The truth in our songs

Chapter 72

Mara Kenward

It was late at night when I parked Blake's car back to the riveway. I had changed out of the dress and heels and was wearing a jeans and one of my sweaters, which I had stuffed into the backseats this morning.

My brown hair hung losely down my shoulders an the red lipstick was gone, replace by simple chapstick. It was always tiring, slipping out of that role an becoming myself again. But who was I anyways? The girl with her yellow backpack and baggy clothes? Or the girl with black elegant clothes and heels, a gun to her waistband and knifes on her thighs?

I didn't immediatly step out of the car. I stayed in it for a while and stared at the steering wheel. My head was overfilled with everything that happened over the last months. It was just so much. I had been set out into this world, feeling like a stray that had to find his own way of survival in a city where nothing was familiar. I had been given names and places where I had to be but I had felt it. The moment my feet had stepped over the doorswell to the highschool. The feeling of not belonging.

It had all been so wrong. I had never been to a school, never been to a café or out with friends, had never been at a birthday party or someone elses house. I had never learned how to know that it was all normal and okay. I had felt like an interlocuteur, as if it was forbidden for me to exist the way everyone around me did. Oh, all the lies I had burdened everyone with. I've had no orientation, these long hallways with all those different classrooms- I had walked around like being lost in a labyrinth. Everything, a lie.

I had wanted to be sent to the school counsellor, I had wanted to be put into the school band, to get to know the boy I had known years ago, to see if he still existed. I had barely tried to keep my damaged heart a hold when I'd seen him again. When I had bumped into him, in accident, when our eyes met briefly, just for a split second- I had felt it in every inch of my body, jolting through me like thousands of electric shocks, like punishment. I had been so scared, not of him but me.

I had never thougth I'd see him again, even though I's worked toward it while being in the mafia. When years passed and I grew older I understood what they wanted with me. I understood what use they saw in me. But I had hoped that Blake's love would vanish into oblivion, that he woul move on, with someone else- as much as it tore on me. Me coming back had been a mistake, I could not undo. But me coming back had also been redemption of torture and pain. I had, in all those years being locked up, whished for nothing more than to see him one last time. To see if he was alright.

And I probably should have left the moment I saw he was alive but something kept me away from fleeing for good. Had it been curiosity of who he might now was? Had it been hopeless hope of being able to have at least a little unseen part of his life? Or had it simply been the love I had always kept for him, and only for him to ever own? I had never gotten answers and I knew I never would because deep inside I already knew why I had stayed. I knew the reason.

I could have grabbed freedom the moment they threw me into my father's house and left me there bleeding and bruised. I could have simply ran out of the door without ever stopping, could have escaped into the woods and could have run until my limps would have gieven out of pure exhaustion and my heart racing too fast and my mouth too dry to gulp and my eyes too burnful to blink, I could have ran until i would have finally collapsed and be exempted from this hell of a life. But I hadn't done all these things. Maybe not because my lack of knowledge about the outside world had frightened me too much to even dare. But again, I know I wouldn't have cared. I had felt like a wild animal, burning with rage and fury and anger and pain.

I hadn't grabbed all these easy chances that had opened up in front of me because I saw no worth in them. I stayed prisoned in this city, this life, this identity because I would have not beared any longer the absence of him. Even though he loved with a heart that would beat for me until its very last struck, I loved with a heart that only beat because he existed.