Page 2 of Divine Violence
People weren’t comfortable with the reality every single tragedy brought with itself. They liked toying with the idea, talking about the tragic events of something that happened to some other people in another country, another neighborhood, another city. Yet whenever it came to their own doorstep, whenever it knocked on their perfect, white door, they crumbled, unable to deal with the events that transpired.
Even worse—they didn’t know how to deal with people who went through something tragic.
I hated the pity in their eyes. I hated the unspoken words from strangers and acquaintances. I hated the “it gets better” sentence, because it didn’t, really. The throbbing inside my chest might have lessened, but the anger coursing through my veins only intensified with each year that passed. I wanted to scream and shout, tear my lungs apart with the darkness suffocating my very being, but I couldn’t do anything.
I was just a child. I’d learned to keep my mouth shut, to keep my head down and to walk through life as if nothing ever happened to me.
I didn’t want their sad little stares, or their well-meaning words. I didn’t want the whispers behind my back or the stifling attention I got back when everything happened. What could I have done with it?
Nothing.
There were no words that could soothe the gaping wound inside my chest. There were no hugs, no soft-spoken words of love and care that a child needed. There were no parents to check underneath my bed when the monsters crawled outside of my mind into the bleak reality I was living in.
There was no brother to hold my hand on the first day of school.
And now… Now I had no idea which direction my life was going to take, and it terrified me. After all the uncertainty, all the doctors, all the psychologists and changed homes, since I came to Ignis, I found something that resembled peace. Maybe it was complacency or the lack of need to change, but I’d had enough turbulence to last me for two more lifetimes. I didn’t want to leave the only city I could call home.
But it wasn’t like it was my choice.
Or maybe it was. But I couldn’t turn my back on the only family I had left. And that call… that fucking call that changed my life. But for better or for worse, it showed me that there was still hope. Even if it came eleven years later, it still existed.
Then why wasn’t I elated?
Why wasn’t I happy that in two days' time I would be leaving this city, this continent, to go back to my home country, to my home city—Corwynth?
When I’d heard that last name—my original last name—why didn’t I scream from happiness? My paternal grandmother found me after years of searching for me, yet the only emotion flooding my body wasn’t happiness, but sadness. It meant I would be leaving the one steady thing I had in my life.
Hearing her name, her voice as she trembled on the other side of the line, brought back the memories I have long since forgotten. My earliest memories were filled with Grandma Aurelia—her brilliant smile, her kind eyes, and a soft touch—but she was a stranger now. And I wasn’t little Echo Selene Selke, ready to conquer the world with her family by her side.
I was Echo Winslow now—a sinner, just another damned soul who wished to disappear.
How was I supposed to go there, fly across the ocean, when my hollow heart lay heavily inside my chest, without the brightness that once surrounded me and without a family that used to love me?
Would she see the void swallowing my soul?
Would she see the emptiness reflecting in my eyes?
Would she love me even though my hands had blood on them, and my mind stopped believing in dreams?
Were we the sum of our sins? Or were we the children adrift in the great, vast world, floating in the ocean of lost dreams? This funeral for souls was the only real thing I knew, so how was I supposed to move on? Was I supposed to forget or at least try to?
Happiness was as much of a stranger as my dear grandmother, living all the way across the ocean, yet I yearned for it. I needed it, but I didn’t know how to ask for it.
This fortress of sorrow I’d built around my heart was the only place that felt like home.
It was easier hiding behind the empty heart, convincing yourself that you didn’t deserve happiness, because those you loved never lived long enough to find theirs. Sometimes it felt as if my happiness would forever be tied to a small grave on the other side of the city. The grave that shouldn’t have been the final place for my brother’s pure soul.
It should’ve been mine.
I wasafraid of heights for as long as I could remember, but sitting here on the edge of the rooftop of one of the tallest buildings in Ignis felt different. Detached from the world, looking at the strangers down on the street as they ran from one side of the sidewalk to the other, trying to evade the pouring rain, I felt invisible.
Nothing and no one could touch me up here.
I was close to heaven here. I was close to those I’d lost and far away from reality. I liked to pretend to run away from everything I was, faking a different life in my head. It was a beautiful fantasy, but it was all mine.
I found this place months ago, during one of those restless nights, when every single corner of the city suffocated me and when nothing I did quieted the demons inside my head. I found this building in the middle of the darkness when my soul cried for freedom and my heart felt as if it was going to jump out of my chest.
I wasn’t sure if it was sheer luck or the wicked hand of destiny, but the back entrance was unlocked, with no guards in sight. It was the first time that I’d felt alive.
