eli ostensen [d11] fin

When we were nothing but children, washed up on a forgotten shore, we never sought for anything other than our own survival. Cost wasn't a factor that existed in our brains, because there was nothing we wouldn't do to keep on living.

We were born rotting. Our skin decays and our minds deteriorate, and such is the beauty of life; the temporary, fleeting concept of it, and the race, the raw, brutal effort of dragging yourself as far as possible away from the drowning abyss of death. You're on this side of existence for such a short period of time, but you're on that side forever.

You know that of course, dear sister. We came so close before, so close that I could taste the bitter inexistence on my dry lips.

Like fish, we were; exposed and near naked on a colourless beach. The wind lashed at our backs. The dead ocean spray numbed us to our bones, left us pale corpses heavy in the grey sand.

And maybe it was a blessing, to be stripped of everything we had, locked away like we were for weeks, starved and deprived of water until we told them what they needed to know. I can't help but think it was the best thing to happen to us. They cast to the seashore for the waves to claim us, hoping that our bodies would never surface again. Clean, quick, no evidence. No bullets. Or maybe they just enjoyed the concept of it. Either way, I thank them.

For as I lay there, my existence eroding away with every lapse of the tide, my dear sister beside me, her breaths short and her eyes empty, I understood what life meant. Because for you to truly feel alive, you have to feel death first.

A fistfull of a sand a dry gasp for air, every muscle in my body straining as I lifted myself onto my forearms and began to drag myself, and my sister, up that beach. Inch by inch.

Took hours. Hours and hours.

It wasn't until the first flickers of sunlight stroked across the hills, and the shrieks of seagulls above woke me from unconsciousness that some shop workers found us, led up by the cobblestones on the promenade.

We decided that we should move up-District, away from the coast and further towards Twelve's border. I had heard that there was plenty of work up there for young men like myself, and with mother and father gone, we had no one who could provide for us anymore. We had to make a new life, away from our past. We had to make out that we did perish in the sea, that the great expanse of blue and grey had taken us from the world. Because then they won't come looking for us.

Then, we can start again.

But now, life is so much more. I had my life taken from me, I was treated like an insect, a lesser-creature. Those people took the value of my life and decided it was worth next to nothing, decided that I wasn't supposed to continue living - they had that power, and there was nothing I could do. They cast us away, left us to die.

But I took it back, all of it. I took it back, decided I was worth more.

And in this new life, I'm never going to let anyone decide how much I'm worth ever again.

Cost isn't a factor. It's not a matter of how, it's a matter of why, and the answer is because I am more.