nosleep

Let’s recap. It’s been a little bit since my last post. If you’re new here, I grew up in a small town with a campground that some of you are very familiar with. I worked there through highschool with nothing unremarkable happening until after graduation. My boyfriend was killed, the future I thought I was doomed for vanished, and I decided to take my life in my own hands and go to college instead.

I thought about writing something insightful about how we can’t escape our pasts, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I brought my past with me in the form of ties I can’t bring myself to sever and as knowledge most people don’t have and don’t want if they know what’s good for them. And what’s happening at my college isn’t like what I grew up with. It’s different. It’s like we’ve been swaddled here into this cocoon so that in four years we might emerge as something new. And the college and the things contained within are also changing into something new. A process that started before I arrived and now I’m just wandering through the ravine and marveling at how much the river has worn away and how much further it has to go before the landscape is irrevocably changed.

I wish I could say that after finishing my freshman year everything settled down, but that’s not how these things work. I’m not naive. When I returned home for a short break before the start of the fall semester, I already knew that when I went back to campus I’d be marked. I had a bargain with the devil and I’d traveled into the depths of the traveling river and returned. These things can’t be set aside so lightly.

But at least I had a brief reprieve back in my hometown.

Hah.

If only.

The town’s gossip network got to work spreading the news that I was home. After two days, the parents of my ex-boyfriend showed up at my house. Not Steven. The very ex-boyfriend. There’s been rumors spreading in my absence because this is a small town and of course there were. His disappearance was suspicious enough but then I went to college, which is not something people in this town commonly do. With no prior interest? Against the wishes of my mother? But no, it couldn’t be because I’m trying to get away from this stupid fucking town, it’s because I’m guilty of something. Surely I know what happened or - gasp - might even be involved.

Which I guess I do know something, but what am I supposed to say? Oh your golden child wasn’t really all that great and apparently there was a lot more going on with him than even I knew about, because Krampus saw fit to make a personal appearance and strangle him to death before dragging his corpse away to some wintery hellscape.

No one will believe me. Or at least, his parents will never believe me, and I have no desire to be hounded and blamed by these people every time I come home to visit my mom and my siblings.

Because they’re borderline accusing me of being the reason he disappeared and all I did was try to have a future of my own and not join them in their life of misery and mourning. We weren’t even married. I’m realizing that I didn’t even like him as much as I thought I did. My life isn’t over because my boyfriend died when I was 18.