ALONE | where our hearts sink into the earth.
― I don't want to be alone anymore.
The world had not been kind to us, the boy and the girl, and the souls within.
Made to suffer, minds that were created for this world, they do not sink; they swim.
but...
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TESS
The world taught me to grow uncertain of most things, to expect nothing out of the air I breathed. I would never know just how many years I would live to see or what I would do with the time I was given. There would never be an answer to the infection, what caused it, and if it would truly be around for centuries to come. If a cure were to come, if there was anyone left to create one, I knew very well it would not come to life within my lifetime.
To know if there was a single part of the earth left untouched from the chaos, to wonder how many people still walked the line, alive with the dead by their sides. All of it was unanswered, uncertain masses in my mind, things that would take years upon years to solve. Some thoughts kept me up into the hard parts of the night, other pieces drifted past me without care. There seemed to be one thing certain on my mind, one thing I trusted; I didn't need Carl Grimes or his help.
He was a boy made up of hypocrisy. There was a leash at my wrists, one wrapped tightly that had the ability to keep me within the walls, away from beyond the fences; Carl seemed to have trouble letting go. A boy who spoke ill against leaving the prison for others, but had acted on the same motion weeks before. Out of that trip, I seemed to be the only thing to come out of the chaos.
Whatever caused Carl to leave the prison that day, all of the reasons that added up to why he found himself in the forest, it laid a mystery, one I was willing to wait to find the answers to. Telling me I had no right to leave the walls of the prison, to act as though I wasn't appreciating all that he had done for me, Carl had no right to speak for me, to speak to me like I was a small child under his age. After all, the boy didn't even know half of me. He didn't deserve to know a thing.
His ways of helping, whether his tall voice and rude remarks could be considered so, didn't rub me the right away. The boy only seemed to know how to call orders and jump to conclusions. In the weeks that had passed by, I had spent so much time trying to figure the boy out, and yet, I had not come to a clear view of him. I didn't understand a lot, but perhaps it was not my place to pry and understand more than what he offered.
Still, the edges he wore along his flesh and the anger that took home in his eyes was not what I knew truly lived in the boy. I wanted to believe in the boy who I spent the better half of my evenings with, the one who rambled about comic books and lit up over super heroes, the one who shared his jokes with me; I always laughed at them, no matter how silly they were. I wanted to keep believing that rage didn't truly live inside the boy, but his ugly words made it hard for that belief to settle on me.
Blonde curls were my escape for a moment, what kept me focused, and what pushed me to keep walking away from the troubled afternoon I left in the field. Zach led me through the courtyard, the back of his head my only worry in keeping up with. Carl and his burning words were what surfaced the truth that told me what I needed to do, what I had wanted all this time, but had been too scared to fully admit; I wanted to leave, I wanted to help, I wanted to give back what had been taken from me.
