INEFABBLE - Short Stories Collection #2

A Writer's Cry

I felt the coldness of the air envelope my being as I forced my heavy eyes open. I could only see the darkness of the room and the millions of memories I tried so hard to forget for the past month or so. They were like scenes of a movie about a tragic love story that I knew the ending all too well.

I hugged my shivering form with a blanket as I tried to peer my vision away from those phantom scenes. No, I reminded, those things are over and never to be remembered again. I tried countless times to bury deep inside of my mind the hell brought about by love and its comrade which was pain. I never imagined I would be seeing my 19-year-old self being tortured by love instead of the agony of being pressured. I shook my head again. No, I stated, I should only be crushed by pressure but not of love.

Surrounding my fatigued being were stacks of papers. I should be reading them endlessly for I claimed to have loved reading so much. It's funny how a lot of things changed since then as I already felt the draining sensation while my gaze landed upon the copy of Dead Stars by Paz Marquez Benitez which I personally loved to have read a few weeks ago. It was a story about a bachelor who fell in love with a girl he just met despite having a fiancee. Now that I thought about it, was it love? Or was it just an attachment? I reckon it was the latter for he easily broke that attachment to settle with love despite the phantom of the girl haunting him for years.

My eyes soon found the copies of my own stories. I Promise, A Perfect Christmas, and The Denouement. Three stories fabricated by my imagination last year to satisfy my need to write and to express. I have loved writing as much as reading because I wanted to pull out my thoughts inside of my head and instead be a piece of writing that I could look back on and be proud of. Those three stories were not inspired by my life but rather by others who experienced the misery of being put under love's merciless spell.

I sat up on the bed and clutched my blanket tighter. I stared the dark void in front of me now showing more memories like that of a projector used in schools for film showings. No matter how much I tried to escape it, I couldn't. It was like torture, like being killed tonight and having live the next day only to die once more in the company of these thoughts and memories. I never thought I would get to this point in my life. So low but so high with the pain.

I watched the inevitable scenes flashed on the white empty wall. Us walking under the starlit sky while in our uniforms. Him holding my hand while holding my heart tightly. Me making jokes in an attempt to make him laugh despite my lame sense of humor. Us being two people who fell victims to love's wicked schemes. It was shown there on that wall. How lovely it was to be in love with one person and how painful it was to have sought eventually what would happen next.

Was I dumb not to realize things? I guess so. For the next scene shown to me was the both of us on the streets under the same starlit sky however I was not the one who held his heart now. He cried while confessing that while we were separated for two months because of how tired we both were, his heart found new joy from the arms of a forgotten past. Despite this, he had claimed to love me still. He promised that I would be the only person he would come running back to. Because he claimed to love me. The world had gone so still for me yet it remained to go on as I heard his pleas of forgiveness. I asked him who he would choose and his answer made me go insane, like a mad woman. He didn't know who to choose and that was enough for me to let him walk by himself in this path he chose for himself.

My eyes let another bucket of tears fell down my face that I tried to stop from falling for five days now. Each tear fell represented all of the questions inside of my head that was left unanswered because he did not know, because he was not sure. Was I not enough? Was the warmth of my own arms not enough? Or did it turn cold? Why didn't he go to me instead of running with that girl he buried in the past? Why couldn't I be chosen? It felt stupid to ask these questions, desperately, too. But I had to ask them now instead of suffering at the future. 

I walked away from my own love because I wanted him to learn of my worth. But he found somebody else's instead. He posted their pictures with the girl blurred so they wouldn't get attacked. So that he would protect the girl. I was envious. He said he couldn't choose between me and her because he was afraid of hurting us. I was tempted to laugh so hard. Was this still not a form of hurt? He could have just said he was afraid of hurting her. Then again, why would he be afraid of hurting me if he had already done so repeatedly for three years and six months?

I loved him and I faced the world for him. I dedicated the stars for him. I tried bringing the warmth of the sun in every embrace I gave him. I wasted inks, pages, ideas, rhymes, sentences, and words for him. But he still chose someone who gave him a stone disguised as a crystal. He chose someone who emptied his rivers that I refilled. He chose someone who broke the melody he knew so well that I fixed with my own.

Out of nowhere, I realized that these papers containing the stories I held dearly were signs of what was to come. I never thought I'd have my own real life version of Alfredo Salazar but in this version he chose Julia Salas instead. I never knew that I would become Paige, Jade, and Flor all at the same time. I embodied all of my own characters that I put together in my mere imagination.

Never have I imagined I would become like them.

I let out a shaky sigh as I laid back down, the papers and pieces of my broken heart beside me as I cursed love and its schemes. I wiped my tears and let the drowsiness envelope me instead of the cold February night and prepared myself for another day of living only to be tortured again at night, the image of the two of us under a starlit sky but our hands were no longer intertwined as we looked at each other from the opposite side of the street prevailing in my head like a child's nightmare.