Adrian (The Write Awards 2013)

11: Desperation

And now it's all a blur, like the paint on the canvas hasn't dried just yet, and the colors mix together incomprehensibly.

It has stopped raining, but the Burningwater is now up to my waist and I feel a type of numbness in my legs. Adrian is still holding me, which may be the only thing that is keeping me alive. Silence envelops us, a sign that Darren and Jax must be gone. But I have Adrian. And I don't care if he is a figment of my worst enemy's imagination, because right now I need something familiar, something to hold on to.

"Cleo," Adrian says. His voice is fragile; I can tell he's afraid of saying the wrong words. "I'm sorry, but do you know where we are?"

I feel like somebody's dropped the universe on top of me (which they have, but that's besides the point). My shoulders sag, my face falls even further, and my heart feels exhausted. Now it's my turn to find the right words to say, to so delicately form sentences in a way that my friend can comprehend without question. I can't do this, but I have to. It's has to be one of the worst feelings in the universe.

I'm learning about a lot of worst-feelings lately.

"It's complicated?" I only nod in response, and he just hugs me tighter.

I try to drain the water.

One.

Two.

Three.

Of course it doesn't work. Why do I even try anymore? I think I'm just desperately trying to find a purpose by pretending that I have one. I pull away from Adrian, and we cause ripples in the Burningwater. I let my finger touch the surface of the lake that surrounds us, but it burns my skin so I quickly pull away.

Adrian is looking at me. His head is cocked to the side like a lost puppy's. I scan his face over and over again, soaking in the remembrance and hoping that I'll never forget it. But now, ever so subtly, I'm starting to remember lots of things. All the memories are absent, empty, but they are there.

It's like looking at a fair after it's closed. Some neon lights still blink on and off in the distance, completely out of place. But it's all familiar. The wind sweeps up trash that was left on the ground by those who were inconsiderate. The rides stopped moving, the lights on the ferris wheel stopped shining. But it's all still there even if it's gone, and there's some consolation in that.

The day at the playground would be the blinking neon lights in the distance, the most prominent of the memories. I couldn't see the perfect universe, Adrian had said, so I couldn't know what it was. A tear runs down my face, so Adrian instinctively reaches out his hand to brush it away, as he always does-or did. I catch his hand just before it can touch my face. It's still there, whole and real. I let it go and he proceeds to wipe away the tear.

I wish this never happened. I want everything to end. If I could cease to exist without Jax winning, I would. But there is no way to make that happen, and I can't let him win. He's broken me down, created my past, and then taken it away. So how could I let him get away with that? He's manipulated Darren, he's messing with Adrian, and he's going to destroy everything in his path. I can't let him keep doing this anymore.

But wouldn't it be so much easier to just give in? To just let him win? To just rid myself of everything and never have to deal with it anymore? I don't feel like I have anything to lose anyway. Unless you count Adrian, who I'm so conflicted about. It's so easy to just let him comfort me, to just let go, but he may just be taken away from me again in the end.

So I let myself sink. I drown and I don't let myself come back up for air before the world goes dark.