The Beautiful Truth

// 80

Berkeley. Sunday. One week and five days since Barton Black broke my heart.

Cal had gone unexpectedly deep in the NCAA tournament. I had yet to see Micki since coming back to school, but Cal'd finally been knocked out last night—the whole campus was distraught, although I barely noticed. Every day since had been the same.

I went through the motions—I got up. I went to class. Sometimes I ate. I did my school work. And then I cried myself to sleep.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

My Facebook account was closed. My phone was off. My dorm phone was unplugged. After a few days, I'd checked my email, and upon reading one from my dad that threatened him flying out to San Francisco if he didn't hear from me within 24 hours, I finally let him know I was alive. Barely alive, but alive nonetheless. He told me he understood.

I had to believe him. He'd been here, or some version of here, anyway. And I had to remember the conversation about 'have you had your heart broken by love?' we'd had in Dr. Bovich's class last semester.

I was wrong. That was a pin-prick by comparison. I'd never had my heart broken by love before. Not like this.

The weather was annoyingly perfect. If I hadn't been so miserable, I thought in passive bemusement, it would be a nice afternoon for a run in the city. But, of course, that only made me think of Barton. And I was crying again.

But, all was not lost, I told myself with heavily noted sarcasm—Dr. Bovich always encouraged me to write from the core. The scene I'd been most struggling with, of course, was the breakup scene—the first scene not captured in the original The End, and by all accounts, what should be the climax of the script, or...anticlimax, whatever your definition may be.

So, I willed myself out of bed, and put the saddest song I could think of on continuous repeat...and sat down to write.

For the first time in two weeks something went right. Not only was I crying for myself, but I was crying for Grant, and Madison, and Ellie—and the real people behind the aliases because I understood. I got it. They hurt. I hurt. Theirs was a messy love triangle. Mine was a messy love triangle. And something in me knew I'd never written anything so raw and true in my life.

I was completely unaware of the time—how long I'd been sitting at my computer—when the door to my room pushed open slowly. All I knew was that I was in the middle of Madison's most impassioned, gut-wrenching monologue of the script.

"Sawyer—oh my God, is that Konstantine?!" I heard Micki exclaim in a voice that almost sounded as wounded as it did concerned.

Konstantine, the one song Andrew McMahon had refused to play for five years, all nine-plus minutes of it was still on loop in the background. I barely noticed.

"Oh! Honey!!" Micki's eyes welled up as she saw me for the first time. I hadn't realized I was crying again until she reached for me. I tried to wipe away my tears and get a hold of myself.

It was no use. Micki pulled me from my desk chair and into her arms, then on to her bed and in an unusual role reversal, she was the one comforting me. I didn't care—turns out she was the one I'd needed in all this. After all, she'd been there from Minute One. The floodgates opened and she held me, like no other friend had before, while I cried myself to sleep again.