Chapter 39
I am a bundle of flesh and fractured memories, a tangle of knotted pasts that choke the breath from my soul. For months now, I have drifted through the corridors of my life, resisting the insidious pull of an ever-present whisper—the desire to end it all. The temptation of silence, of oblivion, has clung to me like a second shadow, beckoning with promises of peace that felt too sweet, too cruel to deny.
Dear Papa, dear Mama, the grave’s cold embrace came for you too soon, tearing you from this world before your time. At night, I would lie awake, staring into the void, and pray for its grasp to reach for me as it had for you, to latch onto me with the desperation of an infant to its mother. But it never did. Instead, my soul bleeds in silence, each tear a wound that never closes, each breath a burden too heavy to bear.
I died that day alongside you, though my heart stubbornly beat on, dragging my decaying body through the days. What remained of me was little more than a husk, a corpse too stubborn to lie down and rot. My screams went unheard by the heavens, swallowed instead by the same cruel storm that had taken you. “Please do not leave me!” I had cried, my voice breaking against the uncaring wind, a fragile plea lost to the merciless howl of the tempest.
And yet, it was an echo.
I hear it now in Sebastian’s voice, in the way he shouted my name into the storm that hungered for us both. The rope that bound you to life snapped. A cruel betrayal, and in its shattering, so did mine. I clung to the frayed ends, hoping, praying, but tragedy has no master—it answers only to itself. It had won that day. Or so I believed.
But death... death is not the villain we fear. It is a stillness, a quieting of the chaos that binds us to suffering. Death is a tender lullaby, a hand that promises to cradle you gently, to whisper peace where life only shouted anguish. It is not cruel, not callous—it is merely an end, a book closed before its story could be rewritten.
And so, here I stand on the precipice of that stillness, staring into its abyss. The weight of my existence has worn me thin, and I no longer wish to resist its pull. Dear Papa, dear Mama, I will soon join you in the quiet dark, where no storms rage and no ropes fray.
Goodbye.