Preface – Why the crap can't I die?

I had finally gotten over myself and stopped bashing my head against the hard, rough red bricks and mortar that made up the one wall left standing in the middle of the huge, wasted field. There were weeds everywhere, growing wildly as they climbed the walls and swallowed the sections of the wall as it dwindled slowly down to merely knee-height far to the left, trying doggedly to tangle themselves around my ankles as I fought my way backwards, my forehead throbbing from hours of pounding. I felt like I had been run over a steam-roller over and over and over…but then again, I might as well have. Aside from the huge slash that ran down my left leg where the knife had plunged into my leg and shredded the skin and a small part of the muscle—making me limp, despite my ability to ignore the fire—and the way my head was throbbing fit to explode, on the inside…well, even as strong as my stomach was, I knew that I would lose my cookies if I could see the state of my poor little heart.

I'd never had it broken before, since I'd never let anyone in.

And, sure as hell, when I finally did take that chance and let the one person that I thought could never hurt me close to my heart…they had to go and die.

My eyes were still dry—a result of loss of blood from my leg, I supposed. It didn't see possible to lose that much body fluid—as I stared deadly at the red wall in front of me. My left foot was still moving, finishing my last step, when the overgrown weeds finally won and wrapped greedily around my left ankle. I didn't try to get up, just stared at the wall, the last part of me.

The last part of everything, really. Of everyone. Of humanity in itself; I was just a small part of what "life" actually meant. I was just a girl. Just a sixteen year old girl who had gone through hell, fought with the devil himself, been blistered by the fires until my skin felt like it should melt, and then didn't even manage to save the one person that I would've given my life for.

I was an idiot. No one but an idiot would ever expect to get in and out of hell without being burnt. I was just an idiot that had lost everything. Every single thing that had ever meant even of a fraction to me.

My hands knotted convulsively around the grass at my sides, and I found myself suddenly wishing that the damn weeds really were alive, so that they could rip me apart, sticking me a million times with their prickly spines until I died. And finally, finally, my eyes began to fill with tears that spilled over and covered my face, soaking my ratty, shredded shirt as the tears dripped like a broken faucet off the end of my chin.

I lay back, still silent, and closed my eyes.

I was over, in one word, finished.

Because my heart was gone now, gone completely, and no one, not even the strongest—like I had thought that I was for so long—could live without their heart. It wasn't mutilated like I had thought before; now I knew as I slowly began to drift with the waning light into a deep, mute, suffocating darkness. I knew that it was gone.

The sky above me was a silvery grey as it slowly darkened, the sun setting on the day as well as my life, and slowly above me as I watched through misty eyes, dark clouds began to accumulate in a thunderous, roiling, bucking torrent.



And then it began to rain, each drop seeming to change course in the air to head straight for me. It only made sense, and I wasn't resentful at all. After all, if I was going to die in such misery like this, than shouldn't there be rain at my funeral? But I knew there would be no funeral. No one to mourn my passing; it would be as if I had never existed at all. Never loved. Never fought.

My eyes closed with the darkness in my head, and the rain continued around me, the downpour so heavy the noise seemed more like a thousand hoof-beats of a thousand horses. The air was thick with the tangible humidity, making my breathing shallow. I was happy about that. I needed to die right now.

I clenched my teeth and held my breath.