Loss/Conclusion (+ Author's Notes)

I pulled him aside, close to the entrance to the toilets, and slapped his face with a resounding force, loud enough to cause Brooke to run to his aid. My friend glared at me with a fire in her eyes.

It's not like she could understand me and my affliction anyway.
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My frustration kept growing deeper...

My health began to deteriorate, and soon I couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't anything, except sit in bed and hate on the outside world as I was admitted into hospital, suddenly pardoned from all my responsibilities. Between the sterile white walls and even whiter sheets, I felt like a stranger in my own head.

The maiden kept grinning from a position just beyond my right shoulder, her form growing more and more corporeal by the day.

I tried to tell others, but they wouldn't believe me!

The twins' father had gotten involved because he was writing something on ghosts. Harrison was involved because he stuffed up the seance, and now I was in that position, taking the fall for him.

Even though I thought I'd cornered that ghost, she had bested me. I refused to believe she was the one who was slowly sapping my strength, but the more I thought about it, the more I could feel that cold gaze upon my shoulder...
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One night, about a week after Brooke had defended Harrison in the cafe, the maiden stood before me in her full glory - ruby-like oval eyes in a round face, her head cocked in a slight mockery. Her hair was slightly wavy and shoulder-length, but otherwise the face was everything I remembered from previous sightings. Her body was cloaked in a long beige trenchcoat - one I recognised from Harrison's magazine as belonging to her "workaholic boyfriend" - and nothing else as she strode towards me, her eyes never managing to meet mine.

This was, I assumed, because even though we were cloaked in nothing but an enveloping darkness, the floor looked like glass at first glance, but the more pressure was applied to it, the more it would create ripples.

I looked down at myself to find I wasn't faring any better in the clothing department - this strange world had only given me a white poncho-like cloth to wear, and although I couldn't really feel any temperature anymore, the eternal darkness made this place look cold. As I sat up and tucked my knees below me, causing the floor to continuously ripple, I noted the cloth extended past my knees and had a soft whitish haze to it. Then again, the maiden's entire body also had this quality to it and as I pulled my hand out from underneath the cloth, it took on this hazy quality too.

'Do you know why Harison's face never got fixed?' she asked me, snapping me out of my visual exploration. In the real world, my heart grew still, unbeknowst to those in the hospital around me.

I shook my head at her.

'It's because you loathe yourself more than you care for anyone else! That's why you've never properly interacted with people!' With this, the maiden laughed in that obnoxious "ohoho..." way as she left me trapped in the prison of my own mind.
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---- Author's Notes ----
First of all, hope you enjoyed the story. My stories always have a naive type of optimism to them, so writing a story about despair was quite the challenge.

Normally a story's genesis begins with an image found near the beginning of the story (in the case of "Face Me Online", it's the scene where An looks into the cracked mirror). Unfortunately, this story never really became anything more than that one image to me, so that's why this story seems like it was cancelled partway through.

I think, about one month after I type this (August 2017), the very first Honeyfeed writers will be celebrating their first anniversaries on this site. I'm quite the Honeyfeed veteran myself, having begun in October of 2016 with "White Parasite", so here's to many more stories and many more years to come!