Listen Before You Speak

Chapter 25

I could feel the air getting colder with every step that I took. Every breath became more difficult, became heavy up to the point where I had to mentally tell myself to stop dead in my tracks and take a deep breath before continuing my journey to the end of the endless hallway.

"It's just a dream," I kept on repeating to myself under shallow breath.

But it did not feel like a dream anymore. When you could smell the hospital so clearly that you could taste it in your mouth, the idea of it all being just another dream started to evaporate from your body. Everything started to set into reality. The white walls leaving too much space around you so that demons could clearly see you walking by, ready to grab you and make your worst nightmares come true.

"You okay kiddo?" Mr. van Leer asked, although his words sounded hollow and far away, as if he was talking to me from another dimension.

How would anything ever be okay again? I wanted to ask him, but in response I just nodded my head. What more was there to do? Was I to tell him that I was realizing that none of this was a dream? That I was on the point of breaking down and slamming my head to the ground until it opened up and swallowed me into a depth where I could no longer see or hear or feel. Where there would be eternal darkness to surround me and keep me safe from the lingering fear I was walking into at that very second.

Still the hallway seemed long and short all at the same time. Every single step I took went on forever, making sure that I could play off ten different scenarios of what might happen next. And every step went by just too fast, bringing me closer to a room where a bad dream might just shatter and turn into a reality that would be worse than any Stephen King thriller could ever hope to be.

"Elijah..."

I looked up into the face of my teacher, and allowed him to wipe away the tears streaming down my eyes, even though I had not to that point noticed them at all. I could see the pity in his eyes. The question of what he could do to make it all go away. But nothing could make this pain go away... Unless... Unless he switched places with Blake and died in his place. But that was more than I could ask from anybody at this point.

Here I was again... Standing alone. Broken in pieces, and the one person who could have glued me even just a little was broken even more than what I was. More than what most people could even imagine to be broken.

"We should go in..." Mr. van Leer said, his voice trembling with emotion as if he wasn't far from crying either.

"You don't have a right to cry," I wanted to tell him. "He was just your student. Just another kid you used to teach. But he was the love of my life. He IS the love of my life! He is the only one that can make me feel whole again. That can make me believe that I still have a chance in life. That allowed the sun to shine through me every moment that he was with me. You do not have any right to cry, because you have no idea what real loss is just yet."

And no matter how cruel I knew these words that was floating through my mind was, I could not help but think it, for it was nowhere near as cruel as the joke that life was playing on me. Was playing on me from one year in and the next year out for years and years of my life.

In one night I have lost everything that ever meant anything to me. I lost my mom and my dad, not that I cared that much for him, but he was still my dad... I lost the only home that I had ever knew, for I already knew that I would never be able to put my feet in that house ever again. I could still see my backpack laying there in the blood. Blood that I was probably expected to go and clean sometime. A place where I would still have to go and get all my things, but I knew that I would rather walk naked before setting my feet in that house again. I had lost Lucy, running out on her wanting to give me the best. Betraying her friendship and trusting a stranger before I trusted what she knew. And most of all... I was losing Blake... I was losing the one person who truly meant the world to me. I could feel him slipping from my fingers, as if his presence was growing fainter and fainter by the minute.