Lost at the Start

11.

The next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of my bedroom, and feeling like an enormous failure. And a jerk.

I hadn't meant to leave Jackson like that, or even leave to begin with. Not consciously, anyway. But apparently when you want to disappear, when you want to be anywhere but where you are right then, the subconscious trumps what the conscious wants.

Can't say I'd never had to learn that before.

I felt so hopeless and messed up. I collapsed onto my bed with my face buried in the pillow. And finally, because I knew no one could hear me, like I was in space, I cried.

I sobbed.

I bawled.

I screamed.

Letting it all out, every moment I'd ever swallow disappointment, panic, discomfort. All the times I'd forced myself to calm down, when what I really wanted to do was run as far away as my legs could carry me to someplace I could be only and just wallow in my own private pity party. Every time I'd had to reign in how I really felt, all because the world wouldn't accept me like that.

The dark, empty feeling I'd felt when I'd made up my mind to kill myself opened back up like a black hole in the darkest corner of the universe. That painful numbness spread from my center out. And I knew in that moment, if I hadn't already been dead, I would've done it all over again.

And just like before, I wouldn't regret it.

If anything, twice over, I'd be proud of my choice.

I don't know how long I stayed like that, letting the tears fall and bellowing myself hoarse like a child, a realization that sent me reeling all over again more than once in the middle of my fit.

But after so long, I couldn't cry anymore because I'd run out of tears, my voice was gone, and the exhaustion from trying to keep myself seen while I was with Jackson and the general life-sucking feeling crying gives you settled deep into my bones.

I sat up and fruitlessly batted at my eyes with my hands and forearms in a lame attempt to dry up the water works.

That's when I realized: The letter.

Blinking furiously, I got up and started feverishly searching around the pillow I'd snotted all over and the head of the bed, but I didn't find anything.

The letter was gone, which could only mean someone had found it.

Well, I guess it also could've meant the letter had learned selective corporeality or just literally disappeared into thin air, but I was very doubtful in the abilities in inanimate paper, a little ink, and a spot of wax.

I mean, at this point, considering I had come back from the dead as a ghost and discovered I hadn't saved myself any trouble at all, there was very little I wasn't willing to believe in terms of the strange and unusual, but still. A letter that had been perfectly normal and unassuming only hours earlier? Really? We're going to say that's magic now?

That thought in mind, I passed through the door to my room and into the kitchen, noting the room was sparse, save for what I could only assume was going to be dinner once everyone was home and accounted for sitting on the stove in not-cooking dishes.

I carefully wandered down the short hall to the closed door of Riley's room, which certainly hadn't been an uncommon sight before I died. Even so, looking at it now, it felt odd and out of place. Wrong, somehow.

For the first time all day, I stepped through the door without hesitation.

If Riley had found the letter, I needed to know. I'd planted it, after all. And with the intention of seeing her reaction to it. What good would my effort be if I didn't try?