Chapter 5
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD
Fawn,
You’re gone. I know that. Yet, you haunt me still. I can’t see you, touch you, hear you, but I feel you. I stupidly told my mother I could still feel you. She said my brain was trying to cling to something long gone, like a phantom limb.
I don’t mention it to anyone anymore, except the palace healer. I went to her once, after feeling you, to see if I was mistaking physical pain for foreign emotions. It sounds stupid when I write it out, but I was desperate.
She suggested writing my thoughts down every time I feel you. She’s a healer for both physical and mental ailments and claims it can help people sort out their thoughts when they don’t feel comfortable speaking with people about it.
She meant journals, not letters to the dead. But writing to anyone else—even myself—feels wrong. How can I miss someone I never even met?
Because you were the only proof that some part of me was still alive. The only light threaded through years of shadow.
I only felt you for a year, yet your emotions became my addiction. My obsession. Now they’re gone.
I felt you today. A bit of affection trickled down the bond, and I can’t help but wonder if another man caused it. The thought made me blind with jealousy. I’m jealous of someone who doesn’t exist.
Maybe I am losing my mind.
Maybe madness is just what love looks like when it has nowhere to go.
Or maybe you’re not really gone. I can’t let myself consider the alternative—that I’ve spent years mourning while you’re somewhere out there, living without me.
I’m pathetic. It’s tragic, really.
If anyone finds this, they’ll lock me away until I come to my senses. I wonder if that would be best.
Tragically Yours,
Dean
Dean stared at the letter, wondering if he should burn it or tuck it away to read when he needed to realize how ridiculous he sounded. In the end, he hid it in his desk, unable to fully let Fawn go.
He existed in limbo. Not sinking. Not rising above. Rotting, his soul decaying a little more each time he felt her ghost.
Fawn laid in bed and stared at the wall.
A deep longing flickered within her, but for what, she didn’t know.
She only knew she missed something . Her soul ached for it, and she wondered if the void would ever be filled.
Since the day her grandfather threw muck at her grandmother, she had the occasional break in the bleak numbness in her chest.
This differed from those instances. The whisper of foreign emotions she often felt confused her. She usually ignored them and refused to let them rule her actions.
But tonight, she’d allow herself to wallow.