When Friendship Becomes Forever

Chapter 15

Max

I was alone.

We all were.

I left the house after Nancy and knew that El had left too. I didn't know how to feel anymore; my emotions so tangled that I couldn't feel anything properly.

She had been kissing him.

I had kissed Lucas.

Should I be angry?

Was it my fault still, or was it hers?

Words jumbled inside my brain as I walked through this broken, grief stricken town.

I was headed for the roof; a place that was once reserved for El and I.

A place that once symbolised love and friendship, the two things I had lost.

Maybe I thought that going back there would help me find them again, in some childish, naïve way.

Or maybe, I just needed a place where I knew I could think.

The world was too loud; people milling from place to place, children screaming, adults sighing, teenagers laughing and kissing and talkingtallkingtalking.

Sometimes it was so loud, that it was louder than my own head.

So loud that I couldn't understand what I was thinking.

So, I walked up the staircase that led to the long metal rooftop.

It was silent there.

An asterism of stars glimmered above me, signalling the first echo of nightfall.

And then I let myself fall. (A/N: Not literally- its not su!cide)

I let the thoughts and memories and questions and everything fall down upon me.

It felt like I was plummeting downwards, like my own words were pulling me with them, forcing me to carry a weight of something that wasn't mine to carry at all.

I let them swallow me whole until tears fell down my cheeks and my body was so tired I was sweating.

I was drowning and there was only one other person who could keep me afloat.

"El," I whispered, my voice hoarse and broken from exhaustion.

But she couldn't hear me.

Nobody could.

Slowly I sat up, the tears drying on my pale cheeks simply to be replaced by new ones.

I thought I knew what alone felt like.

I thought I was used to it and that it was never something I could despise or be afraid of.

But when you are alone because you have lost everything you love, its different.

I had lost a whole life, leaving my father and essentially my childhood back in California.

And now I was here, in Hawkins, and I had friends.

I had the boys and I had El and then I had Nancy and Robin.

It had begun to feel like I was slowly building a new life.

A new me.

But then I lost it all again, and this time it was my fault.

I lost something that I could still have.

There was nobody else to blame it on, nobody else to hate or to detest but myself.

What do you do then?

How do you stay afloat when you're your own worst enemy?

Is that the true definition of alone?

When there is nobody left to save you, or love you, or want you- not even yourself.

How do you find what you've lost again?

How do you find love after hate, friendship after disaster?

How do you find yourself, when even you don't know where she's gone?

Does it stay this way forever?

Or does the summertime heat find its way into our hearts, into our memories and latch itself onto everything so that we find what was once lost?

Is it these three months when the impossible is possible, the invisible is visible and the lost is found?

I didn't know the answers then.

But I did know one thing.

Love is more powerful than hate. It finds its way into your mind even if it so heavily guarded or manipulated by anger.

Love finds you.

But sometimes...sometimes I think you have to find it.

(A/N: Hey- This chapter is really sad I know. If I'm completely honest, it doesn't get much better for a while but things turn around eventually. This story is supposed to be kinda philosophical so I hope maybe you can find something in it :) Love you all <3 Stay safe and totally tubular and I'll see you in the next one xxx)