"There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does." ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
~oOo~
She couldn't remember the last time she was happy.
The last time she smiled; last time she was truly asked if she was okay or the last time she was able to give someone a hug without flinching or ask for her missed notes because she had a panic attack. She can't remember a time when she had friends to go out with, the times before...he came into her life and decided to stay. A time where she didn't have to hide marks on her body or the pain on her face when someone knocks into her.
She didn't have a dark secret then...
And she's lost so much...
Give up so much...
Her story begins like any other story. She was born to both her happy parents; all smiles and warmth on a certain day of a certain month on a certain year on a certain time. She's nothing special really. She has ten fingers and toes like everyone else with auburn hair and light brown eyes. To her parents; she was the world but to everyone else...
She was a nobody...
As she grew she started to learn the horrors of life quite early. She lost her father first, around the young age of six to a robbery gone wrong. He was claimed a hero but she didn't want to see him as a hero but rather alive and still reading her bedtime stories. After a year or so her mother remarried to a brute of a man who adored her mother.
Not her.
One day, she learned to fear him. She screamed at him, anger turning her face red as she did. She yelled at her stepfather that he was a liar; that he didn't like her at all and that he wasn't a father to her. She hated him.
She received her first slap...
The first of many to come...
Her mother found out but he said that she needed to be put in her place. Her mother was disgusted but said nothing. She didn't want to pick sides. However, she did pick a side one way or another. The side of death for she was taken away by a fetal car crash; one of which the girl was the only survivor. At the funeral when a hand rest on her shoulder to only squeeze most painfully was they lowered her mothers body into the ground did she know that she signed her life away.
A life of fairy tales and princes and kings were no more...
A tale of locked doors at night, people seeing but never asking the real questions.
Over the years as the passed she escaped anyway she could. Through books and music. Through her school work and drawings. She wanted to be a doctor; to help people who would hide just like her. She wouldn't be the ones to remain quiet; to sit by and watch as they waste away in their pit of darkness. Her mother would be turning in her grave if she knew what the man was doing to her.
The bruises...
The cuts...
The nightmares that would keep her up at night for she fears he would come and kill her while she slept.
The one night...
She could not take it any longer...
She snapped...
And that would be the last thing she'd ever do...
All of a sudden she felt pain in her neck and it got so hard to breathe until the last thing the girl remembered was the color orange everywhere like she was swimming in soda pop; her hands hurting from banging on something before all went dark. A ringing sounded, something was cracking and falling away as she faded away.
Only she wasn't afraid of the dark...
She embraced the freedom...
The darkness was warm and she felt finger run through her hair while whispering something but she couldn't understand the words being spoken. It sounded like a woman by the way her voice chimed like bells and how softly the fingers ran through the girl's hair. It reminded her so much of her mother...
The voice spoke softly one last time before she felt herself slipping even further down into the warm darkness...
~oOo~
"Good morning everyone, and welcome to channel 7 news. We have a rather sad story for you all this morning. Around ten o'clock last night a fire broke out, spreading to the homes on either side of the home; injuring three with only one causality, Lena King. Upon further investigation by the fire department, the woman killed was the stepdaughter of the owner of where the fire originated from. They also found out that the fire showed no signs of accidental cause for signs of lighter fluid were found near Lena's body. We''ll keep you updated as the investigation by police progresses."