Swipe of Fate

Chapter 18

I am loving reading all the new comments, so please do keep them coming! :) This is the next chapter in Ava's long winding story.

I became a zombie after Max stopped being my friend. I would see him in the dining hall; he would occasionally smile and wave, but I would go to the bathroom and weep. 

I barely felt alive, but it wasn't about Max. It had never been about just one boy. It was about the utter injustice of love and men and how they used me. 

I felt empty and useless; I was a shell of my former self. I talked to friends, but I realized they would never understand me or the hurt I had gone through.

I looked around at the attractive, intellectual boys that stalked the campus, and I felt an intense kind of anger and helplessness. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that love was a scam. 

I either would never feel what I had perceived as love again, or I would and it would destroy me again. I didn't know which was worse. I felt barely alive, and yet I remembered thinking, if I'm this depressed, if I can barely get out of bed, why am I so angry? Shouldn't I just feel numb?

Again, it was the injustice. Max was happy with Zoe, and he had destroyed me. He had lied to me. 

Ethan was likely in his own way happy, having sex with hundreds of new girls, spreading the poison around. And neither would ever see any accountability. 

But I would be sad. It seems silly to say, but I knew my sadness would span forever. I had survived the worst, most abusive relationship of my life only to believe in love again and be thrown away like I was nothing. Again. 

There was no way I would ever get over it, and I stupidly felt I was the only one who had lived through this.

I didn't know how to survive, so I just went through the motions of life. I started missing class occasionally, sleeping until after noon on weekdays, being too sad to eat. 

I made excuses for why I couldn't see friends. I stopped talking to Liv as much, even when we spent hours together in the room. I feared anything I could share with her she would only judge. 

She had never experienced betrayal or emotional abuse like I had, and she didn't have a bad childhood telling her it wasn't just that men are trash, it was that I meant nothing to anyone and I began feeling sure there was nothing to live for.

It's hard to explain, but I felt already dead. Breathing was exhausting, and every moment of the day hurt. I kept remembering how Ethan and Max destroyed me and how they got to be happy and I never would be again.

I began thinking about suicide. I didn't want to blame others, including my friends, for how I got to this point. 

But a few months had passed. At first I was nearly constantly crying in the brain fog of the sad zombie. Now the transformation was complete. I had no tears to cry, just despair to feel, just tiredness and hopelessness that nothing would change. 

And my friends seemed content to leave me like this. They didn't like asking me about my feelings or how I had been since Max stopped being my friend.

I told Liv how Max said we couldn't be friends anymore because of his girlfriend when it had happened. She said that made sense. 

She said to imagine if I was his girlfriend.... I didn't deserve anything from him as ex. Basically, she was saying, love meant nothing and one could take it back at any time. 

Even though that had never happened to her, and she always had someone who loved her. No one was on my side. Everyone thought my feelings weren't valid or they were just too much.