Prologue

A Chapter by Nichole

Kea's first moment alone since becoming a Missing.

It wasn’t often that silence encased her and she embraced the locked loneliness. Kea peeled off her dirty and torn shirt in the privacy of an old bedroom in an abandoned apartment. Wrapped tightly around her chest was an old ace bandage, which is one she hadn’t unwrapped since first placing it there, despite the fact that it held no wound beyond it. With the service of the nearly atmospheric light from the stars that brought bright streams of rays through the dismembered blinds, it took several times for her warn and dirty hands to create spheres around her bruised body to unwrap the bandage and releasing a small, red, leather-bound book that had been kept close to her heart for an amount of time that she could no longer count accurately. Days seemed to mesh together here, and all that there really was to look forward to any more was the night-time, when the group Kea was traveling with dispersed into private chambers if they could for a little separation from constant companionship.

Clutching the small book between worn fingers as though the thought of dropping it would just simply end the world, she took a few steps back before the back of her knees brushed against a mattress in the corner of the otherwise bare room, save for a broken mirror that when looked into either provided a skewed version of her with multiple appendages or, if stood in front of the right way, seemed clear enough. The mattress creaked under a weight it probably hadn’t felt in months, despite Kea being much more underweight than what could be considered as healthy. She removed a hand to run through her hair. It was getting long " well, longer than it had been in years. She had always favored short hair cuts, it was always much more manageable and suited the shape of her strong jaw line. The way her heart was racing, the way her hands shook ever so slightly, frightened her. Emotion wasn’t a friendly figure, despite what its costume was when it arrived in Kea’s life. Glancing at the bandage that lay on the floor as though it were an un-wrapped ribbon from a present, debating whether or not to replace it with the worn pages between its wrappings, a laugh echoed throughout the room. It didn’t startle her in the slightest, though. It amazed her that she could hear the noise when she most needed it, when she most needed to know that things would be okay in the end.

The binding of the journal snapped from having been constrained for such a long time, and Kea could have sworn to have heard a sort of sigh of relief from it just as a tattered piece of paper floated away from the rest of it, like a person having been burdened with a secret and then finally being able to let it go. The note was a small one, written on a normal, college-ruled piece of paper that was ripped haphazardly in half, but now yellowed and less dense with time. The handwriting on it was more than familiar to Kea, and enough to have her holding her breath, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the sight of it.

"I know that every time I wrote in this, it drove you nuts. You always wanted to know what was written inside of it. It’s true it’s really mostly about you. You are my life, after all. I love you, and will see you soon." Riley