Lost In Lucidity

Dead Kids

For the first time in years, an old familiar feeling comes back to grip me from within. I feel utterly like a ghost. Hollow, alone, and drifting from place to place in forlorn sadness. Part of me is dead, and I have no more motivations or desires. Time seems to almost disappear entirely. I have no idea how long ago I left the red house and began laying in bed. Maybe it's been hours, maybe it's been days.

'Not days. If it was days, Dad would be home by now.'

Dad... I should call him. Tell him I'm alive.

'No. we're leaving soon anyway. Better for him to never get his son back than to find out we're alive and lose us again.'

'It's not going to come to that. We'll convince Val still. We told her we'd be fine, but that was before the drug stuff. Tell her we're going to kill ourselves without her now. That will change her mind for sure.'

'We're not doing that, you selfish, rotten, piece of shit.'

'Better than your plan, you stubborn, pathetic dumbass.'

I curl into myself on the mattress and shut my eyes tight. I'm so tired, and I don't want to think. I just want the irrational thoughts screaming in my skull to shut the hell up, but they just endlessly rattle on, overwhelming every other process in my brain. All I need is to sleep. Just lose consciousness so it all stops working, if only for a few hours. It hasn't come yet, though, or maybe it has, and I just didn't realize. Maybe not even sleep is an escape anymore.

'It's not. If you want it to stop, you need to get off your ass and get out of here.'

Cradling myself, I think about it, and the more I do, the more sense it starts to make. Everyone close to me hates me now, and everyone else I care about is going to be ripped from me in a few weeks, anyway. There's nothing left for me here.

'Wes, that's not true, there's—'

There's nothing left for me here.

I know that it's at least been more than a full day, as the pain in my stomach tells me that I haven't eaten in a long while. I consider it, but the thought alone promises me that anything I choke down will most likely come back up. Better to just sit through the pain than to do more damage trying to fix it.

At some point, I get a message on my phone. My heart thrums anxiously as I raise the glowing screen, thinking it might be from Val, or Claire, or my dad, or any other myriad of people that I don't have the strength to hear from right now. It's only a message sent from the barrack's computer, however, telling me I should be ready to leave for the city tomorrow afternoon. Friday. It's already been three days. I wonder why they're sending me the message when I gave my spot up to Claireese, but I don't have the capacity to think too long on it, and I assume it's just some sort of automated thing the city sent our guards to forward to us.

As I swipe away the message, I see a plethora of other notifications that I never cleared since my time getting back to the compound. 28 missed calls. 10 from Claireese, 3 from the barracks system, and 15 from my father. I cringe when I see all the countless texts that go along with them.

Wes?

Wes where are you?

Wes you nneed to anser me right now out thisis serious

I hold the power button down before casting the device away from me in shame.

'We need to go. Dad will be home tomorrow morning—that's only a handful of hours away.'

'Go see Val. She HAS to feel guilty by now. We can convince her with that, just try again.'

'Would you give it up already? She doesn't care about us. Even if she came, it wouldn't be real.'