She wanted to die.
He wanted to live.
•••
A hand grabbed onto my wrist, yanking me back just as the train rushed past, before I'd even had time to comprehend whether or not I'd carry out the action. I stumbled back into the person's chest, my hear...
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I wasn't entirely sure of what I was feeling.
Everyone had been telling me how they thought I should feel: I shouldn't blame myself. I should allow myself to mourn. I should cry as much as I needed to. It was okay to feel the way I was feeling.
But I didn't know how I felt.
I couldn't articulate the feeling of such cruel discomfort - like a ball of molten lava burning through my chest, with shards of ice imminently scraping through the gaping gash left across my lungs by the white-hot pain. I failed to fathom the contrast of searing agony: the scalding pangs followed by numbing prickles that felt like I had been set alight in the midst of a snowstorm.
I was certain it was somewhere between grief and heartbreak – somewhere between impulsively jumping off a platform edge and inadvertently falling from the edge of a rooftop. Not in the sense that it felt like I was dying, but rather I had known it was inevitable and had done nothing to stop it.
Not that I'm sure I could have done anything to stop it, but rather I felt as though I ought to have known from the very second, when our stars collided in the dense matter of this dark world, that we had been destined for destruction.
Fate had been toying with us. Fate had been toying with Romeo and Juliet.
Nosebleeds weren't supposed to kill people. Blood wasn't supposed to stain my skin. Stars weren't supposed to die just as they were birthed.
I felt like I moved on autopilot as I was hugged, cried with and ushered into my room to change out of my blood-soaked clothes. I felt like I was watching myself move through the white corridors when I returned from a shower, dressed in my own clothes as my dad waited at the reception to take me to the house. I felt like I was a separate entity to my body as the Harts' hugged me goodbye and Theo failed to look me in the eye when handing back my journal.
I never thought it would end like this.
I fiddled with the loose threads of his grey beanie as I sat on my bed, journal in front of me as my crimson fingers blared loudly through the silence of my dark bedroom, the cloudy sky hindering any moonlight or stars from shining through my open curtains.
It wasn't dark enough to erase the vision of his bloody figure.
Mum had come back to the house tonight. Her and Him were downstairs talking lowly, playing their parts perfectly as though trying to convince themselves they could actually repair all the damage they had orchestrated.
Their voices weren't loud enough to block out the ringing sirens.
Scarlet fingerprints adorned the grey material in my hands, splattered with dried blood clumped between the seams that seemed to unravel at my fidgeting fingers, picking relentlessly at the flakes of vermillion. Unmoving, I watched while they landed onto the open page before me, scattering across the empty lines as no poetic words seemed to blossom forth at the flashes of the dripping blood before me.
