Complete radio silence for a month and a half, and then …here’s my phone number, Ophelia, like some customer service representative.Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any issues.
“Hi, yes, my boyfriend left without a word. I’d like a refund,” I mutter, as I shut off my phone without saving the number.
My lungs ache, and whatever protection I thought I’d built against the harsh slap of Alex’s silence crumbles away. Anger rejuvenates my tired mind, the blood rushing through my veins almost an audible thrum beneath the duvet.
Why has he given me his number?
I throw my phone to the end of the bed before I do something stupid like text him.
Silence descends around the valley, a break in the wind offering a brief reprieve from the whistling and the whispering that snake through the trees. Somehow, it’s worse than the noise.
Loneliness is like a physical presence in my life. A person more than it is a feeling. Faceless, nameless, back turned to me. Teasing and taunting, laughing at me whenever I have to eat dinner alone.
Like I always have been, I think I was a bit naive about how my life would change once I had friends. Friends were a panacea, a big, shiny, glowing orb that if I could only reach, would turn all the shit in my life into gold. The yawning chasm left by my parents’ deaths would shrink, and silence wouldn’t feel like an ache.
Now I have some, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. The introduction of friends to my life has filled adifferentvoid, numbed adifferentpain. My friends make the mornings pass quicker, fill the afternoons with noise and laughter, but when the night has stripped the day of its color and the day has stripped the resolve from my bones, my past still eats away at me.
I trace my finger round the lucky key ring my dad gave me on my twelfth birthday. It’s actually a shopping cart token, but I don’t think he knew that. He just liked the fact that it was orange.
He loved my mother’s hair, always said it was the reason he loved her at first sight. I think that’s the reason I don’t hate mine. I struggle to pick holes in my reflection when it’s the combination of the two people I loved more than anything else.
I startle, the key ring falling from my hand when footsteps sound outside my door. I wait for them to fade, wait for the guy down the hall to close his bedroom door, but everything is silent.
My breath is suspended, whole body frozen as I watch two black shapes come to a stop in the dull strip of light beneath my bedroom door.
No knock comes.
Did I lock the door? God, I hope I locked the door.
My fingers tighten around my knife, my own voice making me jump. “Hello?”
I cringe at the rustling of sheets as I slowly rise from the bed, bare feet silent against tile. I don’t dare breathe, mouth clamped shut as I wrap my hand around the door handle.
With my heart beating a rapid, sickening rhythm in my throat, I count to three and yank open the door, holding my knife out, just in case.
It meets … nothing, no one.
The hallway is deserted, the shadows between the doorways eerily still.
The only sign I’m not going completely mad is the remainder of two rapidly fading wet footprints at my feet.
A KNOCK ATmy bedroom door has me jumping out of my skin.
This is it.I’m about to get murdered. Probably.
I’ve hardly slept for two days. I spend my nights covering and uncovering the thin gap beneath the door, unable to decide betweenyes, I’d really love to know that someone is standing outside my door, andno, thanks, I’d rather just die a quick, ignorant death.
“Ophelia,” sings Colette on the other side of the gnarled wood. “We have snacks and plans.”
“I’m busy.”
Divya’s voice comes next. “Sitting on the bed in a towel while plucking hairs from your stomach doesn’t constitutebusy.”
God, I’m getting predictable.
“Rude!” I shout, throwing the tweezers to the back of my drawer. I drag on a hoodie and pull the door open.
Project Pheelz.
