❝ put my guns in the ground.
i can't shoot them anymore.
that cold black cloud is comin' down,
feels like i'm knockin' on heaven's door ❞
― 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧' 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧'𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐨𝐫, 𝐆𝐔𝐍𝐒 𝐍' 𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐄𝐒
supernatu...
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Her life was riddled with endings.
But that was to be expected. Beginnings would lose their luster if endings were extinct, just as diamonds would be vacant of value if they were mixed in among the rocks in streams and in children's backyards.
It was an ironic thought, and not one that begot humor. How could the cards she held in her hands, the ones that had been gifted to her at her very birth, the ones that boasted pictures of death and loss, share the same treasured attribute as a rare jewel? They couldn't.
Bellona was growing to hate metaphors.
She brushed the tear off of the scrap of paper she held, but it was too late. The salt-ridden solvent had already soaked into the wrinkled page, bonded forever as a reminder of the aches it was born from.
She'd been gripping the lined page so tightly that it had a tear in it, as well. In her consuming bitterness, she almost wanted to scoff at the scrap. It was pathetic. It had been torn from Sam's notebook, from the only resting place it had ever known, only to be stained and torn and transformed into nothing more than a product of anguish. Much like her. She'd been torn from Sam too. Only she'd done it herself. She wondered if that made her even more pathetic.
The paper was lying on her desk when she'd arrived shortly after lunch. She could tell it had been hastily ripped from a notebook, due to the tell-tale blue lines across its surface and the row of holes on its side.
Only, it hadn't been alone. It was with Emma.
Bellona felt something in her chest yank against the strings that held her heart there. Emma by Jane Austen. It was the book Bellona had hidden a note in all those months ago, the first time she'd asked Sam on a date, and now here was Sam's note, hidden between those same pages of that same book that now sat in front of her computer keyboard.
Even then, her heart didn't immediately sink. It had taken a moment, a first glimpse at what was written on the folded paper's insides, before the beating of her chest found a new home in the pit of her stomach.
The first line read 'Bell', and the first tear swelled in her left eye. She swiped at it, but she could still feel a slight chill on the crest of her reddened cheek where the tear had left a streak of residual water. Just as she figured she would still feel this aching in her chest for months to come.
She slumped into her chair, and as she stared at the handwritten note, she immediately recognized the jagged lines of the consonants and occasional bulging curves of vowels as belonging to Sam. This was when the tears had started falling faster, staining her cheeks and her paper and the divots of her eyes where they were created.
Bellona didn't want to read it. But her actions had generated this consequence. Each move she made, each word she didn't speak, each phone call she declined - it had all been a sequence she dialed into a simulator. Now, her simulation had come to fruition, and it only felt right that she should read the lines that marked this ending.
