Amnesia • Calum Hood

•Chapter Seven•

The sound of my shoes crunching across the dead leaves echoed throughout the dim forest.  Wind whispered through the tall trees, mocking me and tricking me.  The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees, and I found my shoulders shaking as I walked.  The watery sunlight from before was even more muted now, if that was possible.  While I could hear the sound of my footsteps and the rustle of foliage, I wasn't listening.  My ears were ringing with white noise, with static.  My eyes, though trained forwards on the end of the path, saw nothing but a blurred black color.

The dirt path lasted forever.  No matter how long I walked I couldn't reach the end.  This forest stretched on for an eternity, and I spent a lifetime searching for the light.  I thought I'd been walking for years, when in reality it had probably only been a few minutes.

Eventually, my surroundings fell out of my mind like tumbling rocks off of a cliff, and I was immersed in my own world.

All my life I'd taken hardships and struggles quietly.  I complained the regular amount any sane human being does, naturally, but I was never over dramatic.  I never exaggerated anything for attention or effect, I was a straight-forward thinker.  When I broke my arm in year two, I cried just as anyone else would.  But I didn't nurse the wound or milk the sympathy from others when I was healing.  I just shrugged and said it wasn't that big of a deal when my classmates and teachers questioned the bright pink cast.  I was a sincere, uncomplicated person.

So when I say that I was numb, walking down that dirt path, away from all of the baggage and hurt I had just left behind, I mean it.  I had never quite understood the feeling people described, of numbness and cold.  They're just being dramatic, I always told myself silently.  Surely they aren't entirely numb.

I was wrong.

Normally, and especially lately, my heartbeat was something that roared in my ears.  It was always something in the back of my mind, a constant factor that was there, much like breathing or blinking.  But now, not even my pulse could be felt.  I knew there was earth underneath my feet, but I couldn't feel it.  Air was whisking by my body, but it hardly existed inside my brain.

The only thing I could definitively feel was cold.  Cold on my skin, cold in my veins, cold deep within my heart.  The weather was nice, pristine.  But to me, it was like I was submerged in a huge bucket of ice water.  I was shivering and trembling despite the sun.  I was breathing hard and erratically despite the clear skies.  My limbs felt frostbitten and weak, yet they moved automatically to keep me walking.

That was what I felt as I walked.  Numb and cold.

But all of a sudden, like a knife cutting through fabric, splitting it open at the seams, tearing a wide hole through the color, came the hum of an old engine.  The rough sound of tires on dirt outmatched the sound of my footsteps.  The blurred black shape was replaced by that of a station wagon.  An old, familiar station wagon that had just left me behind not half an hour ago.

My brain did not register it was Calum until he had the window rolled down and was speaking directly to me. 

"Joey, what are you doing out here?" 

I couldn't tell if there was concern in his voice or just confusion.  Absently, I slid my gaze to his, meeting his deep brown eyes but not truly seeing them.  I blinked a few times, processed the words he just spoke very slowly, and thought of something to say, anything, in response.

But nothing came.

Calum sighed, hands gripping the steering wheel as his brows furrowed.  "What happened with your dad?  Is he alright?"