butterflies ઇଓ matt sturniolo imagines

𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵

ॱ⋅.˳˳.⋅˙ॱᐧ.˳˳.⋅ઇଓ

     being friends with the triplets wasn't like being friends with other people- there was a certain energy to that relationship that didn't surge anywhere else in the world. to be without that is to be without yourself.
     nick, matt, and chris are pillars; they are rocks, protectors, brothers to anybody they take in. when you're a part of their life, you are made special. those three boys make family out of strangers. they take you from who you were and make you a part of them. the first day you met those boys, you knew you were getting yourself into more than just a friendship, and you were right.

     it's been five months. five months of radio silence, and you couldn't decide if you were better off or destroyed. you grappled with your situation daily, because they work themselves into your brain without ever saying a word. they always have. even when you don't want to think about them, when you try your hardest to put it out of your head, you cannot avoid the feeling that when you left, a piece of you stayed behind. and oh, how hard it was to leave.
you didn't want to. the last thing you wanted to do was leave the only people you truly felt at home with. nick was your best friend. he answered every facetime call, even the ones in the middle of the night when you couldn't sleep and needed to talk. chris was the brother you never had, and he took you up on every challenge and accompanied you on your adventures and road trips and looked out for you in every way he could. and matt... he was the thing you didn't know you needed until he came around. a safe haven inside a boy. he was your shoulder to cry on; your late night chauffeur; your confidant, your someone, your everything else. matt was special to you, special in a way no one else had been before. neither of you had ever crossed the bridge from friends to more, but you knew. matt knew, his brothers knew, and so did the world. and that was what made you leave. the world.

the world didn't like you two together. everywhere you looked, they told you how much they hated you. they hated your face, and your body, and the way you laughed. they hated the way you did your makeup and the clothes you wore. but most of all, they hated the way matt treated you. they saw his kindness in every vlog, and the sweet comments he would leave on every post, and they despised you. they saw you as a fraud, as a freeloader, somebody who didn't deserve to be loved by someone like matt- matt sturniolo, the jewel of the internet, youtube's angel. they told you daily that you didn't deserve his attention, and that weight eventually grew too heavy to bear.
     you felt weak for it, but you couldn't handle the pressure of being so close to the boys. they swore up and down and that they'd release a video in a heartbeat shutting down any hate coming your way, but you refused, because it wasn't their fault. it wasn't yours, either. but being in their shadow and feeling the pressure to not only perform but perform perfectly was taking far too large a toll on your wellbeing. you hated going out, you hated having any presence on social media, and you hated the watchful eyes waiting for you to fuck up so they could crucify you for it.
     you told the boys you needed space, and you shut yourself off. you stopped posting, you stopped going to their house, and you stopped your life. you picked up a job answering phones and bookkeeping in your apartment building for a discount on your rent, and you disappeared.

nobody took it well. nick was out of a best friend, and all of a sudden he was waking chris up in the middle of the night to talk. chris forced his brothers to go on hikes with him, because you weren't there to come up with a new outing every week. their living room was a mess because you weren't around to tidy up, and their fridge went from having real food to being stocked with takeout boxes and prepackaged shit. the halls were quiet. there were no spare candy wrappers on matt's desk. their lives were dull, and you were better off not knowing what you'd left them like.
the worst of it happened to matt. he was destroyed. he slept more than ever, which says a lot. he kept forgetting to eat, and when he did eat, nothing tasted right- or tasted like anything at all. he kept zoning out around friends and family, and nick and chris had to draw his attention back to the world. the boy was lost without you, feeling that same void in his chest that you felt. he never reached out to you, though, because when you left, you said that if you came back it would have to be on your terms. matt wanted to hate you for it, but he knew what was best for you; you wouldn't know if you were ready until you just were. he couldn't make you better, and he couldn't filter every hate message. he couldn't fix this until you fixed yourself. so he let you be, and for five months, he's been empty. you could see it in his face every week when you watched a new video. they didn't know you still payed attention, but you did. every week, right on time, you admired their smiling faces and half-debated taking everything back and running to their doorstep. but you didn't.