SONDER (IV): tmr thomas

008: I should learn to swim

Ella 8

There are people running outside my room. If my hands weren't strapped down, I would pull myself over to go see what's happening. No matter how hard I try, I can't get off the ground.

I wish Eli was here to help me. He's gone now, forever more, unfortunately. I can't find him anywhere I look.

Maybe he was right. After all, it wouldn't be impossible to believe that Eli had dropped dead.

"He was sick," she tells me. It's an echo of words I've heard Leo use to describe me. They tell me that the Violet girl didn't know him. She was like his Zart. "Emil killed himself."

She told me that.

I rise to my feet, attempting to rip my arms away. It's only as if the chains which hold me down grow in length. I step forward, but I can feel the heavy metal seat dragging behind me. The motivation just sprouts out of nowhere. It is a blooming violet in my garden of wilted sunflowers.

What would I know about gardening? I let the only man who could teach me how to make plants rise from the earth die in front of me. At the time, I didn't even feel bad as I watched a dangerous creature snap him and rip him from the room. Now, I don't know what to think.

My brain is in a constant state of colliding. The past in the present coexist, and my opinions are muddled by the mess of brain splatter. I can't make any more sense of who I am than I could analysis a Jackson Pollock painting. Every time I try to better understand myself, to reach into my brain and sort through the much which fills it, I find that my body moves like it is chained down to a chair so heavy that I cannot walk.

I make it to the door, pulling it open. It's unlocked. Perhaps it's been unlocked this whole time, and I never bothered to notice. There are men tied up on the ground. The guards who stood outside my room. They are unconscious.

I look at the rope wrapped around them. No one could have broken into the compound and bested WICKED so easily. Not after I have tried for centuries to destroy them. I feel like I'm an entity as old as time itself. I am a tide, hitting the shore over and over. Eventually, I will wear down this organization.

No one could've done what I have tried to do in just one night.

If they did, that means that everything Eli and I worked for is useless. It means that with the passage of time, I too will be swept out from my feet unexpectedly.

We are not the ocean. Instead, we are rafts floating in the water, facing a tsunami.

My hand moves up to the scar on my neck, and I can't help but scratch away.