𝚁𝙸𝚂𝙺 | ᴊᴀᴠɪ ʀɪᴠᴇʀᴀ

one

five years later.

if someone wanted to look up the definition of traumatized, whether it was in the dictionary or online, that person would find a photo of me.

after the EF5 back in '19, i moved back to new york city. i ended up working at the same meteorology company kate worked at... haha...

well, also after the EF5, i started hanging out with my little sister and my best friend more. things weren't the same. but i wasn't about to take their lives for granted.

losing addy and praveen and jeb hurt like hell. heavy on losing addy. addy was a ground to reality for me. you never saw her upset or sad or angry. she was always happy. something i may never be again without her.

after the EF5 hit, i had a major fallout with javi. we met up one day at a café, and i quite literally almost lit it on fire before we left. we had got into a dispute over the tornado, and he wouldn't shut up about how i was supposedly taking everybody and everything for granted and being stupid and immature and baby-ish and entitled for not wanting to do anything with him after the EF5.

in my defense, that was the worst day of my life. i lost one of my best friends. and my closest friends? gone. they're gone. and, yes, i know javi lost them, too. and i know that the situation impacted the both of us in entirely different ways, but i was not about to let him call me selfish. because, whether he'll accept it or not, or if i'm genuinely just being an idiot, he'll never understand how i felt about that day. ever.

he'll never realize i wouldn't eat for days. he'll never understand how my dumb teenage eating disorder came back because of it. i was on a winning streak. i had a decent calorie intake per month. but, after that, i gaslighted myself into believing that i had to have less than 800 calories per day to stay healthy. probably the dumbest choice of my life.

my eyelids started sinking in, i lost about 40 pounds in a matter of under one-and-a-half months. i pushed savannah and rosaliá away for months straight, and i would keep myself locked in my room. i shut myself out from the rest of the world.

i couldn't properly touch the food i used to shovel down several servings of for months on end. i couldn't even bite a full mouthful of a granola bar without breaking down crying and spitting the food out, protesting and struggling against whoever was trying to feed me because my body just couldn't handle it.

ada. stop it. think of rosaliá. and savannah.

savannah. my best friend since 5th grade. we met in PE. we both fell doing jumping jacks when her foot hit mine, and i guess we clicked after that. we went to the nurse's office together for ice, band-aids, and ointment. after that, we started talking a lot more in our class. when seat change came around, we would arrange our desks right next to each other or near each other in every humane way possible to avoid the 'not being allowed to sit together if you sit with the same person the same way every month' rule.

we were a dynamic duo. we fell out of contact when i left the city for college. after i got back after the EF5, she and rosaliá, my pride and joy of a little sister nursed me back to health.

my mom still lives in oklahoma. but she sent rosa off to boarding school when she started her freshman year. however, things ended up playing out in my sister's favor, because she ended up loving the city to no end.

rosaliá ended up becoming a bartender at a nightclub a few blocks down from our apartment. every so often savannah and i would take a break from our jobs and go hang out at the club for a bit, to get our mind off of work stresses. savannah was a famous headshot photographer around the city. she had taken the headshots for a lot of the cast members of current broadway shows such as hamilton, wicked, & juliet, back to the future, the great gatsby, the outsiders, and more.