Mess You Made

16.

Malibu.

Everyone's here to watch the basketball game since NBA season's started and Cristian and Rafe have always steadily awaited it each year. I can hear the sound of them both, the game on the TV, through the thin wall of my room.

It's dark in here, quiet asides from the sound of them. I sit perched on the edge of my bed, run a hand through the ends of my hair that's longer than its ever been and stay here, momentarily, because there's an irrepressible need for me to be alone. Because it feels like the pit of my stomach's on fire, like the claws that have been raking through my insides since I sat at her funeral, they're just constantly tearing me to fucking shreds.

A slow sort of dying, but excruciating. Fire's a destructive force. Wipes out clean, it doesn't leave room for rationality and choice and nothing else except pain.

When a body's on fire, the smoke restricts oxygen. The tissues contract and shrink, the muscles contract, bones burn — and it feels like I've been on fire for so long that I know nothing outside of it. I want out. I want to feel something fucking else, it's excruciating, it's killing me.

I tuck my knees up, hold my arms around them, my nails digging tightly into my skin and my eyes absently find the small framed picture atop the dresser.

Papai took the picture of me and Maya when we were young, looking up at the camera but I hate the picture. I hate it. It says too much if you look at it too long. I never really sat next to her, so it looks forced. My body looks uncomfortable in the same way that her body looks lifeless and if we didn't look similar, those two don't look like sisters.

To be truthful, she wasn't much of a sister. I learnt young that Maya isn't the same as Cristian, and you don't go to Maya the same way you would go to Cristian.

It became glaringly obvious to me, rather young, that she didn't like to be around me. At six years old, that's confusing. Immediately, you believe it to be just for you. As if she hated just me, as if it was personal. Too young to comprehend that in actuality, she didn't like to be around anyone.

Sometimes, I believe the dark inside her was too vast for her to ever have really been a person, to have been a sister - there was nothing outside of her pain. Awful, do you not think? How awful it must have been for nothing to exist outside of the walls of depression, to not be capable of anything else because of how dominating it was. She never got to get out of it, even if we tried and she tried. She tried sometimes.

I was desperate. For her to see me as a sister, for it to not feel like we were strangers because nothing ever came past her sadness - it never happened, she died before she could've felt anything except it. She died before she got to love me, or try to. We failed.

I feel my phone buzz on my bed, and reach back towards it. It's an unknown number, but the single text tells me who it is immediately.

hey, malibu júlia.

I rest my chin on my knee, hesitate. I debate ignoring him and then I debate shutting my phone off but it's quiet in here, my mind keeps running off to things it shouldn't. So I respond instead — he spelt the middle name right, rare.

Me: how do you have my number?

Miguel: may have stolen it from the receptionist's paper she had on the desk.

Me: that's theft.

Miguel: or it's sweet?

Me: no.

I tuck back a strand of my hair, the light of my screen enlightening the dark. He really shouldn't be texting, I still don't know why I speak to the boy from that side of the city. That life of his that's quite incomparable, and all the things set up for him in the future. I heard girls at school saying he's set for the NBA, one of the youngest ones to ever have it this close to solidified, at his age. Feels wrong that he's even in my phone. He texts again.