VIPER || Oscar Piastri

Chapter 145

Please listen to Visions of Gideon by Sufjan Stevens!
I'll signal the point in the chapter when you should start the song — look out for it!

(Prepare to have to restart the song, this is a long one!)
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Leavers are always easier to blame than to understand.

People see the act, not the hands that tremble before it.

But leavers weren't always like that.

They learnt it slowly. In the pauses. In the quiet punishments of being too much. In the empty spaces, and in the stares of unanswered confessions.

And it is often that the thing they start mistaking for safety — the comfort they find in the distance; the relief in leaving first after too many times of leaving last — ends up teaching them how to live without the thing they want, instead of fighting for it.

And the longer they go without it, the easier it is to believe they don't want it at all.

They learn to tend the empty space they prepared for it to fill.

Because they kept waiting.

And the empty space became comfortable.

Empty space doesn't ask you to be enough for it,

Empty space doesn't ask you to stay,

Empty space doesn't that care if you go, because it never needed you there to begin with.

Nobody asks the leaver why they leave.

Just that they did. And that they're gone.

But leaving isn't the same as not loving.
It isn't cruelty, not always.
Sometimes it's the only thing they know how to do.

Because they've never been given anything else.

And if the empty space wasn't so patient with her, maybe then, Andreanna Saunterre wouldn't be rolling her suitcase to the door. Maybe then she wouldn't have made her bed so quietly, and she wouldn't have made her handwriting so easy to read.

*

[POV: Narrator]

Andi had to dig into the pocket of her jeans to find the note.

She'd folded it three times, pressed it flat, and put it away until now; She finally held it in her hand, rereading the words for the ninth time. They still made her stomach twist into knots tighter than her shoelaces, which were already on and laced too tight for comfort.

She laid the note carefully on the narrow hallway table where he would see it, where there was no way he would miss it.

She had left everything else meticulously arranged: the chairs tucked under the table just so, the counters wiped, the fridge emptied. Her suitcase was packed with socks rolled into tiny, exact cylinders, and the zippers were drawn clean to the edge, and everything was sealed and final and still, but as she looked around, she wondered if there was anything else she could do. To stall for five minutes, or ten.

But there wasn't.

She hadn't eaten, but... she couldn't. The thought of breakfast made her feel weak, and she didn't want to take the last slice of bread, anyway.