fade to black | james hetfield [1]

eighteen

chapter eighteen: alone again

tw: food, vomit/sickness, emotional stress

Every time something good happened to Iris, she ruined it.

For once, she had something to keep her going. She found everything all of that in James and didn't know how to deal with this new feeling. Now without him, she was back to that dark place.

The day he left, she waited with every passing hour, hoping to hear the phone ring or a knock at the door. They said things to each other that they didn't mean, and she hoped that he would come back with an apology.

But he never came.

Iris's world slowly began to crumble and grow dark again. She sat alone in the cold empty apartment that was once filled with James's warmth, replaying the last few moments she saw of him in her head.

She couldn't stop crying, wishing she could take back everything she said. Iris couldn't get over what James said.

"I can see why everyone hates you now."

After all the times he reassured her and made her believe that nothing was her fault, it suddenly was her fault. It cut her deeply. 

Iris rarely wore her heart on her sleeve and she wasn't prepared to love someone or be loved, but that was how she felt with him. 

In a desperate attempt to hear his voice once more, Iris would dial his phone number, listening to the phone ring in hopes he would pick up. The longer it went on, the more tears welled up in her eyes.

She did this more than once. She sat by the phone and dialed, having hope that off of some miracle, he would feel bad and pick up. But every time she called they all ended the same way.

"Please leave your message at the tone." 

Sometimes she would cry out in frustration, other times she would slam the phone into the receiver, getting angry. She was an emotional wreck, angry at herself, angry at him, and sad that this was now her reality again.

She only had enough energy to leave the house to go to work. People could tell that there was something wrong. It was obvious with the dark circles under her eyes and her mind seeming elsewhere. 

Whenever she came home from work, all she did was lay down in bed and cry again. The minute she stepped through her front door, the memories came rushing back and it was hard to get rid of them.

She barely ate, and if she did, it wasn't something she would put effort into, just a bowl of cereal or something she could heat up in the microwave. It was something to keep her going, even if she didn't want to keep going.

Some nights, she only got a couple of minutes of sleep. Other nights, she got no sleep at all. She would stare at the blank wall above her, thinking about what James could be doing or where he might be. 

The good memories she had with him always came back to taunt her. Like the time when she saw him drunkenly playing with the cat, or when he was playing on stage with the rest of the band. It all seemed so long ago.

And the tears would start to flow again. She was reminded that the one person she had grown to love didn't want to be around her anymore. 

She would get so consumed by her thoughts that she wouldn't even realize how long she was awake. It would take the sunlight peeking in through the windows to break her out of her daze.

The heartbreak sometimes doubled with the exhaustion and she would physically become sick. Running to the bathroom, she hovered over the toilet to throw up, but sometimes, nothing even came out. 

Trudging back weakly to her bed, she lay heartbroken and in denial about her current situation. She felt so sick and used, her mind filled with thoughts about how he might be feeling about all this.

Was he hurting as much as this was hurting her? Did he know the torment this would cause? Was he sitting in front of a toilet seat ready to vomit from the sickness of it all?

She wished it was easy to just get him out of her head, but it was hard when she didn't have anything or anyone to provide a distraction. She was all alone, just like James had reminded her before he left.

James grew on Iris and he meant a lot to her. Although she would never have the chance to tell him, it was evident in the way she was suffering from an endless loop of despair. 

And so James became another remnant of Iris's life and she accepted the fact that she would never see him again.