Don't Forget Me (George Shelley Fan Fiction)

Holding onto Nothing

Months went by and the pain in my heart never seemed to fade. Most days I’d write out huge texts to him, apologising even though I knew I had nothing to apologise, I thought that if I apologised maybe I’d get him back, but everything I wrote made me appear pathetic and hung up; so I’d re-read them over and over until eventually deleting them and throwing my phone across the room. It got easier to deal with the pain, I suppose I just got used to having a hole in my heart. The agony wasn’t anything like the first time I’d lost George, this time I felt betrayed, at least when George had walked away the last time it had gone unexplained, I had the choice to make up any excuse for him back then, anything that could hurt less, this time I knew the truth and there was no escaping it, George just didn’t love me enough. Then it suddenly dwelled on me that I never had found out why George had never texted me back all those years ago.

The band made new music, but I never had the courage to go out and buy it, I wanted to, so badly, but I knew hearing George’s voice sing about love and heartbreak would only make me feel like he was rubbing it in my face, instead I gave Em the money to go out and buy me a copy of the CD that she could keep with her own, that way they’d still get the profit they deserved. I don’t know why I felt like an extra £9.99 from me would help, it just felt like I owed it to them. I knew eventually I’d get that CD off Em and torture myself with it but I didn’t, for the months that followed its release.

One day in July I got a random call from Em.

“April I can’t believe I’ve only just noticed this” she said sounding extremely egger.

“Noticed what Em?” I said in my now common ‘I’m probably not interested’ tone.

“So I was just listening to Union J’s album for like the millionth time and-”

I cut her off “Em I’m not really in the mood to talk about George or his band at the moment” as I hadn’t been since that day in January.

“No, no you’ll want to hear this, trust me!”

I sighed “go on then”.

“So I was listening to their album and I’m thinking to myself during ‘You Were the One’ ‘man there’s a lot of George in this song’ like he has so many lines, and then I start really concentrating on the lyrics, coz yanno I don’t listen to the lyrics properly and anyway they sound like they’re telling a story, but you see April, listening to this story, I’ve got Deja Vu and so I rewind back to the beginning of the song and-”

“Can you just skip to the point Em?” I said a little too agitated.

“Yeah well basically April, I think George wrote a song about you. A really good song actually”.

I choked a little on the air in my lungs, shocked at what she’d just said “what?”

“Yeah, the song goes on about tracing back pieces of a broken heart back to our home and wishing the world would let them be together, he sings about all these memories April, the memories YOU already told me about”.

I jumped up from my bed “I have to go Em” I said ending the call before she had the chance to say anything else.

I opened my laptop up and pressed the on button. I was pacing around my room for what seemed like an hour, waiting for it to turn on then waiting for YouTube to load. When it finally did I quickly typed in the song title with my shaky hands and clicked on the first lyric video I saw. Turning up the volume and hearing the guitar solo at the beginning I knew it must be his. I listened to the song over and over again, concentrating on the lyrics, Em was right, there was no way this song wasn’t about me. Every line seemed like a replay of our time together “walking you home”, “waking up next to you”, “leaving you behind” and “seeing your face for the first time since school” he couldn’t have made it more obvious to me if he’d tried. The problem was though, I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to say. Eventually I took to Google, searching everything I could think of which may give me answers, what was the song about, who wrote it, why did they write it, yet all I could find was that it was written by George, but that was all I needed to confirm my suspicions.

I went to pick up my phone to ring him and tell him I had heard the song, I didn’t know what I would say after that, but I didn’t care, I’d wasted too much time giving him the space I thought he’d needed but as I got to my phone and tried to turn it on I noticed it was suddenly dead. I felt like this was a warning, someone up there telling me I shouldn’t bother trying. So I didn’t. I let it go.

I let it go for 5 months.