Forever

    Sometimes I think about running away. I dream about it all the time. I can picture it so vividly, almost as if it has already happened. The drab gray walls surrounding me fall away and are replaced by explosive colors. Magnificent shades of greens surround everything the concrete doesn’t exist anymore. Flowers of every colors bloom, replacing the walls, twisting in with the green grass. A perfect paradise where nothing bad can happen and everyone is happy. At least a paradise where I’m happy.     But then I open my eyes… And everything is back to gray. Most days I would do my best not to sleep, so I wouldn’t wake up disappointed. Don’t write me off as a sob story yet, I have my moments of happiness, they’re just very few and far between.     “Kenz, come on, you’ll be late for work.” I don’t have to look up to know my mom was standing at the door smiling down at me.      “I’ll be right there mom.” I tell her, reminding myself to smile. It’s hard to smile most days. No matter how much I try I can’t seem to find it in myself to be happy anymore. I know that makes me sound selfish, but I can’t help it. I can’t find happiness in anything I see or do anymore. Everything just seems so bleak.     But I can’t complain either. I’m luckier than most people. People who do have the right to be unhappy. I’m healthy, there’s nothing physically wrong with me. I have loving parents who support anything and everything I do. Friends that I adored. How can I still be unhappy?     Maybe there’s something just fundamentally wrong with me? Maybe I’m just not meant to be happy?      “Kenzie! Come on!” Mom shouted probably from somewhere in the living room or the kitchen.     “Coming!” I shouted back gathering the last of my things into my backpack. I took one more deep breath and tried as much as possible looking at the suffocating gray walls. It was harder than it should have been.      “Good morning sweetheart.” That was dad’s greeting to me every morning.      There was just a small blip of emotion that stirred within me before the emptiness consumed everything once again and I was left faking another smile.      It was exhausting having to fake every emotion but I had to. My parents didn’t need to worry so much about me. They had more than enough on their plates to worry about me on top of everything else. Dad had lost his job a few months back due to a work related injury. He had spent over twenty years working for an automotive company as a lead mechanic, until he was injured. He never told us exactly what happened, but he had received some money from his former employer. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to cover all of our bills. He now spent his days limping around trying to find any place that would be willing to hire him. Every now and then he’d find the odd mechanic job but nobody was willing to hire him. He was being optimistic but no one was willing to hire him. I knew well enough that all they saw when they looked at him was a big liability and a possible lawsuit.       My mom who had dedicated her entire life to being a stay at home mom was now working nights at a local fast food place, just to help pay the bills.  Most days she wouldn’t come home until maybe five or six in the morning. The instant she walked through the door she’d start making breakfast for everyone. Then she’d go on and wake all of us up one by one. Starting with my dad, then my sister, and finally me. It wasn’t until we were all gone that she would even go to bed.      My sister, well she was my exact opposite. She was always happy, talkative, and generally just more fun to be around than I ever was in twenty years. Elle is only two years younger, we both grew up the same, with the same parents, living in the same apartment our entire lives, yet we have two vastly different outlooks on everything.     I tried to shake every thought out of my head as I sat next to my dad and sister. Elle was already spewing out her plans for the day. She still had a few weeks before she started college, having just graduated from high school. She had wanted to go to an out of state school. But mom and dad hadn’t been able to afford it and her scholarship wasn’t enough to cover it. She cried about it for a week and our parents scrambled to try and find some money, but it was no use, the money they could come up with wasn’t nearly enough what she would need.     “And then this afternoon Carly and I are going to go watch a movie with some of our other friends.” Elle ended, digging into the scrambled eggs mom had set infront of her. I had settled for a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast, I didn’t like eating in the mornings. I’ve never had much of an appetite and lately it was mostly non existent.      “That’s nice, Ellie.” My dad smiled before turning his attention back to me. “So Kenz.” He cleared his throat.     This can’t be good. Whenever dad used that tone or started a sentence with “So Kenz.” I knew he was going to try to get me to do something. Those conversations never ended up well. Still, as I usually did, I looked up from my toast ready to face this head on. I had ten minutes before I had to escape to work either way.      “You ever going to go back to school?” He questioned staring me down as if I were a suspect in a murder investigation.      Here we go.      School was always a point of contention between my dad and I; he thought I should go back and I saw no point of returning to a place that had done nothing but make me feel more miserable than I already felt.      I had done fairly well all throughout middle and high school, but once I reached college all that seemed to change. I thought I had been doing fairly well, only to find out I was not. Then I failed my first class and everything just seemed to spiral out of control from there out. I was put on academic probation, only to fail again. And then I had decided I’d take a break for a semester or two. Then dad lost his job and I had to pitch in and help my parents. After that school just kept being shoved back and back. And now the thought of returning to that place just fills me with more dread than I can possibly ever hope to decipher.      “Mike.” My mom sighed, tired of the argument she knew would surely happen if my dad kept talking.      It was a touchy subject, he thought I should be doing something with my life instead of wasting it away like I have been doing. My mom thought that I just needed some time to find myself and figure out what it was that I wanted to do. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth; I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.      Most days I didn’t even have the energy to get out of my bed, how could I possibly know what I wanted to do with my life if most days I didn’t even want to be living it?      “No, Rhia, she needs to get back to school.” My dad exclaimed fist banging on the wooden table. All my mom could do was sigh at that moment and try to eat her breakfast. Her shoulders were tense but she tried to remain as calm as she possibly could.      His attention is back to me in an instant. “You’re smart Kenz, you could be doing so much more with your life.”     I had heard the spiel a million times before. At one point I had tried to explain to my parents what I felt but they hadn’t understood me. My mom freaked out instantly, talks about seeing a psychologist had been brought up. My dad thought that I was just being dramatic or lazy and not wanting to go back to school. In the end they hadn’t understood what I was trying to tell them and after that I just gave up trying.      “Actually dad I’m going to enroll for the summer semester.” I mumbled out, munching on my piece of toast.     It was a lie of course. I had no intentions of going back to that hell hole. But if it got my dad off my back for a little bit, I was more than willing to lie. At least to avoid an argument.      My statement had stumped him a bit. He just sat there for a good minute staring at me with a mixture of suspicion and joy. “Really?”     I nodded. “Yeah.” I swallowed the bile that had risen to my throat. “I was going to tell you guys yesterday, but between work and everything it kind of just slipped my mind.”      If there is a hell, I’m going straight to it. My heart sank as I watched the excitement consume both of my parents. The smile on my face was forced and purely for their benefit.      “That’s my girl.” My dad praised. “I knew you would do the right thing.”     “That’s great Kenzie!” My mom hugged me and I felt another rock drop into the pit of my stomach.      Elle scoffed, glaring at me from across the table. “Does that mean I have to see you all the time now?”     My sister and I don’t get along, big surprise there, huh?      I didn’t bother looking at Elle, instead I chugged the rest of my orange juice and got up. “It’s a big enough campus that I won’t have to deal with your crap, Elle.”     I leaned down hugging my mother once more before turning to my father and doing the same thing. “I better get to work don’t want to be late.” I had to leave as soon as possible, my chest was tightening and the walls felt like they would cave in on me at any moment.      I was out the door before anyone could utter another word. At least outside I could breathe properly. But even outside the gray followed me everywhere.      We didn’t live on the best side of town, but we didn’t live on the worst either. It was somewhere in the middle, not quite happy but not quite miserable either. Still this place inspired nothing but melancholy within me. There was no beauty just a lot of people who have given up. People who woke up day to day and followed the routine they have forced themselves to follow for their entire lives.      I was no different just another cog in the machine. Another hopeless person wallowing in the melancholia. That thought makes me smile a little bit. Only I could smile while thinking I’m in a constant state of melancholia. There's no real reason for it, I’m just weird that way.      I’m weird in a lot of ways though, I’m just a constant contradiction to everything I say and do. I like being alone but I hate being lonely. I hate crowded places but constantly find myself surrounded by people. I hate attention but constantly find myself craving it more and more. I don’t do these things on purpose, my brain is just at constant war with my feelings. None of it really makes sense, honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever make any sense. Not even to myself.     And as I walked to work I tried to clear all the thoughts from my head. I’d just give myself an anxiety attack thinking too much about the things that made me tick. I scoffed at myself, annoyed that I could cause myself to spiral down as easily as I could. But that was my sad truth.      I was steps away from reaching the salon where I worked when I saw the prettiest butterfly I had ever seen fluttering right past me. It was easily the size of my palm and the most magnificent shade of blue I had ever seen. It didn’t look real, had I not been watching it flap its wings I would’ve believed it was nothing more than a drawing floating on the wind.      “You’re too beautiful to be stuck in a place like this.” I found myself whispering as it faded away.     I sighed, watching it until I could no longer see it. My surroundings seemed grayer than normal.      I cleared my head and got ready for eight hours of dealing with people and sweeping hair. Fun. At least it gave me something to do and a much needed reprieve from most of my thoughts.      I pasted on another smile as I walked in through the door, the bell chime announcing my arrival, greeting everyone I came across. Another day another countdown.     Hours came and went and before I knew it, it was nearly closing time.      “Kenzie!” My sweeping, the millionth time that day, stopped as I looked for who had called me. “Can you do me a favor?”     “Yeah, sure.” I said turning to my coworker Diana. She was the only one who ever asked me if I could please help them out with something. Everyone else kind of just ordered me around.     There were only three of us left, Kristen who was just about to leave by the look of it, she was shoving everything into her first as fast as she could and fidgeting more than I had ever seen her do in the year I’ve known her. Diana who was leading the last customer to her chair. And then there was me sweeping up clumps of hair.      “Could you get me some towels from the back and a some more shaving cream?” Diana asked quickly before turning back to her customer, a man this time.      I nodded, mostly to myself since no one else was paying attention to me. Nolan’s wasn’t just a salon. It catered to both men and women having both a barber’s side and then a salon side. Mr. Nolan’s son, Daniel, had thought it would help bring in more business but I hadn’t seen any significant difference in customers. Some days it would be as busy as possible, and other days, well it was mostly just seven to nine people sitting around and talking for most of the day. Most of the time it was just regulars who came in every few weeks for their basic maintenance.      I was gone for five minutes, no more than that, but I will never forget what happened when I went back to the floor.      Everything seemed to be moving at half speed. Kristen was gone by now the only people left were Diana and the customer. Only instead of Diana giving her consultation, the man had her pinned to the wall, one of his hands over her mouth and the other was reaching into her shorts.     I don’t remember dropping everything I had been holding but I must have because he turned to me instantly. He must’ve forgotten I was still here. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, beating so hard it felt as if something was being thrown against my chest. I saw the man’s lips moving but I couldn’t focus, the room was starting to spin. My limbs became as heavy as lead, so much so that I felt immobile. Tears stung my eyes and my vision began to blur.      Why was this happening? This neighborhood was relatively safe, the only crime that ever really went on was petty theft. Not this, not something so… The thought alone churned my stomach. Why Diana? She is a good person, she works three jobs to provide for her son, she’s never harmed so much as a fly. The woman’s practically a saint, why would someone want to hurt her?      Someone’s screaming, I could hear the high pitch tone but I couldn’t make out any of the words. Everything was just blending into an unintelligible blur. This cannot be happening, not to Diana, not at this moment. I had to do something.      What can you possibly do?      Do you really think you can help?      You can’t even move.      The traitorous voice in my head was taunting me to no end. Distracting me from the real danger in front of me. The man scoffed at me turning back to Diana, I could see the panic on her face as she tried her best to fight him off but he was too strong.      “Leave her alone!” My voice cracked, the words coming out strangled and afraid.      I wasn’t afraid, I was terrified, of what he was doing and could still do to her, and of what he could possibly do to me. Is it selfish of me to be afraid for myself in this situation?      “And what are you going to do if I don’t?” His voice was smooth, pleasant, almost sensual in a way. That made him all the more terrifying, he was charming. He was handsome too, with just a smattering of stubble on his face, and incredibly well dressed. Definitely not the type of man people picture when they think of a predator. But that’s exactly what he was, and Diana and I were his prey tonight.     He scoffed. Clearly unimpressed with my lack of response.     “Kenzie, run, call someone!” Diana managed to scream out now that his attention was  one me. She had found an opening and she took it.      Only I would find myself wishing she hadn’t.      The predator’s attention was back to her, instantly. It was slow, deliberate movements. Like he was savoring ever detail of the moment. It was gut wrenching to watch and still I couldn’t find it within myself to look away or to even move. I could feel the tears running down my cheeks now, as I watched him whisper something to Diana, moving both of his hands to her neck.     And then he began to strangle her.      I moved then, running over and pulling his arms away trying to get him to loosen the hold he had on her. Diana thrashed in his grip trying to gasp for air, nails clawing at his hands leaving cuts deep enough that they began to bleed. He shook me off easily enough, managing to elbow me in the chest hard enough to send me to the floor.      I could see the veins on his arms straining against his skin, it looked like they’d pop out at any second. He was going to kill her, if didn’t do something to get him away from her, Diana was going to die.      “Let her go!” I screamed again, rushing into his back pulling at his arms as hard as I could. I kicked at him trying to hit hard enough to get him away from her. It wasn’t working.      I spotted a pair of shears laying on the vanity of Josh’s station. I ran and got them gripping onto the damn things as hard as I possibly could. I tried not to think about my next move, if I did I would chicken out and Diana, who had started turning an alarming shade of blue, would die.     I held my breath and ran at him, thrusting the shears into his back, stabbing him right in between his neck and shoulders. The blood poured out instantly, his pristine white shirt instantly stained with his own blood.      What have I done?      He let go of the barely conscious Diana, howling with pain. I watched her fall to the floor like a pile of rags. Was she even still breathing? Was I too late?      “You little bitch.” He growled, the facade of calm gentleman completely replaced by a bloodthirsty animal.      “I’ll kill you!” He lunged for me.      I screamed scrambling back to get away from him but not daring to give him my back. Unfortunately for me I wasn’t nearly as fast as I should have been because he was on me in an instant. My wrist caught in his vice-like grip, I let out another scream, not just from the fear this time but also from the pain shooting up my arm.        I pleaded with him, trying whatever I could to get him to let me go. I hadn’t seen his hand ball into a fist, I only felt the impact when it collided against my cheek. The pain blossomed quickly spreading throughout the entirety of the right side of my face. I might’ve screamed again I’m not sure. All I know is that my face was throbbing and my vision was beginning to blur with tears. There was a high pitch noise ringing in my ear.      Is this how I die? A red haze had started setting in behind my eyes the only thing I could see were shadows dancing everywhere. I could feel him standing over me, see his shadow outlined in startling red hues. I could almost make out dark wings extending from his back.      Death had come for me.      I couldn’t hear much anymore, just a high pitched squeal in my ears blocking out all other noise.      If you asked me what happened next, I wouldn’t be able to tell you simply because I don’t know what happened. I just remembered shutting my eyes for a second, counting up to seven, and then opening my eyes. The haze was gone, the pain in my cheek reduced to nothing more than a dull throbbing, the ringing was no more.      All I could see were the fluorescent light fixtures dangling above me, the teal colored ceiling serving as a lackluster background. Why is there no noise?      Peeling myself from the dirty tiled floor was more of a struggle than it should have been. My body ached every time I moved, an uncomfortable feeling settling in the pit of my stomach. Something was seriously wrong I could feel it deep within my bones. The stillness in the air was more than stifling.     A bright splash of color caught my eye. Red. Drops of red loitered my legs, some of them had trickled down leaving a darkening streak behind.      Blood. I was covered in blood. I scrambled back trying to clear myself of it.      I didn’t have to look too far to find the source, the man who I had thought of as Death come to take me, was laying there on his stomach, dead laying in a pool of blood. I couldn’t find the energy to react. I didn’t-couldn’t feel anything. I could see Diana slumped up against the wall black marks covering every inch of her neck.      I need to get out of here. I need to leave, now.      Standing was even harder than sitting had been. Every step I took sent me stumbling to the floor. I kept trying to lift myself up clinging to everything I could to try and balance myself but it was no use. I just kept crashing into things and tumbling to the floor, until I had no choice but to crawl my way to the back room. If I made it back there than I’d be able to get to my cell phone, I had to call someone, I’d never get out of here in this condition. I didn’t feel frantic though, not in the least bit. I felt calm, unnervingly calm. I didn’t care about what was going on out there, I just knew I needed to get out. The two bodies outside didn’t bother me in the slightest. My legs lack of cooperation was the only thing bothering me.      Somehow I managed to crawl into the back room to the backpack I always kept hidden in the back corner, on the floor nestled between an unused filing cabinet and and the end table where the wax beads were kept. I always kept it there to make sure no one went through my stuff. It worked, no one bothered to ever look down.      I ignored my blood stained hands and fished out my cell phone. I dialed the first person that came to mind.     It rang twice before he answered.     “Roman.” My voice was too calm, too measured for the situation I was in.      “I need your help.”