The air is crisp. It puffs out in front of me as I breath in and out. The white mist travels up, mixing with the dust caught in the light of the streetlamps, before disappearing into the black sky. I shove my hands further into my coat pockets, the bright pink material standing out against the cold backdrop of January.
It is the before I leave for school. A day before reality sinks back in, and I must come to terms with what I have done. My brother would say I am being dramatic, my mother would say I am a mess, and my father, well if anyone knew where he was, I would love it if they could tell me what he would say. The only person I really cared about, the only person whose opinion I really cared about, was you.
You with your hazel eyes and black hair that flopped in your face whenever you tilted your head intently listening to me talk. You with your wide smile and dimples so deep I could fit a blueberry in them if I tried hard enough. You were also my biggest regret. My biggest mistake.
I had walked out on you, on what we had. I did not want to, did not really understand the vastness of what I had done until it was too late, but I guessed that is how most mistakes are made in the heat of the moment when no one is thinking straight. My head had come loose that night throwing not only your things but my words across the room. I was the knife slinger while you were the man stuck on a wheel spinning round and around.
It was not my fault really. Even then, I knew it was not my fault. I saw you with her, and my head just exploded. I felt like one of those stars burning so hot they just cannot keep going anymore. They do not want to leave this world, but they cannot hold on. I wish I could tell you that now. Wish I had told you that then.
My fingers are so cold they burn. Pulling them out of my pockets, I stop to blow on them. Another puff of white climbing into the sky. I watch it while standing there on the sidewalk outside your apartment building. Coming here every day this week, looking up at your window, or what used to be your window, I wonder just where we went wrong. You moved out right when break started. You were supposed to be moving into my building across town to be closer to me. Where are you now?
I wonder if this is what our forever will be, me coming here looking for you, you never being here because I drove you away. I drove you away.
Did I drive you away or were we never together to begin with? Were you just a dream I had to keep the cold nights away? If I opened my eyes right now would you just have been a figment of my imagination easily fading away like my breath in the night air?
A sob catches in my throat, and I turn anyway from the apartment complex, away from you. I turned away from you a long time ago lost in the web of lies I had spun in my head. The stories I made up about who you were, and what we were going to be. Maybe if I had let things play out, had not been so controlling of our future, but now we will never know.
You always said the vastness of the sky could never hold us. That we were stars that would never burn up, but I did. I burned up, and you just left me there to die. It is devastating when forever ends because as much as we tell ourselves we do not believe in sappy love stories, we keep reading them hoping that one day they will happen to us.
Our forever, our story, is now locked in that moment. The moment I told you I knew you had cheated on me with her. The moment my heart shattered in two when you told me it was true. Even know, I keep spinning my web of lies trying to convince my heart it does not know what it is saying that you would never do this to me. Never do this to us.
I move forward, but my feet catch on the broken pavement. I stumble and fall. Hands hit cement. The red of my blood stains the ground, and I stand. I do not even feel the sting of pain through the cold. My mind is too transfixed on the metallic smell in the air and the ghost of you standing on the other side of the street.
Cars zip back and forth between us blocking our view. I raise my hand to push my hood back and blood streaks my cheek. You are there within moments grabbing my hand. Your eyes ask if I am okay. If we are okay.
Pulling my hand back, I ask the only thing I know to say, “What now?”