And I Told Them I Invented Times New Roman [billdip]

Apology

THURSDAY, AUGUST 18TH

Things had been going great, surprisingly, for Dipper in the last week. They had spent each day alternating between apartments, just hanging out. It left him barely any time to be alone, which meant he didn't have time to dwell on his thoughts and overthink himself into anxiety.

Today was different, though. Bill had said something about needing to go out into town for something related to his job, but didn't clarify what. It was Dipper's apartment's turn in their rotation, if Bill would even be back by then. Or if he even wanted to continue spending time with him after being around him nonstop for the last six days.

It was the evening and Bill had left sometime in the morning before Dipper had woken up, leaving behind a note letting him know where he'd gone. Or, well, that he had gone. Not exactly where, why, or how long. Just that he'd be back later. There was so much vagueness in the words that Dipper was pretty confident that Bill'd gotten sick of him already and was trying to let him down easy. But yet again, they were in the blonde's apartment last night.... So why would he abandon his own apartment? Was it in hopes that the kid would be gone before he returned? What in the world of freelance dancing could involve someone being out for over eleven hours?

Yet again, Dipper knew next to nothing about dancing, so for all he knew, this was normal. Was he practicing for something? Or being filmed in a video? Was he.... an exotic dancer? Or maybe it was the freelance part; that he was just out and about on several meetings with... whoever hired freelance dancers. Discussing things. Was he at the club? No, the clubs weren't open yet. Well, they would be now, but then how would that explain his entire day's absence?

He hated feeling so clingy and needy, but Bill gave him comfort, gave him safety, gave him a distraction from all of the thoughts that constantly flew into his mind. And now that he hadn't had such instrusive thoughts in the past few days, they were all coming in and flooding his head all at once. It was like the small dam he'd started to build was being crushed from the intensity and frequency and sheet number of them.

First and foremost of those was the increasing itch of needing to feel something to distract himself. And he'd promised Bill that he wasn't going to do this again, that he'd call him if he ever felt this away again. But things were different now and he couldn't let himself rely on Bill. The last time he relied on someone, he got hurt, he got damaged, he got broken. And he was still figuring out how to put together the pieces — if he had even been able to gather all of the shards back in the first place. He was like a puzzle that was missing pieces; he didn't even have the corner pieces to start the outline to kickstart the process. Anyone who noticed would've thrown the puzzle in the trash and gotten a new one.

Secondly, the thing he was trying to distract himself from, was the fact that he was noticing a pattern in all of his failed relationships: they started off fine. Started off happy, full of life. Things felt like they were different this time, but with the amount of times he'd told himself that... and then they turned out to not be anything but the exact same fucking thing he kept getting himself into. At this point, it had to be his fault, right? He was the commonality between everything. The one link between it all. Each and every single problem that happened in his past abuses were all chained together because of him.

It started with his first ever actual relationship in his eighth grade year of middle school. It was with an auburn-haired girl who he'd met in his English class. She was nice and they hit it off quite quickly. He'd just gotten over his unrequited crush on Wendy that he'd had his first summer in Gravity Falls and meeting a girl his age who looked similar to her helped the process. She was interested in the same things he was: mysteries, the paranormal, listened to some of the same music he did and liked the new artists he'd introduced to her. Things started off fine, like they always seemed to. They held hands once. It was six months of being fine until out of the blue, she sent him a text message one evening saying she wanted to see other people and break it off. He was confused and hurt. He had no idea where it came from and even through nearly eight years of reflection, he still cannot figure out why it happened. The best he could explain it to himself was that they'd grown apart and he just never noticed. It wouldn't surprise him. He was always oblivious to those types of things.