the reality of losing jackie was too much for you to bear.

to the point where things have become tense between you and shauna — her with self-hate and guilt, and you mourning jackie so badly that you couldn't help but blame her for what happened.

you didn't believe it was the wilderness — or 'it', as lottie calls it — but shauna's fault that she died.

because deep down, it filled you with hate and anger towards shauna, as well as all of this tension between you, because in your mind, if shauna hadn't kicked her out, maybe she wouldn't have died.

did shauna know that she would freeze to death, due to a surprise snow blizzard half-way through the night? no.

but, it doesn't change the fact that jackie was out there in the first place because of shauna.

your mental state was already fragile as it was, as bad as lottie's situation, and losing jackie cracked something deep within you. leaving you absoloutely broken.

to the point, where you find yourself even hallucinating jackie, talking and moving and healthy, like she hadn't died at all — like it's really her.

it's hard to forget that it's just a figment of your imagination — just a hallucination to help you cope with the trauma and the hole in your heart that she left behind.

"you know none of this is real, right?" her voice snaps you out of your thoughts, peaking over your shoulder as you scrawl messy writing in your journal — it's your only way of coping, feeling alone and having isolated yourself from everyone, refusing to come back into the cabin every day to face everyone until you absolutely have to, at 'dinner time', with whatever flesh they've cooked for the night, merely to survive.

it makes you freeze up, making you look up, only to see the hallucination is gone, only leaving the scene of her lifeless, rotting corpse.

tears are just unshed in your eyes, not ready to face reality yet.

only question is: will you accept the reality or keep pretending?

i think we both know that it's the latter.

blinking away the tears, you squeeze your eyes shut, letting them fall as you try to will the vision of her back to life, as insane as it sounds.

the second you open your eyes up again, only when you hear her laugh, is when you see that lucid scene of your best friend, who you just so happen to still be in love with, as if she's not just a rotting corpse in the room.

"none of this real. you know that," she says once more, just a little teasing, but serious. "i mean, you're talking to your dead best friend, just to cope, to keep yourself from everyone else, but none of it is real — i'm not really here."