SOS

Savannah

I can’t keep walking.

I can’t.

It’s cold—and hot at the same time. The sun is blinding, I’m sweating, making me have a chill every time the wind gives a sigh.

My feet are crazy sore, my knee is fucking killing me. My back is spasming out and I’m weak with exhaustion and hunger.

I’m so weak.

~My strong Savvy girl.~

My dad’s voice is the only thing to be heard out here, taunting me from the other side of the vale—if I am to believe in that sort of thing. Calling out in my head like he is walking beside me.

The mere thought makes me want to kill something.

I don’t believe in ghosts or that ~the people we love never truly leave us~ shit that they feed you when you lose someone. I know they mean the memories, and yes I have them, but they’re not here.

They’re gone. Died.

They left.

I’m the only one that survived.

~If I’m being honest, I wish I hadn’t.~

I wanted so desperately to have died with them, and in a way I did. I’m no longer that girl. I’m not her anymore.

~My Savvy girl.~

I can hear him whispering in my ear.

The gravel from this back road prods and sends pains to the bottom of my feet. It feels like I’m walking on pins and needles.

I’ve tried the grass, it doesn’t help. It’s so thick it’s like being stabbed by the earth.

A gust of wind whips my hair into a frenzy and slaps a strand of it into my eye.

I shiver, causing me to flinch from the muscle spasm in my back, which makes all my other hurt parts fall like dominos.

From the swelling in my knee down to the ache in my feet, it feels like knives are stabbing me.

My thighs have chub burn and the sweat has gotten into the open slashes I have no doubt I put there.

My memory is shit, it has been since the accident. I haven’t lost an entire night before though.

It’s normal names or to-do lists. Never hours just gone. Wiped clean like a hard drive.

Everything is starting to hurt.

I feel sick, my stomach tossing and turning like waves on a shoreline. I can feel it crashing around in there. My own personal storm.

How pathetically poetic.

That’s it!

I’m. Done.

I can’t with this anymore!

I look to the sky, closing my eyes. Locking up the muscles on my face, I do the same to my entire body as I scream to the heavens.

If someone is up there, I’ll make them hear me.

I scream so loud and hard I make birds fly away from the treetops. I keep going until my lungs have been set on fire and burn my throat from the smoke rolling up my esophagus to hopefully choke me out.

Sucking in a strangled breath doesn’t do the job. Nothing does, no cure-all fix-all to dull the ache, to ease the burn, to numb this feeling inside me.

So again I scream.

Locking up every muscle I own to let some of this ~too muchness~ out. I don’t give a mental-illness fuck about my reference to ~Alice in Wonderland.~

I have too much muchness in me.

I’m sure Alice would understand.

My bad leg gives out in a shaky fold that resembles a crappy lawn chair that bows out. I skin my damn knees on the way down. The flare of the rocks digging in sends me over the edge.

I hit the rocky gravel-paved road with all the strength I have left and scrape my hands up with no regrets.

My knuckles crack back open and grow into wide gashes with the blood that is staining the state-owned land under me.

My knuckles twist and beg for me to stop, some protest the treatment I torment them with but I don’t care. I’m too far gone.

It’s not enough.

Hard wracks of a crazed girl’s sobbing confession come on over the sound of fists colliding with a brutal force.

I hit and scream and slap the brown rocky street with all of my fury. Working so fucking hard to make it louder than tears, than the pain that never seems to find an end.

Than the loss and the confusion.

Than this anger inside me that just grows and grows like an infection that no form of penicillin can cure.

The sting I create is nothing.

The feeling of brokenness is everything else. I’m a tortured tornado with far too many issues for this world to handle.

The only sounds left to be heard in this mother nature wasteland are of my tantrum.

No more bird calls, or random bugs to chirp or give any feedback on the savage beatdown I’m unleashing.

My assault on this open road in the middle of nowhere is the new noise of nature.

This bumpy piece of shit pavement that is undergoing my rage-infused punishment for being the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For taking my last grain of sanity, I rain hell.

My nails dig at the rocky brown top, they split and chip at odd and painful angles. I make them become mangled broken bits and leave them jagged.

Some completely tear off, leaving me with an exposed nail bed to endure.

The pain is again—nothing.

My voice is raw and brittle.

I keep screaming, keep hitting.

I keep crying.

The tears only act as fuel to my emotional gas tank to keep me in a stressed-out rage.

The tears that form in my eyes like steamy drops of boiling water to burn me from the inside out.

With each one that falls, it leaves a trail down my face before dropping off my jaw and marring the earth like my blood.

How could they die and leave me to face all of this alone?

How could they leave no back-up plan?

No reasoning on why this has turned out this way?

No last-minute advice?

How am I supposed to handle this?

I had enough to deal with long before my mother whispered secrets in some love letter for a man who is half my DNA!

I have enough on my plate.

I’m full!

I’m stuffed with the things I have to deal with. I have had my double helpings. I have my doggy bags and takeout plates.

I can’t take any more.

I had to recover from the crash physically.

I’m not healed.

I had to recover mentally from being tossed around a moving vehicle and thrown off a bridge to almost drown.

I’m still not healed.

I had to recover from losing my brother.

I’m still not healed.

Losing my mother.

Losing my father.

My life.

My mind.

My way of living.

My guilt for making it out of the fucking hospital.

For surviving.

For wanting to die.

For failing.

For not being happy.

For being with Damon.

For being a hassle on Uncle Jonah and Percy.

For everything that’s happened since we wanted to go to the movies on a rainy Sunday.

I have enough to deal with.

I’m becoming a Luna.

I have to fix Luci to not hate me.

For Damon’s family to accept me.

To build this business from the ground up.

And now, I have to deal with this!

To find Huns and do what?

Go all cliché love child?

Do the ~right thing~ and deliver a letter from a dead woman?

What’s worse?

Having a father who loved you and he gets taken away before his time, or, magically getting a second go of it and finding a father who doesn’t want you? One who lives?

If Huns is a member of the club, then he won’t want me.

Club members.

I...I look like Grave.

We have the same color hair and eyes.

He was asking all of those questions.

He...he knew.

Lucien knew.

That’s what the fucking thing was about.

That’s why he picked him.

GRAVE IS MY FATHER.

I need a test to confirm it, but—I know it.

Deep in my gut I know it.

I try to scream again but the only thing that comes out is a scratchy hoarse gargle that burns so bad.

My eyes hurt from the tears and I just want it to be done.

Which brings on more guilt.

More letdowns.

More pain.

“If there is a God, a heaven or whatever. Can you hear my prayer? Can you grant me an inch of mercy and end this for me? Take it. Give it to someone who can do this. Someone who needs it more than I. End this for me. Please.”

I cry so hard I fall from my knees and lay back on a nearby tree. My back to the trunk of it I feel the shade come over me.

A cloud coming to block out the bright sun, I sob out a broken-hearted laugh.

There it is again.

Another end to my world.

I cry and cry.

My feet feel like I’m drowning in my own tears.

“Please, just make it end. Take this pain from me. Please.”

The broken parts of my mind send up the prayer and I feel this...aftermath end.

Like a peaceful blanket lays on top of me.

I feel light.

Like I’m floating on top of deep water, drifting along to surface weightlessly.

That half-asleep and awake thing we do.

The one where you are only one step away from complete nothingness, stuck in that last step to where you can hear what’s going on around you.

My heartbeat is louder than a bass drum, the rush of blood circulating in my ears with whooshes that remind me of soundtrack music.

My breathing is even amplified to sound like it’s being fed through a speaker.

Over all of it, I can hear a vehicle roll over the crunchy pavement. The brakes getting hit and doors opening. I can hear the footsteps and the voices that come for me.

“Savannah! Dad, she’s bleeding.”

“Don’t move her, I need to address her wounds.”

“Savannah baby, open your goddamn eyes and look at me. Look at me right now!”

Percy.

Uncle.

~My Angel.~

~How mercifully poetic.~

~You sent me my angels at the end of the world.~

~Again.~