Thoughts

I sit on the beach, looking over the sea. The breeze is cold and I wrap my coat tighter around me. My hair is blowing across my face but I don’t notice it. I’m too busy staring. Staring out to sea. The sea. Greyish blue with a hint of black, dull, dirty, cold. Nothing special. Typical Worthing. However, it’s special to me. It’s a place that I can go to, to get away from everything. To just sit on my own and think. Think about my life, the past the present and even the future. Some people keep diaries, some keep their anguish locked up inside them until they finally explode. But not me. I go to the beach. I go to the beach and sit there on my own. Staring out to sea. Thinking. Everything around me blurs. I become oblivious to my surroundings. As I sit there and think.

People say I’m crazy. How can I sit out there on my own for so long? I can be there for hours without noticing the time. Only waking from my comer when my body requires the necessities – food and drink. How can I sit there for so long in the cold? Getting savaged by Mother Nature and her demons. But I don’t feel them. When they are waging a war around me, I am oblivious. When the sky is pelting the land with frozen cannon balls, I am oblivious. When the lightning sets the sky alight, I am oblivious. Lost in my own thoughts. Staring out to sea.

I have heard people talking behind my back. They wonder how I can stay so calm. After everything I have been through. How can I stay so calm. Then there are those who say how lucky I am. How lucky that I still have parents but don’t have to live with them. How lucky that my parents live in another country, that I live with my brother. A brother who is also my best friend. How lucky I am to have that kind of relationship with him. But they don’t know the half of it. They don’t know the torment I go through every night.

I don’t feel lucky and I certainly don’t feel calm.

Nobody knows what I have been through. Nobody knows the guilt I feel everyday. The feeling of loneliness. Having lost the greatest friends I ever had. My soul mates. Gone. Forever. While I am still alive. This shouldn’t be so. My friends ask why I never talk about my family, about my old friends back at the place I once called home. But I can’t. It’s too painful. Three years have past and it’s still too painful. I push everyone away, letting no-one get close enough to me. Close enough to expect the truth. The whole story of my life.

Until now.

My heart has finally let someone in. And I’m scared. Like you wouldn’t believe. The barrier I have been building up has finally crumbled. Leaving me helpless, afraid, like a little girl lost in the wide world. I feel his eyes on me and turn to face him. How can I tell him? The one thing that I have been hiding from everyone. My past. Where to start…

I was thirteen. Young, naïve, making the most of life and causing trouble with my mates. Ella, Tom, Alicia, Ryan, Alex. I can remember that day like it was yesterday. It was Halloween and we were at the park. We had set fire to the paper in one of the bins, and we were messing around. Having a laugh. Enjoying ourselves. We didn’t hear them arrive until it was too late. I heard someone laugh and turned round to see who it was, the others doing the same. What we saw was a group of twenty people. All our age, people from our school. Those that we hated, who hated us. There had always been something going on between us. Like a cold war on a miniature scale. However, the only times we saw each other were at school and in town. Therefore nothing drastic would happen as there were always other people around to see. We settled with taunting each other, calling names, making rhymes. Childish but affective. We always succeeded in winding them up. But it seemed this time we had gone too far.

The light from the fire was glinting off the weapons they were carrying. Knives, broken bottles, and any other sharp objects they could find. We exchanged nervous glances, knowing that we were outnumbered and that there was nothing we could do to stop what was about to happen. And we all knew what they were going to do. They advanced, and we could tell who was the most confident, with the others edging along behind them. Unsure if they were doing the right thing, but not wanting to back out and be known as traitors. That would make them as bad as us in their eyes. I can’t remember what happened next, it’s all a blur. I must have blocked the memory out. And I am glad of it. All I can remember is the screaming of my friends, of myself. The yelling of the opposition. The pain, the fear, and the confusion. What hah we done to deserve this? They finally went, after one last kick from the gang leader. I lay there until I was sure they were gone, and then I tried to sit up. I looked around me, at the red grass and the white bodies. Like a photo from a book about war. Except this was not in a book. This was real. I crawled to everyone in turn, shaking them, screaming their names, hitting them, begging them to wake up. Knowing deep down that it wouldn’t work. But not wanting to believe it. I called the police, the ambulance. Knowing deep down that nothing could be done to wake my friends up. But not wanting to believe it. I remember being taken to hospital, the people around me whispering, saying how lucky I was to be alive. Saying how sorry they were for the death of my friends.

I was in hospital for a week before I was allowed home. The house was full of flowers. My parents tried to cover up the papers that were lying around, but not before I saw the headlines. Telling everyone how a group of teenagers had been ambushed and killed on the night of Halloween. How only one of them had survived. They had caught and interviewed some of the boys that had attacked us. They said how they had thought everyone was dead, and that was the only reason their leader had ordered them to leave. That made me feel even worse. Why was it that I was still alive when I was wanted dead. While my friends were dead. Killed at the age of thirteen. They w0uldnt tell on their friends though. And to this day they still haven’t been caught. There has been no evidence to suggest that they were there. They all have alibis. They are still walking the streets.

I managed to convince my parents that I couldn’t live in that town any longer. That everywhere I went I had reminders of my friends, of that tragic night. That everywhere I went those murderers were following me. Taunting me. Hatching up new plans to kill me. I was paranoid beyond belief. But who could blame me. After everything I had been through.

We moved down here, to Worthing. And we stayed down here as a family until my sixteenth birthday. My parents wanted move back though. They missed the town that they had been brought up in. They missed their friends and family, and they didn’t fit in down here. They took my twin and younger sister with them, but I was allowed to stay down here with my brother. They didn’t have a choice. I refused to go back.

So here I am. Sitting on the beach, having finally told someone. Relief rushes through my body. I turn to him. He puts his arm around me. And I cry.