Scream Silently

Sitting alone at a coffee shop was oddly unnerving for him. Dalton drank slowly and carefully as he could feel the eyes of the people around him looking. There weren’t many people in the building, but there were so many eyes, he felt so many gazes. Maybe it was because he felt so alone.
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A few days went by before Scarlett grew tired of the same old place, a few thoughts went by before she could come to terms with what was happening. What had happened?
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Dalton stopped paying attention to the story about the missing girl, he stopped playing optimistic when he worried about Scarlett. If the slender man had taken her, he wasn’t about to search for the place he’d ran away from. The slender man must have found her, though. Why else wouldn’t he have come back for Dalton? Then Dalton would figure it didn’t matter, as long as he wasn’t being hunted, it didn’t matter anymore.
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Escaping from this place in the forest was undoubtedly easy. It was effortless, to Scarlett’s surprise, almost as if the slender man didn’t care if she stayed at all. Then she figured that must be why everything seemed so vivid and happy when she first got there. He wouldn’t have to keep her in if she liked it. But what did he want with them? That’s what she couldn’t figure out.
Still, she continued through the forest. Sometimes she would wonder if she was taking the same way as Dalton, but thinking like that wouldn’t do her any good.
There was a gentle breeze flowing through the trees as the sun crept down below the horizon. It was getting dark, but Scarlett was still able to see well enough. She started to run. Hopefully she was close to a road, or at least something that was lit.
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Sometimes Dalton would go to the park at night, and the shadows of the trees would always scare him, but they were always just trees. Sometimes he would see faces in things, sometimes he would hallucinate to where he saw full figures that weren’t there. Mostly he just felt things. He felt watched and it scared him. Some force was following him and he didn’t know what it was, but it made his heart feel heavy and his muscles go weak. He always made it home okay, though, nothing had ever hurt him.
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She would scream at the top of her lungs, but no responses ever came. So she ran, as fast as she could, blindly trying to reach anything, anything at all. The world spun and blurred, her sense of time dulled out until it died completely. She could have been gone for three hours, she felt like she was gone for twenty years. Everything felt the same, everything felt empty, hollow and alone.
She reached out a hand, but nothing was there. She cried, but there was no shoulder to cry on. So she regressed into her own mind. She lost who she was, but no matter how hard she thought it through, the idea wouldn’t come back to her. Without Dalton’s hand to catch hers, she was no one. She became nothing.
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Eventually, Dalton went back to his old friends. The ones who talked around him but never understood him. That’s just how it was. People can’t understand each other, because they are all different, in the way that makes them all the same for being unique. He accepted that there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and there wasn’t any point in feeling lonely over it any longer. He didn’t lose himself; he just lost his way of trying for anyone. Dalton became mechanical, he made himself ignorant, and he would laugh with people for no good reason at all, because it was never funny.