Between You and I

Chapter Nineteen

May 16, 2012: 89 Hours After

"Dan, you've barely touched your food," Mom looks over at me with worried eyes.

"I'm not hungry," I say blandly. I'm really not. How can I be after what I've just read?

"What do you mean you're not hungry?"

"Just that. I'm not hungry." That was where all the wounds on her hands came from. That was the secret she was keeping from me. I thought we were friends... I thought we had each other's backs, each other's trust. Just how many more secrets has she been keeping from me? Just how much pain was I not able to see?

The room grows silent besides the tinks and tanks of their forks and spoons scratching the plates. Never knew it was possible for food to look so... unappetizing. I drag the tips of my fork through the top of the mash potatoes. The mushing noises being made with them are actually beginning to hurt my ears. Who even invented mash potatoes? Someone must have been either extremely bored or extremely angry to decide to turn a potato into mush.

"I'm... Going to bed," I mutter loud enough for my parents to hear as I put down my fork next to my plate. How many nights has Valentine told her dad the same thing because she wasn't bothered enough to eat? How many nights has she stayed up, feeling alone and cold and unwanted and... Bad? How many days have I passed her by in the halls, wishing for her to just look at me, while she wishes that I would just look at her, and see her? How many? Tell me how many, goddammit!

"Is it that laptop of hers that's bugging you?" Dad grabs a tiny portion of my attention. No shit, Sherlock. No, no, no. I'm not being bothered by a laptop that my dead friend- who I fell in love with and who actually was hurting so much that she killed herself- left behind. Nope. Not at all.

But, I decide to stay silent.

"You see? This girl is nothing but trouble. She's been hurting you when she was alive, and now even in death she's bothering you!" I could feel Dad's stare burning into my head as the words left his mouth. There it is again. That anger bubbling in the pit of my stomach.

"What's her problem? She's dead." No.

"That means people with lives can keep living without her." Stop it.

"But no. She choses my son to haunt with her stupid little laptop," Shut up shut up shut up-

"And she's a no good- attention whore who-"

"Shut up! You don't know her!" I slam my fists on the table. I don't know her.

"You don't know her like I do!" Tears begin to set my eyes on fire as I shove my chair back and stand up. The anger in my stomach explodes.

"The both of you don't understand!" I don't understand.

"The both of you don't know how fucking much she's hurting!" I don't know. The tears begin to tumble down.

"No one could see her..." I sobbed.

"I couldn't see her..." My whole body's shaking and my head hangs down, the blurry sight of my untouched potatoes giving me something to look at besides the open mouths of my parents.

"I was too... Caught up with what was happening to me that I couldn't look at her, and see what was happening to her," all the words are spilling out of my mouth like a waterfall.

"I couldn't have loved her." It's so quiet, I find it hard to even hear myself.

"That's not how love is supposed to be." That isn't at all how love is supposed to be. What happened to the sappy love we see on television? To all the butterflies, the warm hearts, and... and happiness? You aren't supposed to look after yourself and pray that things go your way.

I glance up at my parents, whose mouths were still hanging wide. Now that I think about it, are my parents even in love? Do they look at each other every day, and think how much they're lucky to have each other? Are they even happy?

"I'm going to bed," Sighing, I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and make my way to the stairs. Maybe my parents were in love in the beginning, but the happily ever afters that happen in fairy tales are bullshit. The stairs creak underneath my feet as I lug myself up them, my mind being somewhere else completely.

Do you want to know what I'm starting to think? Love is its own fairy tale. In the exact moment I shut my bedroom door, I hear my parents begin to talk up a storm. At this rate, I'm definitely getting my own therapist. Without thinking, I collapse onto my bed.

Love is something that everybody wants to feel. It's something that everyone's been wishing for since the moment they process the reason why they think their parents kiss. We've all been waiting for our own kiss.

So gathering everything I know about the human mind, maybe love isn't exactly the emotion we all believe it to be. It's merely an idea that we grow up believing true. I admit that I don't want to believe this because, well, you can't really kill an idea once it's stuck in your mind. You can never not know something you already know.

With that there, you realize that all our lives we've been yearning for and living with something that everyone so fervently believes is the best and most amazing emotion out there. That idea has already been implanted in our heads since the day we could think. It's been the first few ideas we were able to think through in our minds.

When we think we've found that one person, the illusion of love makes us feel like we're on top of the world. But as the years go by after marrage, the illusion slowly fades, and being married feels more like work than what it used to. At least, that's probably what my dad thinks since he's always forgetting things. If he is in love, he wouldn't have forgotten the day he was married. He wouldn't have forgotten any of the things he had forgotten years ago on that Christmas Eve.

Love is an idea. We chose to believe in love, because it's the closest thing we have to a realistic fantasy. And I fall asleep thinking just that.