Page 66 of Jackson

Where did I come from?

Where had I been going before I reached this place?

The unsettling thought that maybe therewasnothing and no one that I’d been trying to find—that Iwasno one—hovered in my peripheral, pulling me down further into the darkness. I choked on it, breathed it in and let it take hold of me.

This would be it, then. I would dissolve into oblivion.

How sad.

But then, a single memory, or maybe it was a dream, foggy in recognition at first but becoming clearer with more concentration, suddenly began to flourish in front of me. Faces that I couldn’t place but felt like home, voices that I could recognize even in my sleep.

And a touch that I’d become so intimately familiar with that I craved it even now...

The touch of a hand gently running through my hair, soothingly and loving.

I missed it.

I wanted to drown in it. Let it bleed into me. Filling every crevice that the darkness had frozen over and consumed and hoped that it could pull me away from this awful place.

Distant voices were beginning to break apart the silence that cocooned me in a straightjacket. Where were they coming from?

“—maybe. We’d have to wait and see.”

“How long will it take?”

“I had to do a lot of sweet talking to get into his chambers, but the judge was interested in looking over the files sometime this week.”

Silence.

The air surrounding me suddenly felt charged somehow.

“Will he wake up?”

The hand moving through my hair froze.

I reached out in front of me, heartbroken at the obvious fear in the voice that had stopped it. I didn’t want those warm feelings to disappear and leave me trapped here with the cold darkness again. My limbs felt numb, hard to move and sore while I fought against the binds that tethered me to this place.

I wanted out. I wanted to be set free and go to where I was meant to be.

To who I belonged to.

Wading through the never-ending void was a hard fight, the current strong as it tried to drag me under again.

A something soft touched my cheek. A teardrop that wasn’t my own.

“Please…”

A deep breath.

A sorrowful voice.

“Please, wake up.”

Where are you?I wanted to say, but my lips felt sewn shut.Come find me.

But there was nothing. No one to reach out to me to lead me like I wanted them to. I would have to make this journey alone, chasing after the one thing I’d been desperate to find all of my life.

I wouldn’t let it be just out of reach this time. My regrets weren’t going to keep me from having what I wanted. Life was too shortto live in fear of the what ifs and I was tired of sabotaging myself from what I really wanted.

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