Her knees were tucked up under her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, slowly rocking.
Her eyes searched for bearing but she was blind. Too long in the dark now. How many days? She didn’t know.
Molly could feel the rock wall to her back, the warm stone underneath her.
Silent movements stirred the air around her, and occasionally she could feel a presence grace the hair on her bare arms. A haunted breeze, a slow exhaling of foul wind.
The cell, for that is how she thought of it, was silent to everything but her heartbeat. She could hear the blood flow through the veins in her neck up into her head. The slow, rhythmic beat of life. The air stirred with the beat, jumping pace when she was startled by the graze of the unseen shadows.
She thought about how she had come here. Not the mechanics of the fact; she recalled that all too well. But rather all the nuanced steps that she had taken, all the seemingly small choices that spiraled out of control and landed her in oblivion. She thought of her mom with her heavy hand of practical suburban life. She had yearned to live freer, to do what she wanted, to make decisions for herself. That is where the dream had started. She had longed to live without restraint, not realizing she was incapable of living without support.
In the dark she could feel her tears moisten the skin on her forearms and run to the crease in her elbow where they pooled and evaporated. Vapor gone before their existence could be noticed by the ones that came after them. Much like herself, she thought. Gone before actually living.
The shadow breaths moved with her despairing thoughts. Suicide had never been in her vocabulary, but with each drip of a tear, with each whiff of silent shade, the dark thoughts would pop into her mind like a twisted whack-a-mole game. She worked to beat one down, to have another thought take its place, taunting her with sarcastic laughing.
She grieved for her shattered image.
Why did she do this? She could see the vision of home in her mind. The day she packed her backpack and headed out the front door. She could feel the coolness of the brass handle in her palm. Stop, turn around! she thought as she watched the scene in her memory, but her doppelganger simply closed the door and walked down the driveway, an impish grin on her face and invincibility nestled in her back pocket. She watched herself disappear down the street and mourned. Despair, regret, and shame swam in the deep pools of her memories.
The shadows were her only companions.