Page 100 of Exposing Colorado

I follow it anyway.

Each step I don’t take brings me closer to something I can’t name—memories scattered like Polaroids:

Flaming hair laid out on a pillow.

Huckslee on a hospital bed with stitches in his arm.

Whiskey colored eyes and a lip piercing.

My younger brothers in soccer uniforms at their first match.

Well… that’s not right, is it? They’re not my brothers. They don’t belong to me.

I belong to no one.

I am no one.

“Logan?”

Mom. Or the shape of Mom, anyway. Her voice is warped and watery.

“I don’t care if we aren’t blood,” she says from somewhere far away. “You’ll always be my son, and I love you.”

Something inside me pulls tight when her presence drifts away. Storm clouds roll in the distance.

I’m still here, I try to say. Don’t go.

But I don’t know if anyone can hear me.

Voices filter in and out, some I recognize, some I don’t.

Taylor telling a story, and Arya humming off-key. My dad promising to do better if I wake up. Sometimes, it’s Salem. She doesn’t talk much, but I can hear her every breath. I feel her in every corner of this strange in-between place.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I’m not sure if I’m getting better.

Huckslee’s voice comes and goes, fractured in grief and guilt. His cries are distorted, crackling, here with me but not. He tells me things I wish I’d heard sooner.

“I love you, Loge. I know you never liked to say it back, but I love you, man. I’m sorry we always felt like we had to hide things from each other. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you like I should have been. I’m just… so fucking sorry.”

Those words make me thrash in this nothingness, unable to stop the echo that follows.

It all feels like a goodbye, but I don’t want to be alone here.

I don’t want to be here at all.

The darkness ripples around me, like a pebble tossed into still water. Huck’s voice fades, but the ache it leaves behind doesn’t. My heart pounds somewhere in the void, loud and unsteady.

Don’t go.

I try to scream it, to claw my way out, but there’s nothing to grab onto—no air, no ground beneath me, just empty.

I’m empty.

But then, like a hand reaching through fog, I feel her.

Salem.

She says nothing at first, but her presence is thunder in my chest. I follow the sound, the warmth, the tether.