fake it til you make it | greta van fleet

a family affair | five

The next two weeks went by painfully slowly.

Aside from the night you'd spent with Danny, you hadn't had any contact with the outside world. You extended your vacation from work, citing a family emergency, and decided to just take a while to wallow in your misery. You'd spent years pining over Jake, only to officially have your heartbroken, and you decided you deserved the time to be miserable.

Maybe it was pathetic, even outright ridiculous of you, but you didn't care. Your longest, most treasured friendship was ruined, and you were going to take all the time you wanted to commiserate. In all actuality, you'd never realized just how much you depended on Jake.

You'd never noticed just how heavily you leaned on him, how utterly devoted you were to him. Hell, you'd locked your heart away since your preteen years purely because you were so hung up on a guy who paid you no mind. How ridiculous was that?

You never even gave yourself a chance.

All those years you'd spent waiting. Waiting, and hoping, and yearning for a chance that was never yours to take. How would you ever know what you could have done, could have been, if you'd put yourself out there instead?

What if, by your own hand, you'd passed up on the love of a lifetime? What if you'd met your soulmate, somewhere in your past, and you'd pushed them away because you only had eyes for Jake? What if you'd truly doomed yourself to die alone because you were a fool for your best friend?

The commiserating was going exceptionally well, clearly. Two days prior you'd constructed a blanket fort in your living room, a simple little tent made between your television, sofa, and coffee table. Over those two days, it had grown into a temple of sorts.

Now, there were tunnels extending into the hallway. Your entire living room was a mess of twists and turns, blankets covering every surface. In the center, where the structure had first begun, was your cave of misery.

You'd be lying if you said you'd left it at all in the past twelve hours. You had your snacks, and a pile of pillows and blankets to curl up with, and you had all the romance that Netflix had to offer. Needless to say, you'd been crying a lot.

You knew that you should probably have checked in with somebody, but you couldn't bring yourself to look at your phone. It was locked away in your bedroom, and it had stopped ringing at some point over the week–you could only assume that it had finally died. Nobody had shown up, though, so you could assume that no one thought you had died.

Pathetically, you were too afraid to look at your phone because of Jake. You weren't sure what would hurt more; no notifications from him at all, or something. As for what that something would be, you didn't know. Some part of you was terrified he'd act as if the entire thing had never happened, and even more of you was scared that he'd be weird with you from now on.

Even more horrifying, was the prospect of finding a message telling you he didn't want you in his life anymore. You'd almost rather suffer never hearing from him at all than to have to read a message like that. Or, worse even, hearing it from his own mouth.

It had been a few days since your sister had returned from her honeymoon, and you were waiting patiently for when she'd finally turn up at your door. Surely, she was trying to get ahold of you to gush about her newly married life, and also to fish for more information about Jake. Information that you didn't have, unfortunately.

You'd been going over the events of the weekend endlessly. Every time you fell asleep, your mind would take you right back to all the moments you no longer wished to remember. Like a slideshow or some shitty movie, you relived each touch over and over again.