Chapter 2: Asleep & Awake
I don’t remember her voice, or even really what she looked like. All I could remember was the silhouette of her head as she stood against the sun and the glimmer of her smile as she said something to someone. It can’t have been me - I was too young at the time - but whoever it was, they made her smile even more broadly.
It was a happy memory, one I’d held hard onto since she left my life, even as every trace of her slowly vanished.
Why?
Why?
Why had she left me?
I knew the answer, knew that it had nothing to do with me, that it had everything to do with my father, with life, with everything else, but I still felt that it was my fault.
It still was my fault.
The pain of that realisation pressed down on me like a blunt stake, slowly pressing into and through my skin, through my flesh, through my bones.
Rage poured where there should have been blood, rage like a great river lashing out against the dam that held it, lashing out against those that had thought it possible to restrain it, hold it, control it.
And so I screamed, screamed at the pain, from the pain - screamed for what I had lost before and what I had lost now - screamed for those that had done it to me.
You are on a boat in the middle of a lake.