October / On My Own / The Final Hours

S Y N O P S I S

THE BOY:
The boy runs from home, from school, from friends. He takes what is owed him: money, a car, and his sanity. Without a second thought he fled from the world of his past, his pain, his anger--a world that wasn't so welcoming to him or to anyone else.
     He leaves because she did. It's his fault, he insists. It's his fault; he chased her away, pushed her away--as he had done before to another close to him. He's suffering; he doesn't deserve it, he says to himself.
     He waits at first, hoping and half expecting that she will return. Hope wasn't enough. Hope wouldn't bring her back--her or his sister and father. Hope wouldn't help him live with his sins.
     Hope was useless.

THE GIRL:
She left, striding teary-eyed out the front doors. She left him alone in the entryway, staring at her stiff back leaving him behind. She sees him in the reflection of the glass doors, a tear rolling down one side of his face, legs apart and staring at the floor beneath his feet.
     Her mind whirled with dispirited emotions and thoughts. It was her fault--all of it. She can't forgive her own weakness; surely it was that that brings him to tears at such a moment. She's the one who was bringing herself below her usual level of sanity and emotional control.
     She leaves for selfish reasons: her inability to bear the insults of others. Surely this is what it means to be weak-hearted. She allowed him to try and protect her until the very end, but it had not been enough. Her mind had been made, her weakness recognized. She could bear it no more.
     Love doesn't exist, she tells herself, stepping into the snow. Love is like the thoughts of forever that float in the minds of the naive: a shattered dream, and putting the two together was completely absurd.
     She waited for signs of love from him, but there were none. She was to be forever stricken by this love. Love unreturned was worse than death, she decides. Those, her reasons, polluted her mind as her fake smile vanished as she told him that she was leaving. Her intentions were completely unclear to anyone else, especially him.
     Love is worse than death, she repeats, her body shivering from cold and pain.

THE GHOST:
He shudders, even though ghosts cannot feel the bite of a cold winter evening. Most people don't know what it feels like to burn to death while locked helplessly in a cage. No, he thinks, almost no one would; no one besides himself.
     One moment, he's in a cage, watching malicious tongues of flame licking at the door. In the next, he is somewhere else entirely, cringing at the sight of the feature of his dreams being made real. For almost three years he has dreamed of this and drawn it on canvas, walls, paper, bed sheets, anything he could get his hands on. Never had he expected to see it in reality.
     Maybe it isn't real, he ponders to himself. Perhaps this is all that death is: a never-ending dream.
     That thought it was causes him to shudder. Forever. That's a terrible word. Time, ticking on until long after the end of existence.
     He recalls watching the hall clock until the flames completely engulfed it. Even after, he could recall his mind continuing the ticking of the seconds in his head. Seconds... Minutes... That internal sound accompanied him in his final hours.
     Time, he chokes out, what a merciless thing.