Insomniacs (#1)

71. your darling

^to listen to for the letter.

Aria.

Graduation tomorrow.

It was a fleeting thought, gone as quick as it came because to put it lightly, I couldn't care less. I'd already thought through ways I could get out of it but realistically, if mum doesn't drag me there, Everest will. Or Benji. Val or Hudson.

The cigarette crackled slightly as I inhaled deeply, letting it out into the air above me. My knees were tucked up to my chest, on this hill alone.

The one near the graveyard. I've spent a lot of time here recently.

The only light source I had this late into the night was the street lamp a little while away but from here, it didn't provide much. No clouds in sight, just stars galore when I tilted my head back to look up at them.

I looked back down at my converse and relished in the solitude. The only solitude I got anymore because nobody left me the fuck alone. Which I got, I did. I understand what it means to worry and they have every right to.

Doesn't mean it didn't piss me off.

So these moments where I snuck out in the depths of the night, I cherished them. The quiet, the lack of hovering, the painful sort of hurt knowing I'm sitting here alone. Without the person I'd came here with.

As of two hours ago, it's been twenty three days since he left.

Twenty three days where it feels as if I have lost any and all purpose. I blink and a day finishes, the next one is starting and I'm on the same recurring wheel of an endless pining for a person I no longer know is alive or not. I've been through some shit but I don't think anything has ever been more excruciating.

I'd hoped that as the days merged, a numbness would take over. I'd yearned for it actually but now, when I wish more than ever to feel that nothingness, it does not consume me.

Because in opposition to what I want, I feel every bit of it. Funny, isn't it? How I spent a lifetime learning how to suppress my emotions but Luca, thoughts of him, I am incapable of doing so. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised, I couldn't stop feeling for Luca as hard as I may damn try.

Every single thing, I feel. Every bit of my body that misses his touch. Every ounce of hurt. Every brush of someone else's body that now irks me. Every waking moment where I wish for him to appear in my eye line and every crumb of sleep where, even in them, I miss him.

I shut my eyes now, if only to remember the dreams I receive when I sleep. Hoping they come back, hoping I get to see them so I can grasp onto them, like a measly tether holding me up.

My dreams are my favourite pastime. Because I get to see see him smiling in them and hear his laugh like a distant brush of wind. Feel his lips graze my skin when he kisses my forehead. Watch his cheeks flush when I reach up, slowly, because in my dreams him and I have time, and brush back his dark hair.

A rush of warmth right to my chest as I keep my eyes tightly shut, prizing the images of him like I can trap myself in my mind to dwell amongst the memories instead of live in the reality, where they are exactly that: memories. Once-were moments.

He's sitting besides me on a piano. Lying on the ice rink and staring up at those stars. Pulling me onto his lap on a New York balcony.

He's beautiful and full of life and every single thing I fell in love with, in those dreams of mine.

He's a promise of a peace I never thought I'd find and a whisper of hope I hadn't ever foreseen. He's a bundle of laughter with Benji on his back and a smiling mess when I call him beautiful. Tying my heart to his. He's a breathless boy when I kiss him for the first time and a fighter, through and through.