PUT ME IN A MOVIE - Charlie Barber.

Chapter 19 - Mourning.

   You never imagined life to be so grey without someone to love — but perhaps it was just the withdraw of love that made you feel like that, like a withdraw from a highly addictive drug.

When you spend so much of your time with one person, they begin to occupy every thought in your mind, begin to make appearances in your daily routine that you had once only done alone. Slowly but surely, you welcome a second presence in your life, and then it becomes all you know.

But all things that come must go, and soon enough, you're left to be alone once more. It's funny how people are only temporary in your life, there for personal gain, and then leaves when they're done. Once born into the world alone, every person is left to leave alone. It's a cycle, a continuous one at that.

Maybe heartbreak made you philosophical, or maybe, you just overcompensated your wallowing with a poetic reasoning for it. Regardless of whatever it was, you were still left with a hole inside of you that one man in particular used to fill.

And now, you were forced to either fill that whole with something or someone else, or proudly let the wound gape - to which you let proudly gape, as you had given up on love after things ended with Charlie.

It had been almost a month since that one night at the bar, where you called Charlie and told him the truth. You had many regrets about that night, but breaking up with him was not one of them. You weren't even sure if you liked that term; breaking up. The two of you were adults, not two teenagers. You decided that you liked the word separation more.

There was a lot to be said about your separation with Charlie. As much joy and happiness the older man brought you, you also knew there was many red flags in your relationship with him, many red flags you chose to ignore, too blinded by love to see them or even really care. The biggest red flag being that you not only say him as a partner, but a father figure, much like Henry had.

You found that you would fall into these patterns of forgiving Charlie when he would make mistakes because you never had the chance to do that with your own father. You felt rejected when he wouldn't baby you like he did with his young son, and at times, almost felt angered that he had other priorities other than you. But you weren't the only one at fault here, so was Charlie.

If anything, Charlie was one to pursue this behavior most; using terms like "Daddy's Little Girl", "Daddy", among other things. Part of you wondered if he actually saw you as a woman, or if he only saw you as a girl younger than him, easily corruptible. Maybe that's why you felt so tied to him, because he wrapped you around his finger, made you dependent on him and his time, manipulated you.

But now, slowly but surely, you had to learn to live without him and his company, and all the things he gave you, emotionally and physically. You'd admit, it was hard. For the first week or two after the separation, you cried yourself to sleep most nights, along with picking up on heavy drinking. It passed though, and you learned how to turn that ache for him into numbness, letting it engulf you whole. At least with the numbness, you could actually get things done.

You had continued working at the small coffee shop, filling your days with shifts, and even some nights. It gave you something to do, something to distract yourself. You even became frequent on dating apps, although it never really got you anywhere. The dating apps gave you a sense of false freedom, as if a part of you wasn't still bounded to Charlie.

Sometimes, you wondered what Charlie had done to cope with this loss. You hoped he had somehow used the pain to motivate himself, translate it into his theater work - maybe then he would actually be doing the separation justice, unlike you, who wallowed and pretended it was fine. You also wondered what Henry had gotten up to, and who babysat him now. Maybe, he had already gotten a new babysitter, blonde and attractive, and maybe, Charlie had manipulated her to falling into his traps too. The idea of that made you sad.