Anchor to the World

Lizzie. I'm always Lizzie. I'm never Lisa or Eliza or Liz. Just Lizzie. I'm always known as my innocent and childlike nickname. I’m neither childlike nor innocent. Not anymore.

Now I'm different. I don't think like I used to. Before I was Little Miss Anne Frank, thinking everyone was good at heart. I couldn’t find it in me to believe people could be so filled with hatred that they don’t have a heart.

Now I'm standing among bodies, all piled on top of each other. People did this. How could people do this? How could they do this to each other? And why? Some of these bodies I recognize. Most I don’t. I walk over to one girl I used to know. Her name was Delia. She was going to be 25 next week. Now I look at the wound that killed her, and I jerk my head away almost instantly.

It was almost like I was there. Like I saw it happen. She was fighting. Fighting for her life. Fighting a battle she knew she would lose. Then a man dressed in black rid her of her weapon, a kitchen knife (probably the only thing she could find), the very same knife he jabbed into her stomach, and dragged upward. Smiling at the ripping sound following his destruction of her sternum. Then he flung her aside. Like a toy he’d gotten tired of.

I look up, and I see Jack. We're sharing the same shattered and shocked expression. I run to him, and hold him in a broken embrace. We stand there for a long while, weeping for him, and for me, and for the world. We gasp for air, as we sob for what we are going to become. The whole time, I cling to his dark, curly locks, my last anchor to the world.