slide away {lorenzo berkshire}

86. live forever

"I'll find a new place to be from
A haunted house with a picket fence
To float around and ghost my friends"
- Phoebe Bridgers

~~~~~

Cassie Avery

To everyone else, it seemed like I was doing better.

I could tell by the way they acted around me now. The slight ease in their voices when they spoke. The way conversations no longer dropped to a whisper the moment I entered a room.

I wasn't sure if I believed that yet, that I was doing better. But I suppose I could see why they might think so. From the outside, it probably looked like I was finding my way back to something resembling normal.

Because I was getting up in the mornings again. I was eating a little, most days. I was answering when people spoke to me, even when I didn't feel like speaking at all. Small things, but they added up in ways people seemed willing to call progress.

It wasn't that anything inside me had stopped hurting. That hadn't changed at all, and I didn't think it ever would.

I didn't feel better. It was more like I was pretending. Not for them or even for myself. But for him. Because every time I felt like giving up, I thought about his words, about the look on his face if he could see me. And that was usually enough to make me want to try. For him. Only for him.

You don't get to disappear.

Lorenzo had made it sound so simple.

It had been two months now.

That still didn't feel real when I thought about it properly. Two months since everything stopped being normal. Two months since Lorenzo was just... gone. And now there are just all these gaps where he used to be.

It was always the stupid things that caught me off guard. A joke I'd save to tell him before remembering there was nobody to tell anymore. A thought I'd automatically turn around to share with him. Or I'd hear something and my brain would just... fill in what he would have said before I could stop it.

The worst part was that I was usually right. I knew exactly what he would've said. Exactly what face he would've pulled. Exactly how he'd have made me roll my eyes before laughing anyway.

And then I'd remember he wasn't going to do any of those things anymore. I would think about how unfair it was that I kept having these conversations with him in my head when I couldn't actually have them anymore.

I never told anyone else about the letter.

I'd read it too many times. I knew exactly where every sentence was without even looking now. I could probably say most of it word for word if I had to. Not because I'd memorised it deliberately, but because I kept going back to it when I couldn't stand not hearing him in my head.

It was the closest thing I had left of him. And I hated that. I hated that all I had now was a stupid piece of paper and not him.

"Cassie."

Theo's voice pulled gently through the fog in my head.

I blinked slowly toward him. He was already looking at me.

We were lying side by side on top of Lorenzo's duvet, the room dim except for the weak light filtering in through the windows. I wasn't sure how long we'd been there. Time had started slipping away strangely lately. Entire hours vanished without me noticing, and I would only realise afterwards that I had spent them thinking about him again.

"You went somewhere else again".

"I didn't", I replied automatically, though even to me it didn't sound convincing.