Save Me

Map Of The Soul

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Written by Authoress Kamara

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Chapter 1: Save Me

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Kai Webster wanted to fall in love so badly, the thought of it had been on his mind more often than usual for the past few weeks, occupying the back of his mind as he tried to concentrate for his mid term exams.

Right now, he saw it all around him, as he watched couples walking together around campus, gloves hands clasped together, bundled in jackets against the cold.

He shivered under the woolen layers of his own parka, his breath coming out in white faint puffs.

It would be nice to hold somebody’s hand, he thinks, nice to experience the cool colors of winter instead of the dull black and white he had been seeing for years.

His friends, Jax and Fox, had told him about the color of winter.

Or they tried.

It seemed it was hard to describe colors to somebody who had never seen them before.

And Kai wanted to see them badly, so badly it hurt.

In his eyes, seeing the color meant love, it meant happiness, it meant completion, it meant his other half had found him.

Because the brutality of this world was that nobody could see the world to its fullest until they were at their fullest.

You had to have met your soulmate, have touched their skin, have kissed them, have connected with them in order to have that kind of privilege to see the world in it’s full colors.

Some were lucky; some people had met their soulmates in childhood and had the luck of growing up surrounded by the colors of the world.

At least, people had soulmates who existed.

In fact, if Kai didn’t know any better, he’d think his soulmate was dead.

Never once had they tried to reach out to him, or even try and communicate with him through their previous connection.

And it crushed Kai, he didn’t know what he did wrong and he often thought that his soulmate must have hated him to not give him the chance at seeing colors.

He used to occasionally reach out, to try and connect with his soulmate, but soon after receiving silence, he gave up succumbing to the monochrome world he seemed to be doomed in forever.

And now, at twenty years old, walking across the campus alone, nothing had changed.

He was still alone, his eyes still only saw shades of grey, and his soulmate still remained silent.

Kai learned to live with the ache after a while but sometimes he gets reminded of it after seeing how happy his two friends, Jax and Fox, were together.

It was never jealousy, just longing.

Sighing and pushing the negative thoughts out of his mind the best he could, he dug his room key out of his pocket and shoved it into the keyhole.

His fingers trembled slightly from the cold air.

The door swung open and he rushed inside quickly just to slam it shut once more, sighing in relief as the warmth enveloped his cold body when he stepped in.

“Adonis ?”. He called out but received no answer.

Adonis Atlas, Kai’s roommate, was a year above him in college, and also still hasn’t found his own soulmate too.

Adonis got into the university on a performing arts scholarship and he was so passionate about dance.

As soon as Kai had gotten inside and thrown his coat off, he noticed the insistent grumble of his stomach, grimacing at the rather depressing emptiness of their cupboards.

He whipped out his phone from his pocket to ask Adonis if he wanted any pizza. He quickly typed in the question and almost immediately got a response.

Instead of a reply from Adonis, he got a selfie of Jax, along with a message telling him that yes, Adonis wanted pizza.

He smiled as he dialed the number of the pizza place making a mental note to order a huge slice just incase his friends decide to drop by.

**

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Soon, Kai was distracted from reading his books by a harsh knock on the door, jolted out of his thoughts by the sound of knuckles on wood.

Letting out another soft sigh, he grabbed his money off the counter and moved to open the door.

“‘Good evening!”. The delivery boy said enthusiastically.

Kai have him a smile, greeted him, and briefly wondered what color was his uniformed shirt.

He wondered if he would ever know things like that.

After Kai had handed the boy his money, he brought the pizza back into his apartment, and threw the box down next to his open laptop and the textbooks on the desk in the corner of the dorm room.

Plopping down in his chair, he grabbed a slice of pizza and began to one handedly type an essay on effective economic strategies while eating.

He had learned the weird, but useful skill of multitasking like this so eating and writing an essay paper didn’t bother him.

But he didn’t like writing essays, he didn’t like the business major he was studying, the truth was, Kai Webster loved to sing.

Music was the one thing he could enjoy freely and use it to distract himself from the burden of not having found his soul mate.

He wrote songs in his free time and sang them to himself.

Even now, he hummed as he worked, his fingers flying over the keys of his laptop.

Meaningless words on a page, he thought, another paper he would never care about again once he finished it.

He was just writing for the sake of passing the class.

A sudden jolt of fear cut through Kai like a knife, making him jump halfway through his seat. He found his finger clutching the edge of his desk, his eyes wide, heart beating wildly as a feeling of nervousness overcame him.

“What the ...”. Kai choked out gasping for breath.

That’s when he heard it.

A voice, brushing the insides of his ears, so quiet he could barely hear it.

“Help me”.

*

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Finn Pattinson hated any kind of motor vehicle with an intense passion. Not only hated, but he also feared it with all of his heart.

The hatred started when he was six years old, when a drunk driver cut out in front of the car his dad had been driving and killed him.

Six year old Finn barely knew what death was but he knew grief. And he knew terror.

He and his mother had been in that car, him and at the backseat while she sat at the passenger side holding hands, both of them smiling at each other.

They had been soulmates, his mother and father, and it showed.

Six year old Finn believed in soulmates and he believed in love.

Then there was a shout and sickening screech of tires and metal on metal and then a resounding crash as Finn was thrown against the tight restraints of his seatbelt, the car spiraling wildly into another.

Then there was silence.

What happened was an accident that he would never forget, an accident that took his father’s life.

But even after months passed following the accident, Finn’s mother never became happy.

She cried, sometimes screamed. Other times, she was quiet, withdrawing from the world.

Six year old Finn suddenly understood that having a soulmate meant there was a possibility of losing that soulmate and never feeling happy again, like his mother.

And so he decided he would never find his soulmate, because he didn’t want to go through what his mother went through, ever.

Every time he got into a moving vehicle, he always relived the moment of the crash, saw his father’s limp fingers, heard his mother’s screams.

The memory of that always seemed to close his airways, made it hard to breathe, hard to think and seemed to choke the life out of him every time he felt wheels began to rumble under his feet.

**

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Now, nineteen year old Finn Pattinson was on a seven hour bus ride to the university he had luckily managed to get into, on a music scholarship.

As soon as the engines started, he lost control almost entirely panicking as he remembered. His breaths became short,  uncontrolled, his throat seemed to close up as he fell deeper and deeper into the anxiety attack.

His fingers, white knuckled, gripped the armrests of the bus seat, his stomach knotting painfully.

His mind was blank, darkness, panic and darkness crushing his thoughts away as the screams of his mother reverberated against the walls of his skull.

Taking in more short, restricted breaths in an attempt to calm down but it wouldn’t happen.

He didn’t open his eyes because then the tears would spill out.

He needed someone to calm him down, specifically that singing voice he heard every night.

He muttered enough air to make a real sound needing someone to save him from this hell he was plunging into.

Even if it meant contacting the one person he had been trying to block all his life.

“Help me”.

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TBC

Written by Authoress Kama