Page 6 of Broken By Silence
But the darkness calls to me like a siren’s call… and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to resist anymore.
The darkness curls tighter around me, seductive in its silence, but Lottie’s voice echoes louder than the quiet.
It slices through the weight pressing down on my chest. It claws at the corners of my consciousness like it’s trying to drag me back from the edge.
And for a moment, just a moment, it works.
Her pain is louder than my shame.
Her voice is an anchor in a sea that’s trying to drown me.
I remember her eyes—how they burned even when her lips didn’t move.
I remember how she looked at me like she saw straight through the rot to whatever broken thing still beat inside of me.
And I remember her smile. Not the forced one she wore like armor. The real one. The one I didn’t deserve but got to see anyway.
I think of her fingers tracing the scar on my wrist like she wasn’t afraid of it. Like it wasn’t a warning label.
She once said, “There’s beauty in things that survive.”
I didn’t believe her then.
But now?
Now I do, because she has survived. She’s been broken and silenced, driven to the brink, and has come back brighter and more beautiful than ever.
I want to believe that about myself.
My lungs ache.
My ribs feel like they’re breaking one by one.
But somewhere in the haze, in the thick of blood and pain, I feel her.
Lottie.
Sitting next to a dying man who doesn’t know how to ask for forgiveness without bleeding first.
Her hand finds mine. I can’t squeeze back, but I feel it. Feel her.
Warm. Steady.Alive.
How often did I get lost in my dreams, trying to feel the warmth of her skin again when we thought she was dead?
I hear the beep of the monitor again. Faint, but there.
I hear the shuffle of nurses coming back. Urgency in their voices. Hope? I can’t tell.
I float between now and then, between memory and pain, between her and the grave I dug with my own hands.
But her voice is still here when she shouldn’t be near someone as awful as me.
I wasn’t human.
“You said once you’d burn for me. Remember?” she whispers. “You and the others made a hell of a lot of promises before you decided you preferred me broken. Don’t leave me alone. Not again.”
Again.
