Paper Hearts

THEN:Chapter 19

 “You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”  - John Green

Eden:

The past two months of my life had been a living Hell.

Ollie would have said that I was being over-dramatic in saying that, but it was true. Several weeks passed when my parents spent the majority of their time trying to force me to eat, to work, to move, to get out of bed. I was so lost in my own despair that I didn’t even register the fact that I’d skipped a period, that first month. It was the dullest summer of my entire existence, especially when compared to the previous year - I could spend hours just staring blankly at the wall or the floor, my head filled with him. I cried in the shower the day he left, because the water was washing the scent of him from my skin. I cried often, actually; not in public, perhaps, but in the dark privacy of my shaded bedroom I would cry until I was sick. Even after I’d been sick, it didn’t stop me. I didn’t register that the sickness might be anything other than the result of hours of hysterical sobbing, either. Stupid, I know.

Five weeks after Ollie left, I was home alone when the postman knocked with a giant cardboard box – it was so heavy that he was pushing it along the drive with his feet, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. I was confused.

“Please tell me this is the right house?” he begged – I checked the label on the box, and nodded.

“I guess so. I have no idea what it is, though”

“Well if it turns out to have been sent here by mistake, I’m not transporting it for you”

It took me a full ten minutes to drag the box from the doorstep into the living room, and I was still tearing at the cellotape when my Mum returned. She eyed the box warily.

“Eden, what have you done?”

“This wasn’t me, I have no ide – oh”

The box was filled with books. And not just any books, either. My books. Ollie’s books. The books I had sent to him to keep him entertained while he was away, piled up in stacks within the giant box.

Mum leaned over my shoulder, “Oh, Eden, sweetheart – “

But it was the book on the top that made me gasp, choke on a sob.

Anna Karenina.

And the post-it note just said, ‘Sorry’.

And that sorry just wasn’t good enough.

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I was in an even deeper depression after that. Emma came to visit me every day, though sometimes I got the feeling that she just wanted to punch some sense into me. She never did, though – instead, she suggested that I stay at her house for a week or two, thinking it might make me feel better, help me clear my head. I suspect she and my Mum also wanted to get me away from the massive box that stared at me from the corner of my room. Plus I knew I was beginning to drive my Dad completely crazy; he’d never had much patience with mood swings.

I took the test on a Tuesday. Emma was moaning about her stomach cramps and it suddenly reminded me that – well, that I hadn’t had any of those for a while. In fact, I hadn’t had any of the horrible things I normally got around my usual time of the month. In fact...I hadn’t had a time of the month at all.

Emma went pale when I told her, but she agreed that I had to take the test. I heard her pacing up and down outside the bathroom, her steps in sync with mine as I clenched the test in my fist, hoping, praying, that it wouldn’t say what I already knew it was going to say.