Page 84 of Total Exposure

I watch, forgetting about the past for once. Putting Augustine and Jordan behind me for a while.

And just be… present as I go upstairs, get her book, sit on the couch where she just was, and open it to the last page.

Did you ever feel forsaken?

Just a lifetime of waste

as people say they must’ve been mistaken?

Autonomous child now blasphemously wild

alone, and lost, and afraid of being broken?

Well, I have.

That was me.

Tired of all the publicity.

Choppy waves of tattered lace

and only shadows on the stage.

So I withdrew and stayed alone

withdrawing further from my throne

of greed and hunger

and all the ways they threw me under

until there was nothing left

but the fractured lights of night

and the disillusionment of wonder.

I have been forsaken.

That’s why I’m here.

I think I stare at that poem for eternity. Several eternities. I read it nine hundred and twenty-three times. Or a dozen, at least. I scrutinize every word she chose for me. Every secret she just revealed.

And now I’m her. I hold the book up to the camera lens she is most definitely not looking through, and ask myself, who is not on the other side, “Where’s the rest of it?”

I need the rest of it.

Chapter Twenty-Nine - Evangeline

There are emotions flowing through me that I can’t describe. There are no words for them. It’s fear but longing. It’s excitement, but sadness. It’s desire, but anguish.

It’s crazy. That’s all I know for certain.

I am not a part of the real world. I am not here, or there. I am not living, or dead. I am something in between.

It scares me.

But I don’t care.