Insomniacs (#1)

37. ready

Kilned Graveyard.

It was peculiar, really, thinking back now to the first time me and Luca were here. That night at the graveyard; when we'd peered into the realities of one another's lives, saw each other for the first time. At least truly, behind all the facades and concealing we both took effect in holding up all the time.

Two kids, so used to hiding, suddenly finding a person that made it feel okay not to. An unforeseen tying together of hearts, all beginning in the essential heart of our problems, where our so thought inability to love rooted from. Graves, deaths, grief.

I was smoking my second cigarette. Well, it was Luca's. He insisted sharing one.

Sat in front of his mother's grave, our knees tucked up to our chest and hands intertwined between us. He'd been quiet since we got into that car.

We'd been sat for a while, quiet asides from our breaths when exhaling the thick smoke. I was concerned, really concerned as I looked over him. He looked so tired and exasperated with everything.

He looked burdened under the weight of his mind. I couldn't tell you how much I wanted to take it away though I knew that was impossible, so I sat besides him and brushed my thumb against his hand.

Silence, silence, silence until.

"You have the same strength she possesses. The type of confidence to brave the world alone. He broke the quiet for the first time in what felt like eons and my gaze immediately turned to him.

My gaze met with side profile as his eyes stayed on her gravestone. His eyes looked heavy with sorrow and brimmed with affliction, dark hair sprinkled with white flecks of snow.

He was looking at the gravestone like he desperately wanted his mother to cease from lying under it and reappear. Besides him once more.

He continued, the sound of his voice a testament to how hurt he seemed to be, "Hazel eyes. And a smile that made everything bad seem not so bad."

"She was the only person I felt okay with. I didn't have many friends as a kid, I was quiet. She was the first and only person I really talked to, really laughed with, really loved." He swallowed, shaking his head like he was willing himself to steel through.

When he turned to look at me, a flash of pain rocked through my body. When I saw that painful look in his eyes and I could not, for the life of me, look away.

"And then you came into my life and I'm still not sure how I lived without you. You've taken my heart as yours and I don't ever want it back." He said and my heart did something weird, skipped a beat and made my body standstill, "I'll forever belong to you. Even when or if you're not mine. You've consumed me and I adore you for it."

He looked back to his mum's gravestone, "And I couldn't save her. I didn't help her. And I didn't-"

A strained pause, a quivering breath and it seemed like it took all of his strength to finally say, "I didn't save you, I didn't help you."

All at once, he looked about to shatter in front of my eyes. His eyes became red once again, running a hand through his hair. And all at once I realise, this is what he's been torturing himself over and I freeze in my spot.

This. Me. What happened to me, what I told him and didn't speak of again.

And I think, what the fuck have I been doing? How selfish I've been, how reckless I've been with this boy's mind.

As much as it hurt me, I'd been concealing it for years on end. I'd become accustomed to not talking about it nor accepting it as something real. But him, he'd only just found out.