The Last 100 – Ch.10

The clouds, swollen, bursting at the seams finally erupted in a cascading torrent of grey, cold rain. It fell in sheets, lashing the ground with a vengeance, pockmarking the small sandy bank on which I lay. Scampering into the grass I dismissed the chat with a wave of my head and took shelter in a small knot of shrubbery. Cowering under it for the meagre protection it provided.

Now was about this point that I realised I hadn’t changed clothes in the three days since I had gotten the first notification. I was still clad in the off-white polo and black shorts. The rain was cold, like daggers of ice thrown from the atmosphere, I shook like a leaf, curling into a ball on the ground which, as the rain fell in progressively harder waves, was turning into a hellish slush of cold mud, running toward the river.

I was about to die I thought grimly. After all I had already been through and it was the fucking cold and rain that got me. Tears began to stream down my face as emotion finally caught up with me. My body convulsed with wave after wave of sobs, shaking me more than the cold ever could my eyes letting out a stream which could rival the tropical storm.

I laughed like a demon, howling to a sun obscured by the clouds, howling at it with raw throat, sound only pushed out of my parched lips through sheer force of passion and intensity of emotion.

It had taken everything from me, I would never get to go to college, the time in my life which people always said I would enjoy most, I would never get to go to a high school party. I dug my hands into the churned-up earth, clawing at the earth itself as if trying to physically pull out a meagre amount of solace from anywhere, somewhere. None could be found.

I was never going to have sex. This one hit me harder than it should have. The desire for love and sex seemed a petty one to have in the face of all of this great sorrow and yet when faced with it, it left me with a truly great sense of longing, greater than I had felt for any of the other realisations before it. That was because it went deeper than just sex, I realised I would never feel love. I would never feel a partner lying next to me, never feel calm with someone, never feel like one part of a pair. It ached in a primal, pure sense of humanity, the need to be wanted and loved. I was alone.

In the moment of existential clarity that followed that outburst I was hit by another realisation, one far stronger than the rest. I never got to tell my mother I loved her. I vocalised the words, inaudible under the rain but the act of saying them seemed to make them real to me and I collapsed to the floor, the fight running out of me as fast as it had come. After surviving the first night I was filled with a tentative, excited sense of hope. An optimism which was washed away like the small river bank I had been taken to by the tide. What was the point.

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I collapsed back into my house of leaves, crawling into the foetal position and cradling my knees against my chest, the feeling of them offered no comfort, I felt the rain as it hit my skin, stinging it slightly with residual force, I didn’t move, I didn’t even want to breathe. I wanted to die then, more than ever before, it was a dark, all-consuming desire. I was so, so alone.

A scream escaped me, it was shrill and keening, it oozed hatred and loathing and I exploded out of the bush with the sound, running back to the bank tearing the sand apart looking for the axe I had brought with me. When I did find it I pulled it from the sand with reverence, looking over the wicked edge with an expression of fanaticism and fear.

I fell to my knees, holding the blade of the axe just above my wrists. I sat like that for a while, blade hovering over my veins, looming over them with a sense of finality. My arms shook with effort as I willed my body to make the cut, to go the final inch and take me from this hell, they stayed still.

I screamed, a sound like none other which had ever come out of me, it was hoarse, it was ugly. An animal sound it was, in a world were there were only beasts to here it. In a rage I threw the axe into the now swollen river. I watched with a slight pang of regret and the axe slunk beneath the roiling black pool of waves, given strength by the rain. I collapsed to the ground again, laying lifeless as the rain lashed me over and over again. Damn my self-preservation.

In my minds eye I could feel Wilhelm, it was the first time I had focused on the telepathic link between us and also the first time I realised that he had run off. He was agitated I could feel, standing and barking at, something. He wanted me to come to him I soon realised.

Another wave of shivers took me, alright let’s check it out I thought with morbid detachment. When I would think back on that series of events I would realise that I was in very little danger of dying from exposure. Sure the rain was cold, and it was winter, but it was winter in the loose Australian idea of the season, and while the rain was viscous it was far from the pelting’s of ice water other nations got. None of this however made it into any faucet of my decision making, having no prior experience with the outdoors I had convinced myself of my death, and further cemented that with my self-doubt and loathing. A pallor on my mind which was yet to be removed.