Finding Eden

25

There's red in my vision. It's splattered against asphalt and metal and flesh.

There's shrieking and the sound of waves flooding the inside of my ear as I watched my greatest nightmare unfold before me. They tell you it's fight or flight. I froze. Because in this god forsaken world, what were the chances that this would happen to me again?

It wasn't me who dialled 911. If it had been, I don't think the responder could have understood the whimpers coming out of my mouth. But I did get to the scene first, knees scraping red against the hot, slicked, ground and I was so incredibly still. There were screams but they weren't coming from me because if I had opened my mouth, my lungs would have fallen out.

There were hot tears streaking down my face, complementing the steam that came off of the pavement and suddenly it was too hot. My skin burned against his—his blood—and I wanted to dig him a way out of this tragedy with my bare fingernails.

And for some reason, this time, I was granted release from the pain because I blacked out. My aunt was driving to the hospital when I came to and speeding down the highway. The look on her face, the look of mine in the rearview mirror, I couldn't shake off of my mind. He's gone, he's gone.

***

I was greeted with Cassie sitting outside in the waiting room. She didn't notice me at first but it wasn't hard—we were one of the only few in the room. But she did, like all things eventually come, and it took her a few seconds to register me but she knew right away that I was why Cade was getting his skin pulled in halves.

"Leave," she hissed and she was spitting teeth and bones at me.

"No. No," I begged. My voice was a pathetic creature born from illness and remorse and my hands were cursed bones sewn together by fault as they found their ways to the sleeves of Cassie's shirt.

"You did this," she snarled. She, in the lighting, resembled her brother so painfully much that I wanted to pull her closer, to wonder how much hurt she carried and if any of it transcended this hospital pain. But her eyes were a different shade, lips slightly smaller, cheeks rounder, and eyebrows darker.

"I did," I said, "I did."

Cassie flinched, in the highest form of offense, and then the only thing in common she had with Cade was her last name as she raised her hand, not a tremble in sight.

My feet faltered and I braced myself to fight, to stand my ground but Cassie, she came forwards and her eyes were caught in flames and they flitted to two figures behind me, his mom and his dad. I don't think they know who I was but I bumped into them on my way out.

It burned my throat to swallow all that I wanted to ask Cassie. They were about his hands.

Are they still able to paint galaxies on his off-white, eggshell ceilings?

Can they still hold a person and mend them whole?

My aunt grabbed me and I whirled on her, almost biting but then this expression, the one she held between her eyes, forced me to stop. I want to go home, I almost cried, but I knew that if I dug myself under the covers of my bed, I would never come out and that this feeling, like all feelings, never ceased. All of them came to my surface, because they were always there, and suddenly, I was the amalgamation of all my miseries. The ones from seven years ago when I was dropping out of school; the ones from five years ago when I didn't want the torture ballet brought; the ones from a year ago when my parents were laid to to rest; the ones from seven weeks ago when I thought I would never dance again.

She took me to the cemetery instead and stayed in the parking lot while I navigated it myself.

"Mom, dad," I said. My face felt like it could crack from the pressure.

The skin on my knees were too thin for me to be kneeling beside their two headstones but I did so anyways because what was it to me at this point? My lungs did spill out, as well as my stomach and my heart. I told these two ghosts everything and by the end of it, my wailing had woken up the spirits that lived in the place.

Guilt consumed me. Heaven knows I didn't need another corpse to tie myself to.

I couldn't feel. It wasn't just this, it was that and that and that and everything coming together to one single point, like the start (the end) of the universe. But if there was one thing my body could take at that point in my life, it was anguish. It was, and had always been, the host of angst and grief.

If this was death, then I was fine with it