Swan Song || The Lost Boys - & The One Who Found Them...

Prologue - Vendum ( Turning )

I drank of love to cleanse my soul of fear,
lost myself in the dark only to reappear -
to become the light that would keep you near...

________

I sat there wreathed in silence; a dreadful & unsettling kind of silence to most people, but it was all I truly desired that moment - silence & solitude. Just me, the late autumnal breeze & the moon woven into the black tapestry known as the night sky. The cries of seagulls above me, the roaring sea below. It was no more, no less than what my very soul could have asked for.

My tired & still tear-stained eyes wandered along the dark horizon before me, inevitably drawn towards the beige-brownish coloured stone illuminated by the moon.
I vaguely remembered the days where I was beyond terrified of heights to the point where the mere thought of ever being near a location like this - a few steps away from a cliff so high that not even the sharpest vision could make out what lay at its feet - was enough to paralyze me. But today everything seemed different...
No. Everything WAS different. I was no longer the same person that I used to be for the vast majority of my life. I had changed, had transformed in various ways; through several challenging & undeniably painful procedures. My mother used to call them life lessons, but actually those lessons were just an ongoing series of unfortunate incidents that my overall shadowy existence had given birth to. In other words: I was simply a magnet for bad luck, pain & most certainly the wrong people as well. Although I had to admit that I was not all too fond of the term 'wrong' either, even if the feeling attached to it had imprinted just that experience upon my memory.

In my world there existed no right & wrong. Things simply were. It was all about personal associations & feelings...
Whatever made us feel good was automatically considered right, whereas things that frowned down upon us & caused us pain were considered wrong. Bad. Negative.

Undesirable.

Speaking of feelings...

My gaze dropped once familiar images & memories began to flood my mind, encouraging me to remember why I had come here in the first place. It was the silver necklace around my neck that I found myself staring at with an almost nostalgic yet sorrowful glow in my eyes, taking a deep & slow breath whilst lifting a single hand in order to take it between two fingers, my touch gentle due to the pendant's fragility. In an instant my already wounded heart grew heavy, started to ache with each beat.
The urge to grab the pendant & tear it off the chain to finally throw it away was overwhelming, but my at the same time still very much prominent love for this small yet significant jewelry seemed to hold me back.

It was a silver swan, my favourite animal of all, its large wings spread & slightly crooked like it was ready to take off & fly away, never to return.

A gift from him...

A cold gust of wind grazed my cheek as I kept twirling the swan between my fingers, eagerly blinking my tears away over & over again. The images of days long gone kept flowing into this ocean that was my mind like a river, replaying scenes before my inner eye; scenes that I desperately wanted to erase & forget until everything I saw became so vivid that I started speaking. Not to myself, but to the person I happened to share these precious memories with, even though that person was only present in my mind...

" So much for our promise that we would see this through together..."

My voice rang bitter & my throat went sore almost immediately, the words burning their way through my vocal chords like acid. I despised being so self-pitying just as much as I despised what my mind was doing to me in this very moment, torturing me with old doubts & regrets rather than allowing me to heal this awful disease called heartache once & for all. For some reason I couldn't help but think that I was the one person standing in my way. Self-sabotaging? Very much so...