END OF THE TUNNEL
I hate that phrase.
There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.
Supposedly, you’re in the darkness, and you look up and see it — a faint ring of light in the distance, marking the end of the moonless, lonely night. Drumming in the dawn.
But my tunnel wasn’t just dark. It was an abyss.
A tomb.
After a while, when all my hopes for rescue missions and recovery teams had been abandoned… when I realized that my screams would never, ever be heard through the dense-packed rock blocking my path back to the surface…
I stopped waiting for rescue.
And I embraced the dark.
I learned to like my cave. That bleak, bereft place became a comfort, instead of a burden.
I stopped trying to claw my way back to the surface and wrapped myself in a blanket of shadows.
Then one day, years and years later, when I least expected it, when I least wanted it, when I’d been alone in the dark for so long I’d forgotten what the light looked like… an explosion shook the walls of my cave, blasted open the crypt of my own making.
And I finally saw it. The light at the end of my tunnel.
But she wasn’t the dull glow of a flashlight I’d been expecting. Not the dim luminescence of a solitary streetlight, or the dull flicker of a lantern in the starless sky.
She was a fucking sun-ray.
A flare. A fire. A detonation.
She was C-4.
She blasted her way into my life, into my heart, and hauled me from my nightmarish void onto the streets of Budapest. I kicked and clawed at her the entire way like the wild thing I’d become in my isolation, unable to readapt to the world of the living or play well with the masses.
She dragged me out anyway.
She blew up my life.
I hated her for it.
But not as much as I loved her.