[Awakening] Life starts here

[inquis.livejournal.com]

Jinx woke up with a start. Her chest ached, but more than that, her nose was sore.

Her mind racing, freed, she stared up at the ceiling, trying to catch the reins on her thoughts, then Xiphos was handing her a drink, and Tax was looking at her expectantly. She looked between them, focusing on why she was there.

Death.

Just to suddenly be… not. It wasn’t an awful sensation, on balance. Being dead was just an absence. An absence of being. The pain, the horror, the loss. That wasn’t death. The dead don’t feel it. All those dreadful, nagging, dark, consuming feelings aren’t death.

They are life.

Jinx took a sip of the water offered her, a sense of release, of not needing to be that person any more washed over her. First Lexi, then Tax, both of them had told her it wasn’t her fault. But then Xiphos explained what rebellion could look like, and suddenly sneaking out felt so small, so… childish. If he hadn’t taken advantage then, maybe it would have been on the way home from school, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all, but suddenly it wasn’t her fault. She might not have taken the best care of herself, but she didn’t make him do it…

Then explaining it all again. By now it’s become the story of what happened, the tale of woe, and with that repetition, some distance. The more it is told, the more it alters to fit what she now knows, what she feels, how she’s changed. And like her physical journey away from her old life, by telling, by talking, the mental journey away from her old life has reached the peak of the hill, and now the world lays out before her, any direction is possible.

Death was no longer a weight around her neck. Grief was right, it was necessary, but it didn’t have to be all and evermore. Now, it was important to make the most of the life given her. To stop walking away where it is safer. To stop saying “I can’t” and start learning about the person who has been existing in this body, surviving life, rather than living it.

Life starts here.