sixth, and Jaime was bored and insisting that I needed to socialise instead of sitting in bed all day, so he rang up the two friends I had and demanded that they made their way down to our mansion of a house in some form or another.

    I overheard him on the phone to each of them, using the word 'depressed' here and there, which I was certain was the only reason they'd made the trek down here. Like they thought that if they didn't come down and entertain me, I'd empty a bottle of pills down my throat. It made me feel a lot like a chore that needed to be carried out.

    "You know traditionally when you get a present, Rob, you're supposed to look slightly more enthusiastic than that," Jaime said, his words reaching inside my ears and directing my attention back to the conversation.

    "Sorry, I was just–"

    "Lost in your mind again, I know." He smirked, rolling his eyes playfully. He was used to it by now, it had been happening a lot. Drifting in and out of the going-on's around me was becoming more and more frequent.