Just Breathe

by EverythingsNothing

Just breathe.

My fingers twitched in irregular increments. I stood, eyes boring through my phone. 

"C'mon, pick up." My voice barely reached my ears, unheard over the echoing crash of waves, fully knowing my sister was oblivious to our ironic end. Everyone on that darn island was, but I couldn't save them all, maybe not even her. Or even myself. A shiver shot down my spine at the nail-biting thought.

The ocean seemed to have a similar mood to mine. Angry. Restless. Moody. Moody in the sense that the ice wall holding all of Earth in was melting. White-capped waves drug a heap of seaweed into the murky water as the bubble popped from my head.

Volleys of curses spilled from my lips as, yet again, a shrill tone rang above the raging water. I prodded the grain-topped pavement with the ball of my foot, pacing right, left, then back again. Pressing the green button once more, I waited, tipping onto my heels and to my toes, back and forth. The only hope in my mind performed acrobatics with countless possible casualties bobbing along my uncertain future. Yet, my brain swiped left on the ear-splitting tone's existence. My two brain cells only forced my thumb onto the icon a twelfth time.

Stupid, stupid, stupid...

I shouldn't have let her go on that darn trip. Screw research in Hawaii! Save the grunt work for some idiotic group of overgrown apes. Not some rag-tag gang of hormonal teens. But no! I let her go. And I will die trying to get her back. There's no way in hell mother nature is going to steal her from me too.

Gray clouds boomed with voices louder than my own, discouraging my unharnessed anger. Instead, the darkening sky encouraged me to give up, go home, and wait the storm out. But a thought tugged my mind into the unknown danger, already knowing full well that the storm wouldn't cease.

An unpoppable bubble solidified within my chest, unbreakable against the roaring indistinct water. Clouds never diffused my mood before. They sure the hell won't now. They never will, not when I know I'm one of the only non-idiot people on this rocky planet.

For the fifteenth time, I thumb her contact.

There wasn't a way that I could have held the device tighter, grappling and groping around for a sliver of hope. I wanted everything to be okay. I needed everything to be okay.

I knew better. The Antarctic Ice Wall was melting, and we stupid humans couldn't stop it. Not like half the population even believed that Antarctica was a wall and not some southern continent. Let alone that the Earth was a disk in the first place.

Serves those suckers right if they—

A series of muted snaps and crackles interrupted my inferno of a mind, more important than internally roasting every last human who ever called me insane.

One word released the floodgate holding my shoulders in a rigid structure.

"Hello?" came my sister's voice.

Finally, I breathed.