It’s too risky—because I know myself, and I know that obsessing over Bee is only going to send me spiralling.
I hold onto the facts around me, and my theory about the antenna.
Maybe Samick uses the radio to check in, see if he still has to uphold his end of the bargain to keep me alive, to see if Bee has broken her end and run off. If she has, then my throat is likely to be torn out, the way Samick ripped out his horse’s throat. But he’d do it to me with a lot less regret.
Feels like he’s gone for ages. That’s because Arwyn never lets me sit down.
The rope is wound so firmly around his fist that I can’t drop my ass to the ground even if I tried. I would just dangle from my wrist.
So I stand, sagged in my weariness, my exhaustion, and wait, wondering if Samick will return to take the tether or my throat.
I count the time passing in the pattern, the routine of the kuris around me. I decide he’s been gone fifteen minutes or so when all the campfires are lit.
I’m dying to edge closer to the flames over the stones, the ones that Shark and Mika are already standing at, palms pressed to the heat, warming themselves.
But Arwyn doesn’t give me an inch.
Across the camp, kuris dig through the carts, hauling out bags of grain and giant pots.
It’s all so monotonous.
Time chips away at me, fading me into an echo of myself, and even now, standing, I sag with the weight of the boredom.
At this point, it’s possible I would shove someone into the flames just for a book.
No. Not a book.
A movie.
A good show.
Something to stream and binge, beginning to end. Something to kill this boredom in me.
It’s growing, swelling, and as it does, it’s hollowing me out.
It was like this before, when I was with the girls. In the quiet moments, I found myself slipping into the void of depressive-bitch and straight-up-energy-vampire.
Can’t help it.
If I could get myself out of it, I would. Obviously. But I never can seem to claw out of it.
An amateur vibe killer since 1994.
And it stems from that fucking void that lives in me.
Bee’s the only one who could ever tolerate it. Met her in a share-house, and that happens to be ground zero for my energy sucking ways. But she was never phased by it. I’d hum about my misery, project it onto the world, and she would laugh.
No one ever laughed. Butshedid.
She is the sun.
Not a replica of it, not filled with rays of false warmth, but the true essence of a burning star.
I could never point my finger at Bee. I could never throw her to the wolves, like I have done to so many others, like I did to Emily.
I don’t know what Bee sees in me.
No clue what she gets out of our friendship.
