Forget me lots (Completed)

9. River 🐝

The next hours are a blur, the kind that invades your brain and lingers away the seconds fogging your judgement while urging you to tip over the edge. If I couldn't wrap my mind around how much this girl's wellbeing meant to me before, I can't now either. I'm a wobbly mess of useless limbs. Pathetic? Yes. Hopeless? Also yes.

After she walked away, limping while clutching her 'suicidal' boot as if her life depended on it, everything dissolved in the darkness of Elsie's depths. The more distance she put between us, the more I felt like bending over backward and hitting my head against the closest oak tree available. It wasn't supposed to go this way. To think I had the whole scenario mapped out so well, and it all went to shit.

I'd wanted to return the paper crown I found before it was squashed by thousands of teenage feet in their careless stride away from classes they loathe. Everyone knows how desperate students get while on a subject that is particularly annoying the living hell out of them. They want out of there fast, not looking back or even ahead as they collide against one another—a cacophony of clashing backpacks and underbreath cussing.

In between the mayhem I saw it—fragile, just like her, and something in me ignited. It became important for me to return it. Dawn should have it back. I couldn't stand the thought of a random person stepping all over it, crushing it and making it disappear.

I picked it up in a daze, my fingers trembling, and my heart rate speeding like a racehorse. Without thinking twice, I drew it to my face and the second it met my skin a faint smell of honey invaded my nostrils. It smelled like her. I stood there for a second longer than needed, while the rest of the scene played like a movie. Is that too crazy?

Who am I kidding? This is way too crazy. Like the fact I couldn't utter a sound after I took her out of that fucking lake. I thought to myself, "River, you freak, you don't have to say much. Just a couple sounds, words, remember? English words. Nada. Ni siquiera en Español. Not a sound."

Was she trying to kill herself? Was she? Why had the mere thought of that happening fragmented my world into so many pieces? Deep down I knew that with Dawn gone, I wouldn't be able to be the same in its orbiting emptiness. An icy shiver ran down my spine. My voice faded as the forest tilted, and the lake and its depths became a menace.

I'd wanted to talk to her, but all I could do is clutch my chest, burning with the strength of a hundred solar storms. The pain was too familiar, yet I didn't want it to control me. "Not now, please not now," I repeated the mantra over and over in my dizzy head.

I know solar storms aren't dangerous to humans on Earth's surface. But see? I wasn't on this planet anymore, but floating in outer space. So embarrassed by my lack of sorts, I felt like an unshielded astronaut, her piercing eyes bleeding radioactive particles with each blink she cast my way.

"You've already thanked me, Dawn." How were those words the only stupid ones that made their way up my raspy throat, past my dry lips and into the predicament we were both in?

That was it. She'd walked away. She'd turned her back on me and walked away. I'd followed her into the darkness of the forest, with the fault-finding thunder, and the heavens splitting open. I'd called her name. She'd turned to me for a second, and then that moment slipped away—like the rain through my frozen fingers.

"I'm sorry, Dawn," I said.

She didn't hear me, but ran faster instead. Her one boot and white sock puddling her way back to somewhere better than this place and time.

Pain laced through me once more, and I wasn't able to reach out to her. I wasn't enough to keep her safe. She looked haunted and afraid of me. The show was over. A pathetic performance on my behalf. Dawn was out of sight, limping her way home. So, with a downcasted head, I headed for mine.