Chapter Text
09/16/08
That’s when the milk went sour—thick, curdled, and left on the counter to fester. Bacteria multiplied, taking over moment by moment. He was gone. The sludge began to consume, whispering in my mind: You don’t want me. No. No. NO.
I was nine the night the lights never came on at Renee’s. She’d fallen in love with Mr. Right—he knew how to play all the right slots, hit all the right punches, and blinded her with attention. I grew up then: water bill due on the fifth, gas the tenth, electricity the eighteenth. Soon came Mr. Wrong. I was ten when I realized Renee needed me; I became the balm to her aching heart—the one who could pick up the pieces when they left.
Now, as I watch him, golden eyes peering from beneath his moving mouth, I barely catch his words:
“We’re leaving.”
My stomach twisted; revulsion burrowed into my skin. My mouth opened and closed, and then, almost imperceptibly, it broke out in a desperate plea:
“I’ll come with you.”
But he replied, coldly, “You can’t.”
Phil was mediocre at best. I never imagined he’d last more than a month, yet soon she was five months deep into her love affair. I didn’t understand at first how all-consuming her fire could be—how, when Renee looked at Phil, adoration seeped from her pores like honey. Meanwhile, the ever-consuming pit in my stomach grew larger, a reminder that I was nothing more than a neat little accessory to her life: the one to patch up wounds until the next man swept her away into another love-addled state.
She decided to travel with him—because, in her eyes, minor league baseball makes men legends. I begged, I pleaded to come along. But what fun was it for a seventeen-year-old to join a world where she never truly wanted me?
As it seems, Edward never did either.
I found myself abandoned in the forest. Surrounded by echos that fabled my moment of desertion. The air reeked of damp earth and decaying leaves, a bitter aroma that clung to my skin like a shroud. I sank slowly to the ground, cold dirt pressing against my fingertips as if it sought to claim me entirely.
A crushing loneliness enveloped me—a palpable, oppressive sadness that turned every breath into a desperate, shallow struggle. My heart pounded hollowly as the forest whispered its dark secrets: the rustle of dead branches and the mournful moan of the wind. And then, carried on that stagnant air, came faint, ghostly murmurs in Italian—bare fragments that chilled me more than the cold:
“I re della notte…”
“Il destino è segnato…”
They were not consolations, but cryptic echoes of a power beyond my despair. The voices floated in and out like a cruel refrain, leaving me with only the sensation that fate had been sealed. No promise of rescue came, only the inexorable certainty that I was already lost. As the sound of my name faded into the oppressive darkness, I lay on the cold forest floor, immersed in a psychosis of sorrow and panic—a final dirge from the night itself, hinting forces I could neither understand nor escape.