dark places - jb & ag {completed}

{six}

The days that followed were the toughest of all. The questions became bigger, the wondering happened more often, and the theories I kept making up became crazier.

Those days were the hardest of all because I couldn't stop questioning my sanity.

I believed that my dreams – or nightmares, for that matter – meant something. I liked to think that Justin's visits had a meaning behind them. Like, he was there to make sure I remembered him. Or to see if I still remembered him. Or maybe he was there to do something to me. Remind me of Sophie, maybe. I just – I didn't know. But I believed they weren't just meaningless dreams.

Those days were the hardest because the doubt I had – the very same doubt that made people think I was completely crazy – grew stronger. And the thought of it being real haunted me. I believed that Sophie was not dead, like everyone else believed and wanted to force me into believing. I believed that Sophie was alive somewhere. I believed she wanted me to be close to her again, just like we'd always been. I believed she needed me.

I just had no idea how to get to her. How to prove all of the people around me wrong and show them that they'd given up too soon. I had no idea how to get my friend back. Or from where, for that matter.

I remember once opening her chat box on Facebook, only because I wanted to be near her somehow. I wanted to write to her what I couldn't tell anyone. I wanted her to listen to me as if she was really there and would somehow receive it. Her last message to me was two days before Halloween: 'I love you, crazy bitch. xox,' she'd typed. It made me choke up, sob, and weep until I couldn't cry anymore. Still, I opened it a few more times, and one time I could swear I saw 'Sophie is typing ...' at the end of the chat box. And as crazy as it sounds, I did wait for the message to come up. It never did.

On top of everything else, I was actually ashamed of myself. Ashamed that I was thinking of him almost as much as I was thinking of her. It was unfair. I was being unfair. I'd known him for an hour, and I'd known her my entire life. I shouldn't think about him that much. Heck, I shouldn't really think of him at all. But I did. I just couldn't help it.

Halloween 2015

A whole year had passed without her. It didn't feel like a year – more like ten or twenty. Losing Sophie was really painful. It gutted me. Gutted. Me. It hurt so bad, so bad that I could physically feel it deep inside of me and everywhere that could ever hurt, all at once.

With every passing day I missed her more and more, still. There was nothing in the whole world I wanted to do more than curl into a ball and just cry. But it was like I wasn't even allowed to do that anymore. People used to look at me with pity in their eyes, but now they were judging. It was like they were telling me – yelling at me – with their eyes and those looks they'd give me to just snap out of it already. As if that was something I could do. As if there was a button I could press and everything would be okay. I even wished there was something like that.

I just wanted my friend back. Or an answer.

Around eight in the morning, I went downstairs and walked into the kitchen. It felt like only yesterday that Sophie had joined me there at the kitchen table, scolding me for trying to remind my granny that she didn't like pancakes.

I wiped a lonely tear away from my cheek and reached for the cereal in the kitchen cabinet, then for the milk from the fridge – another silly attempt like so many other silly things I did just to feel closer to Sophie, now by eating the food she liked to have for breakfast.

As I was eating my breakfast, which I couldn't even taste, something on the milk carton grabbed my attention and I had to stop mid-chew. It wasn't Sophie's photo this time – hers had been removed long ago when her family decided that enough time had passed searching for her and that there was no hope. This one was a photo of a face I knew so well. I knew him. I'd talked to him. I'd shaken his hand and felt its coldness. I knew him. And I also knew that I'd seen this very photo long before last year's Halloween.