Consciousness comes slowly, by long, painfully disjointed degrees. Throughout the overly prolonged process, I feel strangely lightheaded, almost disembodied, as if I'm floating through space without having my body weigh me down.
Is this what death feels like?
I'm I dead?
I don't think so, but the last thing I remember was bleeding. Bleeding a lot and feeling weaker and weaker.
After that, everything was blank.
Is heaven blank?
Struggling, I try to push my eyelids up so that I can look around and find out where I am. But I feel as if my eyelids has been glued down. Not only that, but someone had put anvils on each of them for good measure. Otherwise, why couldn't I raise them at will?
I become determined to open my eyes.
Something tells that me if I don't open them, I'm going to fade away until there's nothing left of me but dust. Dust that would be blown off to another universe.
I like this universe.
This universe has my parents in it. And my sister.
And Noah.
Noah.
I remember the argument. I remember him walking out on me. Does that mean it's over? We didn't have anything much together to begin with. But whether we had anything or not, I don't want to leave Noah, not ever.
What was I thinking?
With a noise that's half a grunt, half a whimper, I concentrate exclusively on pushing my eyelids up until I finally do it.
I could see.
And what I see is Cory.
I try not to let the disappointment in my eyes show.
He's standing over me, looking worn and worried. More worried than I remember ever seeing him. He's holding my hand that has a bandage wrapped around my wrists.
"Cory?" I say hoarsely.
"Don't act too excited," he wryly tells me. He noticed. "Simone and Lacey are outside. We were all worried." His gaze falls to the neck chain dangling around my neck. "Is that his?"
I put a hand over it protectively. "How'd you know?"
"Simone told me everything." I'm not surprised. He'd have asked why I attempted suicide and Simone must've told him the only thing that came to mind if she saw the letters laying open on my bed. "I think it's time you let him go. And the guilt."
"How?" I ask with a frustrated cry.
"I have a suggestion. And it'll work. Do you trust me?"
His question hangs in the air. Do I trust him? Things don't seem awkward between us after the kiss on the Potomac cruise. And I guess that's how it'll always be with him. He's never one to act awkward when something happens, and just goes with the way things are at the moment like nothing happened. I can say it really helps me, otherwise I wouldn't be able to look at his face right now.
"I trust you," I manage a nod and notice a headache at the back of my head.
His smile is satisfying. "Good."
"Miss Brooke, you have a visitor." The nurse's voice says from the hallway as Miss Renee and Jane step into the room looking somber. They're both wearing black outfits, Jane holds a bouquet of roses in her tiny hands.
"You look better than the last time we saw you," Miss Renee says when Cory already excused himself, giving us privacy.
"How long have I been here?"
"Just three days. Trump's still President." I manage a smile, watching Jane walk forward to present me the flowers with a Get well soon card sticked to it.
"Please don't die. My cousin says it hurts right here," she points a little finger to the left side of her chest area. I look back up at Renee.
"How is he?"
"I've never seen him so lost," she tells me, her reply barely audible. Any louder and I'd be able to hear the tears in her throat. "He never cries. Not once. Not when Nathan was convicted of murder and they had taken him out of the courtroom in chains. Not when a horse had thrown him when he was ten and had come damn near close to stomping him to death. But three days ago, I saw a new him. His tough shell broken to pieces. I watched him weep like an infant. It was hard for me."
"Did he come with you?"
She shook her head. "He says it's his fault, says you're here because of him. I have no idea what he meant by that, but I think he's... never mind."
I pull the sheets away from my body, struggling to get out of the bed. "I want to see him. I need to see him."
"The doctors say you can't go anywhere until you get enough rest. You lost a lot of blood."
I don't listen to what she's saying. I continue disconnecting the rope-like stuffs connected to my hands as my bare foot touches the cold floor.
I hear her calling out my name, but she sounds so distant even if she's just right behind me.
My wobbly legs don't take me far before dizziness takes over, making my vision become blurry. Out of the several fuzzy faces I see in the hospital's hallway, none resembles the one I'm looking for.
Where is he!
There's that spot in my chest again where it hurts so bad, where it feels like my heart's been ripped out of my chest and is bleeding at the aftermath.
I'm twirled around by a pair of hands as I come face to face with Simone. She's looking like she hasn't slept for days. "Allie?"
"He's not here," I sob.
"Who?"
"Noah. I lost Clarke two years ago, I don't want to lose him too."
She makes a frustrated sound. "Clarke was an idiot. Snap out of it."
I notice we're already attracting a small crowd because of my dramatic crying scene, but I'm too stressed to care.
"What if I don't see him again?" I cry harder, weighing the possibilities of Noah already on his way back to Florida to clear his brother of false charges. I'll never get a chance to say goodbye. What we had ended before it even started.
The thought sends massive shock to my brain as I feel my legs give up, slumping myself to the cold floor.
The next hazy images I see are nurses carrying me on a stretcher, fixing what resembles an oxygen mask to my mouth.
After that, I finally close my eyes to dream, and I dream of someone who's presence is the only thing I need.
_________________
I get let out of the hospital two days later.
The doctors said I haven't healed much, but I insisted because I needed to get out of the suffocating room in the hospital.
Plus I'm tired of taking shots. No one knows, but I'm actually scared of them.
Lacey was the one who found me in my pool of blood when she came back to the rooms to fetch condoms from her drawer. In my life, I never knew condoms would be something that'll save me from dying. Trust Lacey to flip out on me for wanting to 'die a virgin' in her own words.
I was warmly welcomed back to the hotel by a lot of people. Some which were friends, some I just met for the first time. It made me realize I was loved by people I don't even know. I'm never going to forgive myself for wanting to leave behind such wonderful people.
I'm currently standing in front of a mirror, smoothening out my black dress with my hands and getting ready for Cory's plan regarding tonight.
He says if I'm going to let go of the guilt and the voices, I'll have to let go of Clarke first. And that means disposing of everything that belongs to him which is still in my care.
My hands instinctively reaches up to touch the chain on my neck that he gave me on my sixteenth birthday. Funny how the neck-chain was the only thing that got me talking with Noah when it ended up in his hands.
I can remember being so furious that night when I hit him, which later caused him to push me into the pool. I guess that was the start of our weird relationship. We weren't exactly enemies, but we weren't friends either. We were somewhere hanging in between those two words.
I enjoyed our bickering while it lasted, the way we constantly riled ourselves up. Who knew that stupid snobby dude from the flight to Hawaii would have a huge part in my life.
"Are you ready?" Cory's voice comes from the doorway, snapping me out of my thoughts. I nod and pick up the box of letters I've written to Clarke and stored for months.
It's time to let it go.
It's time to let him go.
Outside, in the night, Cory already set up a burning fire on the beach. The cool night breeze sways it softly but doesn't put it off.
He stands beside me by the fire, silently watching me with the box in my hands. I know he wants me to take the bold step, so it wouldn't seem like he's forcing me to do it.
Making my mind up, I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, open up the box and empty it out into the fire. I know I need to say something for the last time, maybe not in form of a letter but something that'll finally let me be at peace.
"This is my goodbye, to our good memories, and our bad," I begin. "To our inside jokes and the ones we never quite got. And to all the what-ifs we had, and all the plans we made."
I unclasp the chain I've held close to my heart for two years, tossing it into the fire with no regrets and watching everything burn along with the burden I carried for so long.
For the hundredth time this week, a tear escapes my eye. But this one is different because it's tears of joy.
Cory slings an arm over my shoulders and kisses the top of my head. "It's over."
The realization ripples through me.
It's over.
It's finally over.
I'm too weak to do a victory dance, so I allow myself sink into Cory's warm embrace, watching inks fade away from the papers as they burn to ashes.
I don't know how long we stand there, but we say our goodnights moments later while I trudge back to the rooms, emotionally and physically exhausted. I slip into Noah's shirt I've kept for weeks since I took it from the pool's storage room where he worked. It lost his body scent already, but it'll always be ingrained in my memory.
I can almost smell him.
On my bed, with the lights off and my quilt over my head while half-asleep, I hear the room door creak open, followed by the sound of quiet footsteps approaching the bed.
Gently, the person crawls into the bed beside me so that my back is pressing against the front of their body. With great care, slips their arms around me and holds me close, burying their face in my neck.
"Noah...?" I mumble in my sleep. If this is a dream, then I don't want to wake up.
"Shhh," he cooed. "Just go to sleep."
"Then..." I lose my train of thought, fight to get it back. "Will you..." I can barely speak, and I can't see him at all. I swallow, make an effort: "... kiss me while I sleep?"
I'm not certain, but I think I hear him say, "Always."
I try to reach out my hand to him, and in my mind I do. My last thought is that I wanted to touch him.