skullcrusher

the first of lovely people

make room for me, hannah.

'make room,' i want to yell, but the anger fails to squeeze past my cracked lips. 'make room for me in your life!'

she doesn't, not quite.

hannah is the closest thing i have to a part-time friend, but not close enough, because friendship isn't a word i would use to describe what we have. truth is, we could be friends. we share so many memories together. i fear that the problem might be the things we don't share, because hannah never really talks to me anymore unless our parents are getting together and dragging us with them. we get along really well, her and i. i'm not sure why we don't talk.

i remember she got me out of bed one day, dragging me out of the camper trailer us children slept in. seasonal depression had hit me like a truck that summer. maybe it wasn't all that seasonal.

"jude," she told me. "we should do something. we're only here for a week. you don't want to spend it lying around. it'll go to waste."

she was right. i didn't want it to go to waste. hannah's family had never gone to summer vacation with us before, but they couldn't spend the whole summer with us, either. they had other plans and our house was too small, even without our grandparents there. our parents took the two bedrooms; one with three beds, the other with two. us five were set into the camper.

i reluctantly asked what she had in mind. she told me, and i didn't hate it all that much. here was the plan.

hannah and i would wait until all of our parents went to sleep, and then we would sneak out of the camper to find a location that that radonautica app had given us. it was somewhere in kistanje, the village next to the one we were in, and it actually wasn't too far.

all of that doesn't matter, really. i didn't actually long to sneak out that much. instead, i longed for hannah. for holding her hand while running away from those jackals, for laughing with her as we passed by the drunken café, for walking with her through the scratchy, tall grass; for taking off our shoes while walking back through the street, just in case our parents were still awake.

we never actually found what we were looking for. my feet were dirty, and the both of our siblings almost forgot to let us into the camper once we were back. it was 4am. we'd been out for an hour. hannah crashed the moment we got inside, and unlike her, i didn't sleep at all that night, because i watched her breathing instead.

and there are other memories, too.

walking through the forest, biking with her through the town, her making me meet with those two boys in only my pyjamas, us sneaking out to go to a club once more, me wearing her clothes, throwing up all over her shoes and her only cheerily laughing about it.

and then my least favourite one: sleeping over at her house, when she found out that boy was cheating on her in the middle of the night. she cried. i held her, because i didn't know what else to do with myself.

i wished you liked me enough to love me, hannah. i wish you'd make room for me in your wild woman, euphoria chasing heart.

i'm not in love with you, hannah. i know i could have been.