Darry is the person that watched everyone else fall apart after his parents died, and this is what I imagine his thoughts and feelings to be like.
Disclaimer: I do not own any material related to The Outsiders. I simply borrow them.
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I've only ever once cried so hard that I thought I would run out of tears and start crying out blood.
I couldn't hear anything else except for the pounding of my own heartbeat, echoing through my head and the sudden, hollow gasping of my breath.
I couldn't taste anything but my own tears and saliva mixing together in my mouth.
I couldn't smell anything because I was crying so hard my nose had stuffed up a long time ago.
I couldn't see anything besides the blurred movement of the other things around me, as I had long since stopped moving.
But no matter how much I wanted not to, I could still feel everything. My heart had been ripped out of my chest and stepped on by a million different things a million different ways. My throat was going to give those California wildfires a run for their money, and I made sure that I screamed for every one of those people affected by them. My eyes were being picked out by vultures and knives were dragging all over my skin. Even though I could've literally been on fire at that moment and felt less pain, everyone else around me had turned to ice.
The words that some thought were comforting to me were more like fresh snow, that delicate powder that comes and covers up everything, wiping out any traces of what happened the day before. However, that angelic, picturesque snow is just as weak as the cover it provides and ends up melting just as quickly as it came.
The things that stung the most and left deeper wounds than those that I already had were the people who tried to have a bright outlook on things.
"It'll all be okay," they'd say, even though I had only met them once before when I was eleven and I knew they really had no clue at all because I swear I could see the sky falling and the Earth grinding to a halt.
The world was crashing around me, and nothing anyone could say was going to make it any better. Those holes in the sky were permanent. I knew they were.
And I guess what made those people the worst was that I knew they were lying, and I had never had much patience for liars.
The burning I was feeling because of the pain of all this wasn't going away. If anything, it got worse. Everything intensified and soon I was in a full fledged inferno without even a bucket of water; no hope at all.
I knew there was no way I'd survive this.
But everyone else around me seemed to be coping better than I was, if you can call it that.
They had really only turned into ice. But you know the problem with ice? It shatters and it breaks and it melts.
I guess that was Dally's problem. He was this sharp, deadly piece of ice trapped in the middle of summer. It was only a matter of time, anyway. He got cold and he got mean, more than he had been before. He finally got that there wasn't nothing holding him together except for himself, and he took that and ran with it, never looking back.
Two-Bit had always been pretty slapstick, but it got to a whole new level. He tried to be the one that kept everything light and funny, but he had moments too, those few times that I caught him drinkin' too much or not enough. He'd have this look in his eye and a single tear on his cheek, and he was just sitting there playing with his hands.
He was a whole different type of ice than Dally. Two-Bit was ice only underneath all that warmth and good cheer, and the biggest mistake that people made was thinking he didn't have to work to keep it all going.
While Steve had always gotten into fights and been a very balls-to-the-walls type of guy, all that scaled ten-fold. He got loud and in your face, and he'll deny it to his dying breath, but he got scared. Steve was ice because he thought he had to be.
Johnny lost all the hope that he had left. He didn't know the point after seeing what hand that good, deserving people got dealt. If Johnny had any ice in him, that melted down to slush. But that's why we all made sure to look out for him a little harder. Cause he needed us to be ice for him.
Soda got quiet and unnaturally calm, and then he got frantic and psychotic, and then he got to be a daredevil, all within the span of 10 minutes. Soda threw himself in to things so he didn't have to think about it, but he always was the one I worried about the most, because if that light behind his eyes went out, I don't think anyone could ever get it lit again. To be honest, I really think that he loved to drag race so much because that was where he felt close to them; at any moment on the brink of death, speeding into oblivion to where he didn't know what the world looked like unless it was flying by at 100 miles an hour. That was his form of running away. When he got out of that car at the end of that first race, I could see the ice in his eyes for a fleeting moment. He didn't know I was there and nobody else saw it before it was replaced with his goofball humor and that movie star smile I hadn't seen I a month.
However, the one that fell the hardest and took the longest to gain back anything of what he had been was Ponyboy. He'd always hid in books before but there were times that I wouldn't see his face for days. He went about his daily routine, but only as a ghost of what he was. He wasn't ever eager to talk about what was going on in the books he was reading and it seemed like he wouldn't ever sleep through the night again.
God knows I had nightmares about the screams he'd let loose during the night. He just never went one way or the other, he never got cold but he also never got angry. Pony just sort of coasted along, right down the middle, only occasionally having that icy look on his face.
So I watched everyone else turn to ice around me, building up in this defensive barrier that they hoped no one would try to breach.
And because they turned to ice, I tried to turn to ice before them, to let them know that it was okay to hide sometimes.
Even though it sill feels, every day, like I'm being burned alive from the inside out, it won't ever get farther than that. I won't let that fire control me. I've spent too many long and cold winter months learning how to keep that fire at bay.
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