The calendar on the wall still displayed December, as if the past hadn’t changed, and never moved forward.
She wanted to say she just hadn’t gotten around to changing it yet. But that wasn’t really true.
Time had run away so fast from her that she didn’t even recognize it anymore. Like that kid in kindergarten who she hadn’t really even known then, but ran across at a coffee shop many years later in college. Just a hazy resemblance of a memory.
Only the calendar betrayed her.
The numbers were such a blur; she had no idea what day or time or month it was anymore.
She felt some slight pull in her that she should care. But she just couldn’t get there. It wasn’t that she was apathetic. She hadn’t given up; she just didn’t have the energy anymore. And she had no idea how to find it or how long she needed to wait.
She was lost. Unrecognizable.
She hadn’t chosen this.
Before everything, she had been driven. People told her she had potential. She was going places. Blah, blah, blah…
Now the silence rose up like smoke into every conversation, every interaction, every word. It took over her, smothered her and enveloped her. It had stolen her voice.
She tried to speak, but as if waking from a dream in the middle of the night, her voice barely cracked, and the scream she tried to get out sounded like a muffled yawn.
She hadn’t given up without a fight, but she couldn’t fight anymore. She didn’t want to succumb, but the silence paralyzed her and clouded her brain like a drug.
He had taken everything.
Almost.
She wished she could go back to before. Before the night they met, before she let him walk her to her car, before everything.
But her backspace refused to cooperate. She had fought for every breath she took. All she could do now was wish that he had finished the job. Because leaving her this way was far worse than just getting rid of her the first time.
*Fiction