Just friends

Chapter 11

I spent the rest of the day crying and packing up Peter's stuff. Leaving me to my thoughts. They say after you die, your brain has seven minutes left of brain activity. In those last seven minutes your brain goes through flashbacks. From the beginning of your life to your very last breath. This is what being left to my thoughts felt like. Like I had just died and I'm going through those last seven minutes. From the minute we met, to the moment he walked out the door.

The pain of a break up from a good relationship, is as painful as a hangover. First there's the head ache. Your head hurts so much you want to shoot yourself. It's almost like someone is pounding on your head with a hammer. Then there's the vomit. You've basically dehydrated yourself to a point you can't eat. You even move you feel like throwing up. Then there's the regret. Regretting you did what you did. In which in the case of a break up, you regret dating that person. You regret letting them know every bit of you. From your past to your deepest darkest secrets. You regret having them be your number one priority over everyone else. Finally there's denial. Denial that everything that happened, happened. In the case of a break up, it's the denial that the break up even happened. Then you wake up every morning hoping it was all just a nightmare. That in the end you'll wake up and they'll be next to you and everything will be okay. Then realise you only woke up from a good dream and that's why you become depressed.

We've been best friends since middle school. How the hell do you let go of seven years of friendship? How do you move on from that?

His clinginess made me feel suffocated. Although, now that he is gone, I hate the feeling of being able to breath. I hate feeling crisp clean air travel in to my nostrils and flow into one of my lungs as before the old air flows through the other lung and comes out as a different gas. I never knew something so vital in order to live could be so painful.

I can remember everything from our friendship. For example, the first day we met. He was sitting by himself at lunch in a corner that almost nobody sat at. We got to know each other so well that day. There was one day after school, I decided to take him into this abandoned house that ever since I was four I believed it was haunted by this really old guy and his wife. Neither liked kids and every time a kid stepped onto the yard or in the house, they'd go missing. We wanted to put that theory to the test.

Here's my take. He wanted guaranteed love. He thought our "love" was guaranteed. In reality there is no such thing as guaranteed love. No love is ever guaranteed. No matter how good the relationship is. No matter if you're married. Somehow. Some way. It will all come to an end. You could be married to someone for half a century and it could all end with a simple affair. Nothing is ever guaranteed. Not life. Not happiness. Not time. Not love. None of it.

A good relationship like this is like a dream. A really really good dream. Sure, it all takes place over a long period of time, but somehow it felt so short. A person dreams over a span of approximately twenty minutes. The reason it all feels so quick, is because the melatonin released by the pineal gland in your brain basically causes you to hallucinate when asleep. That is for most people. This whole relationship, was a hallucination. A dream. Everything I could wish for. I thought I had it all. Everything else besides the relationship was real.

For days I woke up in the middle of the night crying. It was always the same time every night. Four in the morning. I'd wake up. See the time. Reach around my bed hoping someone even Peter or Carter was there. Then I'd realise things and start crying. Some nights, I wouldn't even sleep. I would just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until I'd have to get up. Then I would just carry on with my day. I wouldn't get changed or anything. I'd just leave in my pajamas. Talk about insomnia at it's worst.

The Friday before MLK day, I decided to take a quick trip home. I need some time with family and away from everything back in Rochester.

"Delilah, what are you doing here?" my mom says once I walk into the door of my childhood home. The house is so much warmer and smells like one of those cinnamon apple candles she uses to light all the time during the cold seasons. Almost brings me to tears.