Drowned In Silence

Prologue

I’m gasping for a breath that I can’t take. My lungs are compressed inside my chest, not expanding and letting me breathe.

It's cold. Frigid. Desolate.

Except for that sound.

I realize a multitude of things– a tapping sound is so incessant that my ears are ringing, it’s so cold that my whole body is numb, and the hair on the back of my neck is standing on end.

I’m being watched– stalked in the frosty night air.

Peering my eyes over the edge of the asphalt, I hover above the black abyss. He is still chasing me– taunting and hunting. I can hear him like a whisper in my ear– it’s gruesome, but I’m captivated by it. It seems so serene to just chase the pieces of my damaged soul away instead of holding onto them all of the time.

Keep running. You’ve almost made it. Just a few more steps until it’s done.

Struggling to stay on my own two feet, I wince at the pain. When your body is so cold that it starts going into hypothermia, you stop shivering, the pain grows to an agonizing state, and you eventually stop breathing.

My feet are raw, bleeding, soon to be scarred.

Gaining my balance, I hold onto the rail next to me and look back into the eyes of my audience. A pair of blue eyes shouldn’t be able to see every scar, mental and physical, that plasters my body.

He points to me with his knife in his hand. However, I’ll be long gone before someone other than myself can kill me.

I step closer to the edge, letting go of the sticky metal and close my eyes one last time. The blood trickles down my arm and off the tips of my fingers. I didn’t even realize that I got cut up from the branches and limbs on my way here.

I can smell the copper from the blood and frost in the air– the denseness of the fog that surrounds me. I can feel the snow beginning to fall onto my already frozen skin, somehow still melting into my flesh. I can hear the flapping wings of the bats that skim the surface of the river, oblivious to the danger around them.

I’m not oblivious to life– I just don’t want to face it anymore. I can't live in this land of denial any longer.

Eighteen years of this bullshit. Never again will I smell the pungent odor of the pedophilic men who crave my body more than my mind. Never again will I feel my father’s fingertips against my skin as he touches my body in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Never again will I hear someone ask me why I don’t have anything nice to say– or anything to say at all.

Never. Fucking. Again .

I open my eyes and watch as my stalker holds his breath and all movement in time stops. The snow stops falling. The fog stops rolling. Even the bats stop moving as I take one last glance at the poisoned humanity that surrounds me.

“Forgive me, for I have sinned,” I whisper aloud as I take the forbidden step.