Fool's Gold • rewritten

1

Heartbreak. Despair. Isolation. I'm sitting here surrounded by white. White walls, white roof, white furniture. A puddle of tears is forming on the floor beneath me, my breath hitching at each sob that escapes my mouth. How did this happen? What will I do? A dense rock is growing within my stomach and a small lump forming in my throat, making it harder and harder to suck in oxygen . If only time travel was real. I could flash back to the past and redo this whole experience. My mind escapes my surroundings thinking of the perfectness that would occur if time travel was real. Suddenly, I was snapped back to reality and was reminded of my surroundings. My life was unpredictable lately, leaving me to wonder what was going to happen next.

I'm Grace, Grace Stone. I'm 14 years old and I go to Hills High Girls College. Hills High is one of the oldest schools where I live. Its structure and exterior look reminds me of Hogwarts, leaving my imagination to run wild as I walk through the gates everyday. I seemed to always think that I was Hermione Granger due to being a bright student. There always seemed to be a moment in class where I would shoot my hand straight up into the air to answer a question as if my life depended on it. I had always been talented at escaping reality through my thoughts and making the best of situations but sometimes this wasn't the case. I must say it was very different going from a coeducation school to an all girls school because I was always one of those girls that had a lot of guy friends. My teachers always found humour in teasing me about this, calling me a slut, flirt and some other explicit terms. I had never seen any of my male friends in this manner before, until I fell in love with one.

I fell in love with my hilarious, dreamy, reliable and attractive best friend, Nick. Whenever he texted me a cage full of butterflies were released in my stomach and whenever I heard his voice, it resonated in my ears. I haven't spoken to him face to face for two years now and just the thought of seeing him again makes my stomach churn. Every night before I go to sleep, I see his face on the back of my eyelids. I imagine the encounter that we will have once we see each other again. This vision usually consists of me confessing my love for him and he ends up feeling the same way. We end up kissing and the dream ends. My escape ends. Reality kicks in and I realise that there truly is no hope for me and Nick. This is true for many reasons but there is one that is particularly hard to miss, he has a girlfriend. A girl that I used to call my best friend. She would flip her hair and batter her eyelids like it was second nature when we were around Nick. I didn't think anything of it until Nick used me to get to her. He became close to me, got my hopes up and made me have a bright smile that I have never had before but then he stopped it all once he got her. The perfect beach blonde haired, blue eyed, tanned and stick thin Brittney. This kept on stretching me until my trust snapped like a rubber band, irreparable. Two enemies were created for me this day. Although, I could never refer to Nick as an enemy. The only crime he had committed was stealing my heart. On the other hand, Brittney was a stuck up, two-faced and deceiving bully. Prioritising relationships over friendships was her first mistake, making me never talk to her since. But there are two sides to every story, many people have heard different sides and believe that I am in denial. They say that I should be furious at Nick because he used me just to get to my best friend but this just didn't seem to work. Those dreamy eyes, perfect blonde hair and his figure, God how could anyone be mad at him? Envy of seeing Nick with someone else had made my feelings for him stronger. The truth was that I knew that I let Nick use me from  the day that we first met but I wasn't done falling for him yet.

My life was a bad book. Full of different events that didn't seem to make sense and nothing seemed to connect to anything. One of the most terrifying experiences that I had been through was ironically at school, one of the worst places to be. It was a thundery, frigid day and the sky was like a broken lamp, flashing with light every now and then but having no particular pattern. I was in science class with my best friend, Sam. We were learning about rocks and minerals which I personally thought to be the most boring science subject ever. I mean who really cares about erosion and how it creates sediments, and when these sediments are subject to pressure and natural cement they become sedimentary rocks. Boring, am I right? Anyway, as per usual Sam and I were just mucking around and laughing at how annoying our teacher was. BANG! Lightning struck a tree. The sound of the trunk splitting caused a shiver up my spine and the thoughts of safety were starting to fill my mind until the tree started to collapse. It was coming straight for the science labs,

" Thank you for being there for me, Grace. Promise me that you will live your life. I love you," These were the last words that I heard before I lost my best friend. The monstrous tree had fallen onto Sam and unfortunately her fighting attitude faded in the hospital. Her parents were distraught and even considered suicide because they had to make the terrible decision to turn her life support off. I sat by her until the moment she died, saying the words that I didn't find the time to say when she was healthy and not moments away from her death. As I heard the heart monitor make a long, deafening beep sound, my heart was like paper, someone slowly crumpling it in their hand. The truth is though, once paper is crumpled, you can never get the creases out of it, it truly is irreparable. This truly reflected how my heart was when I saw my best friend's lifeless body laying on a bed in front of me. She never got to get her license, she never experienced her first kiss, she never had her first date, she never got to graduate school and she never got to find the love of her life. All of this happened just because of a thing called fate. Sam couldn't decide how her life was going to end nor when it would, but her life was taken away from her as quick as a strike of lightning. It was from this day forward that I knew that I would live my life to the full, never keep words that I want to say to myself and let everyone know how I feel. These thoughts of how I was going to live my life were suddenly overpowered by hurt and wished. I wish I could've had another chance to say goodbye to Sam. I wish I could've told her about how great of a friend she was. I wish I could've thanked her for everything that she has ever done for me. But I couldn't and I never would. The truth was losing my best friend was like losing a shoe, the pair will always be incomplete. I was going to be incomplete from this day forward. I was going to be a half of something that would never be complete. But little did I know that my life was going to turn around so quickly, and suddenly I wouldn't even be able to keep up with my own thoughts. Instead I would be consumed by life itself, trying my best to find a way out but failing each and every time.