For Me,There Is Only You |18+|

1.Stranger and Me.

Just one more day...

That's what I've been telling myself for six months. I kept repeating it whenever the grief got too heavy, like maybe lying to myself would make it easier to breathe.

But the truth was, I chose this. I was the one who decided to sit in this guilt, this sadness, and let it pull me down little by little, let it slowly choke me. I was the one who brought myself to the point where I don't even know how to escape this suffocation anymore.

This room used to be full of life. Now it just feels... dead.

Cold, even in this stupid summer heat. And it was not because of the weather. It was because of the memories. The kind that doesn't really fade, that just crawls under your skin and sits there, making everything hurt.

It used to be such a warm place with Mom's bright paintings covering the walls, and all those family photos, everyone smiling in them like things would never change.

Every corner had something of her. Her bed always smelled like jasmine and sunshine. She loved her floral sheets.

Her cupboard was packed with those bright dresses she wore every summer. She hated winter, always said she belonged to the sun.

Now...

The bed was empty. So was the cupboard. Both hollow, like they'd been scooped clean from the inside. Kind of like me, I guess.

Even the mirror on the dresser had stopped showing anything. It was covered in a thin layer of dust, dull and tired, like it didn't care anymore either.

The shelf where Dad used to keep all his business books was bare too. I could still picture him sitting in that old recliner, flipping through those books with a serious look on his face.

But now the recliner was gone. The books were gone. They were gone.

And this room... it was just four walls and silence.

I walked in slowly and put the storage box on the empty bed frame. I'd been packing all night, shoving things into boxes, sealing them up, like somehow that would ease some of my pain, like removing the traces of their existence would somehow ease my guilt.

It was already afternoon now. And though my body felt heavy, my mind was just... blank. Like it had been running on fumes for days and finally decided to shut down.

I reached for the last few photos lying on the dresser with shaky hands, and I tried not to look too closely. I didn't want to feel it again... the memories, the sting, the lump in my throat.

But then one photo stopped me. It was from two years ago, from a time when things were finally starting to get better. I was coming out of my rebellious phase, finally ready to forgive them for the past.

In this picture, Mom and Dad were sitting out on the patio, laughing about something. I was behind them, arms over their shoulders, pushing their heads together so our cheeks touched.

We were smiling. All three of us.

I can still remember that day. The warmth, the breeze, it felt like a new beginning. And at that moment, I really thought we could mend what was broken between us.

My eyes in that photo looked like hers. Brown. Bright. Alive. And the camera somehow caught all of it. That light. That love. That before.

For a moment, I thought I was reliving that moment because when my phone rang, it really startled me. I shoved the photo into the box too fast, like I could shove the memory away with it.

Grabbing the phone, I turned to the window, suddenly in need of some sort of distraction to make that ache stop spreading inside me.

"Yes, Ash?" I answered, my voice flat.