Afterlife - Stephanie Hudson Page 0,165

come true in my life? One after another I had been used and thrown away, when I was no longer needed...but this time I would change it all. I would never go back to that...never. And this was my proof, no matter how small an action it seemed.

The trees swayed around the forest and I knew this was a perfect place to finish this obsession. Once and for all!

I pulled the picture of Draven out of my back pocket and sat down crossing my legs getting close enough to the edge to be able to get rid of the problem. I took one long hard look at the pencilled sketch knowing that I had already seen the last of the original. So now my re-birth would be to get rid of every last bit of him, including any of my thoughts about him. See, I had the mentality that if I could cast my demons from my mind by drawing them, locking them into the page thus banishing them from entering my mind again. But I had always kept them and I never really understood why I did this. So it got me thinking, maybe the only way to get him out of my mind completely is to remove him from my memory. So with this in mind, I kissed my hand placing it gently on his face before tearing into it with so much fiery passion that before long it was in tiny pieces in my hands and I waited for why I had come here.

I closed my eyes remaining still trying to judge the air around me, feeling it coming close thinking if this could help once before then maybe I would have a chance. Even if it just got a little better then that could be enough to get me through this, making the most horrific pain I have ever felt turn into a mind numbing existence. So I sat waiting patiently for the exact moment when it felt right to let go of him forever....And then it came blowing my hair up around my head and I lifted my hands opening my palms feeling the pain being taken away with the pieces I had left of Draven. They blew upwards, carried into the sky where they belonged...where he belonged. I watched as they blew into the green abyss of the forest and my eyes strained as I watched until they were all out of sight.

Now I could move on and finally....

Say goodbye.

Chapter 29- Grasping Reality

After that day I did in fact get slightly better as I pulled myself together and carried on. The pain never fully went away but was instead replaced with a dull ache, as my mind was numb. But I went on with my life as you have to. Sophia never returned to History, I didn't even know whether she dropped out or was ill but it seemed too much of a coincidence that she disappeared from college life. No-one was allowed to talk about it and the only one that had been nice to me from the beginning was Jerry. But even this I think was staged. I completed my shifts like a machine being controlled by the NEED.... more than the WANT part of me. But the more and more I worked the less painful it got being there. Then even the others started talking to me again and Mike and I were once again friends. We even flirted with each other on occasions. I finally started to relax again.

Nothing happened again, there were no more dreams that included him. There were no more crazy bird sightings and I didn't even have any dreams of monsters. However my dreams didn’t just stop. No, instead they had taken on a darker turn. I decided that after the fourth time of waking up in the house screaming I would finally give in and see a counsellor. I had made my appointment with a Doctor Goff and I was now sat in a waiting room with peach walls and crappy pictures of summer flowers in pots and a little girl playing happily with her dog. If this was supposed to have a calming effect then it most certainly didn't work. After my nightmares, I had seemed to have taken a darker approach to life and I tried desperately to control it. I found nothing fun or good in anything anymore and it was starting to scare me.

The only peace I would find is whenever