The Big Boom [re-writing]

4:15 pm [updated]

a/n: guh, I hate this new chapter too. lmao. but I think I may be bias. so I'm just gonna quote something from my favorite film, Her: "I think anybody who [decides to write a novel] is a freak. It's a crazy thing to do. It's kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity."

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Something snatched me from the inside out, but it was the presence of Christopher's warm body that ripped away. Chubby's gleeful being dropped. The scenes we currently passed had retreated to sheer forms of highlights and shadows. And that photograph of you I'd folded into a square, it kept poking into the side of my breast, reminding me.

And I heard someone screaming somewhere not too far away.

But I just couldn't pay my attention to it, not when I'd been sucked back into that photograph from the very beginning, six hours ago, to not care, and it felt so cold that the lingering heat in my stomach from the milk tea earlier contrasted greatly. The tips of each of my fingers grew colder until it was grossly stiff, like cardboard dunked in water.

Someone was still screaming, muffled now but not so distant anymore. God, I wanted it to shut up.

I slowed down my walk, breathing shallowly.

Would knowing that there was a cry for help that you didn't even know of yourself matter? I couldn't even pinpoint which words of yours, any words you managed to pull out of its nonexistence, were the cry for help. When was your cry for help?

Why wouldn't you cry in front of me or break down? Just shatter in front of me, Sarah, so even if I cried along at first in great relief that human emotion was still within you, I'd be able to open you up and shut down the rest. Just so you'd know I was still there.

The heat beat down on me in waves that were visible and chilled the wetness on my face.

The screaming from before wouldn't stop –why didn't anyone say something? Why didn't anyone else turn to look?

Christopher noticed something –I thought he recognized the screams, too –but he only turned around in time to see me stop on the sidewalk. "Candice?" He said.

There you were against the glass of the craft store, staring back at me blankly. You with the same blonde hair but frizzier. Same nose, same blue eyes the way we looked at ourselves in the mirror and then wished for this and that. Even your sadness in them was identical but it was a given that yours would always, just has to be, sadder.

God.

A passersby walked between us and you disappeared on the glass for that single second. So did I.

Suddenly I couldn't take those screams anymore. I started distinguishing what those words were. I didn't want to hear them again. I didn't want to hear them.

I felt Christopher hands on top of the ones I clamped against my ears, his muffled, "What's wrong? Candice, what happened?"

If you couldn't hear it, it doesn't exist.

"Candice. What's wrong?"

Her breaths don't exist anymore, her eyes won't ever open, she's not –here.

Were you ever? I swallowed shakily.

You knew, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?

He close his hands on my forearms, sending me to the edge of the shade. "Candice," he said.

Candice, your mother went. How did you not see that coming? Look me in the eyes, Candice, the same ones as Sarah, and tell me that you –tell me that–