“Already Dead” Ch. 6
She went up to her room to collect her things. The stairs felt longer than usual, and she took her time walking up them. For the first time since she was a child, she counted the steps as she took them, one after another.
There were fourteen steps.
At the top of the stairs she headed straight to her room. She considered going to her parents room to see if there was anything there she would need, but she couldn't do it.
She couldn't face that down.
There was a suitcase she had used when she went to stay in a hotel with her parents for a few weeks. It had been three years since then. They had had bugs in their house, and they needed to have it fumigated. She remembered when she was a kid that seeing those striped canvases covering their home made her think of the circus. For a moment she wondered if they would do that with those homes that were considered cleared.
She wondered if they would do it with her house.
Pushing the thought away, she mechanically went about, grabbing outfits of various kinds, some formal and most casual. She then grabbed her charger along with a power brick her friend Stacy had let her keep. She considered grabbing her laptop, decided against it, then added it all the same. She didn't use it much. Most of her friends weren't online anymore, and most of what you could find online was just about the pandemic.
It was depressing. But she needed it. Needed some sort of trapping of normalcy that she could reasonably use to feel like the world wasn't falling apart.
Toiletries and shoes came last, even though she realized she had never even asked what they would be willing to let her bring with her, if anything. She decided to grab whatever she could reasonably disinfect and leave the rest behind. Her room was a safe place. Her parents had made sure of that. Even with that being the case, she still left most of the obvious things behind.
Journals and jewelry would stay. She worried about looters, but at the moment she trusted looters more than she trusted...wherever she was going to end up...
The realization of that hit her like a slap in the face, and for what felt like the first time in her life she started to cry. Long, heaving wails of despair poured out of her, as the enormity of it all landed squarely on her shoulders. Her aunt was likely dead, her mom was dead, and her dad was dead. Most of her friends were probably already dead.
There was nothing left of her life, nothing that she would be able to reasonably go back to once it was all over. That was of course assuming that there would be something after this. There were treatments, but no vaccine, and there would likely be many more killed before it was all over.
She wanted to scream, to break something. Anything. She settled on her desk lamp which she threw across the room with as much force as she could muster. The lamp collided with the wall, bouncing off harmlessly, leaving no mark and no real damage to the lamp itself.
The lamp was mocking her. The world was mocking her pain.
She felt alone, and she realized she really was alone.
She considered packing further, considered looking around and trying to find little pieces of her life that she couldn't live without, but she instead zipped up the bag, grabbed an additional backpack that had been loaded up weeks before, and headed down the stairs.
Her life was over. She wasn't going to pretend otherwise, and though a nagging part of her brain, the part her parents always considered level headed, demanded that she look through things and deal with the pain, she ignored it.
She had made her choice.
Once downstairs she grabbed a fold out chair from the closet, grabbed two jackets, and went to the front door. Once there she sat, focusing on her shoes and how tight they felt at the moment.
Maybe he wouldn't come. Maybe he would.
Either way it didn't matter.
She wasn't going to stay in this house tonight.
If he didn't come she would leave all the same, heading towards nowhere.
She just knew this wasn't where she could stay any longer.
It was already not her home.
