When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
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THE RED THREAD THAT CONJOINED his heart to hers, didn't tear apart—it just loosened, extending to accommodate to the miles stretching between them.
With a heavy heart, Dawn Marshal deduced that metaphorical red threads were far more difficult to sever than literal ones. Perhaps, calling her mumbo-jumbo feelings for Clyde Parker a singular red thread would be taking it too lightly. Whatever she felt for him resembled plenty of red threads wound together in a ball of wool. Sometimes, they were like a ticking time-bomb with colorful wires poking out and if she accidentally cut off the wrong wire, the bomb will detonate, "BOOM!".
She curled up against her sheets, her body unconsciously pressing into the side of the bed she often reserved for Clyde Parker, trying to somehow feel akin to his presence. As if somehow her mattress had clung onto parts of him just like her heart. But unlike her mattress, Clyde Parker's absence was indented in her heart like venomous bite marks.
She was wearing his hoodie, perhaps it was yet another vain attempt to feel close to him. She knew that this wasn't the last time she will be doing this. There will too many nights of her sleeping in Clyde Parker's hoodie. The thought made her resolutions falter. She closed her eyes and reminded herself that she had endured worse storms than Clyde Parker.
But had she really?
She felt empty. Dawn Marshal didn't feel emptiness like most people did, for her emptiness didn't mean nothing–it just meant something was missing. May be emptiness wasn't the right word for it. But that was the least of her worries. All her life, she felt that a huge chunk of her was missing, a gaping hole in her heart that's what it always felt like. But now blood was surging out of that hole and she was drowning in it.
She felt incomplete, may be incomplete was the word for it. This incompleteness, it was familiar. But just because something is familiar doesn't mean we always find comfort in it. Its not that Clyde Parker's presence made the void within her fritter away. He didn't complete her for feeling complete was more about one's individuality. His absence, on the other hand, it surely did make that hole grow from a puddle to a pond. From a speckle to a gashing scar.
Dressed in moonlight and loneliness, she lay, clutching onto fistfuls of her bedspread in frustration. She had never felt this stupid. She knew the choice she had made a few hours ago, the choice of walking away, it was a selfless deed, the right thing to do. But right now, it made her feel all sorts of wrong.
Clyde Parker. Clyde Parker with his cold heart and the warmest hands. Clyde Parker with his pale skin and arms full of tattoos. Clyde Parker and his heart heavy with tragedies. Clyde Parker carrying his childhood traumas into his adulthood. Clyde Parker with his paint-stained cuticles. Clyde Parker with his fear of drowning and wanting to drown at the same time. Clyde Parker with oceans of sadness trapped in his blue eyes. Clyde Parker skirting away from a thousand corpses of himself. Clyde Parker holding the universe in his hands. Clyde Parker walking around with death between his lips. Clyde Parker who owned her heart and didn't know it yet.
