The Summer I Died

by Ryan C. Thomas

I am eroding. But this is a far better alternative than the dreams of that summer. That summer of lost innocence, pain, and bloodshed beyond anything you can imagine.

I didn’t realize I didn’t say I love you back, and I don’t think she thought too hard on it—she knew I did—but I regret it now.

Shit. In my book, listening to a drunk get philosophical is on par with rolling down a hill in a barrel full of nails. You get dizzy, your insides shriek with stabbing pain, and you end up someplace lower than where you started.

I guess some problems were too big to fix and you just hoped they would take care of themselves.

The drug wasted no time climbing into the recesses of my mind and convincing my brain cells they could run the place with minimal staff.

Because, somehow, despite knowing the feeling was wrong, it felt like that’s what I was supposed to do.

maybe I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to hear myself admit it.

If I’d only known what was going to happen next I would have taken the gun from Tooth and put bullets in both our brains.

You don’t just concede defeat in these circumstances. You take every second you can find and use it to pray for another few seconds. Hope is a cruel bitch.

The human brain has a difficult time rationalizing the absurd. It’s like watching aliens land in your backyard and take a dip in your pool. You think, “This is a dream, any moment now I’ll wake up.” And then you do wake up. And you laugh about it and go back to sleep. Only we weren’t waking up.

it’s funny how you find God in such moments, almost instinctively, like a caterpillar on a strand of silk stretching for the first branch it sees, even if the tree is dead. Yeah, it may seem pointless, but at least it’s something. I even swore that if I survived I would go to church.

I do this all the time

He was the devil, arguing with his hellhound.

Life really is amazing, and when you’re about to lose it, you finally notice that you never really took it in before. And you realize the sheer magnitude of what it involves, from your first kiss to your hundredth slice of pizza. I guess that’s why those tears drifted down my cheeks.

Fate meant nothing; it was all a sick joke.

The torture, the pain, the way he’d fought till the very end. The way I’d cried and cried through it all, praying the dice would ignore me.

He had all his angles covered, knew all the ways to defeat his victim even when he wasn’t around.

everyone has a purpose, right? Because we’re all part of God’s master plan, a master plan that lets evil men take away the lives of innocent people, that lets some of us live while our friends and loved ones die before our eyes. Or maybe because God’s just up there rolling some dice, using us as tokens in a universal board game.