muddy these waves we weave / helena series {✾}

Ever since I found Joseph Burke's bones in the woods, I'm convinced that people expect too much of me.

It was never my intention to be of importance to anyone. All my life, I had always been the girl who was content with erasing herself. If all my thoughts were to be written down, I didn't care for the idea of them being read. My mother told me to start keeping a diary when I was six, and I remember staring at those empty pages for days on end. Never filled, never shared, just resentment building inside of me as my childhood went up in smoke without any say on my part. I stopped wasting my breath. Sometimes, I tell myself that ignoring my pain is the same as never being hurt in the first place.

It's a lie, and I know it.

My father at least had the good grace to die when I was just a baby, too young to form a memory to haunt me. Mom overdosed six years and two months ago, one week before I made the decision to march through my own trauma and ignore the way it felt like my soul was splitting apart inside me. I had to have my own back, balance all of my burdens on my own two shoulders, and I never once hesitated. Because it's my agony, my undoing, and it's up to me to choose how I react to it. I don't see the point in sobbing when I've been pushed off my feet.

I want to stand up. I want to be on my own. I hold myself proudly for a girl who only wants to be left alone.

Hero nuzzles the back of my calf with his cold nose, panting in the late summer heat. I smile at him, tethering myself to the last connection I think I'll ever care to have. It's just me and him, for as long as they both of us can manage. I don't think too much about what will happen in my inevitable loneliness, beyond the tall trees and the little house that I want to build, the endless expanse of trails for my closest friend to run and explore. All I've ever been able to do is make my peace with the things that happen around me.

Like finding a missing boy in the forest / like hearing the news that a pandemic has begun.

Both moments feel sacred in a way, quiet. Despite my best efforts to distance myself from the community I was raised in, all the while fucking up and making myself a hometown hero, I can't avoid the signs of chaos rising in the district. I was lucky to avoid the initial outbreak, nowhere near the center of Six when the virus started to spread. And I would have stayed there, I'll admit, if I hadn't received the call that my services were requested.

"A number of infected individuals have made a break for the border, and we're low on men as it is. I know that you and your dog do this for a living, and I know that you're the one that made the breakthrough in the Burke case." My lips frown instinctually, if I could sink into the floor I would. "We could really use your help again."

The silence stretched on / I tried and failed to convince myself to keep up pleasantries.

"Let's talk the pay, and we'll see."

Gotta buy that lonely dream.