reality of love

03

I sit outside my house, taking the advice of my therapist. My mom's death anniversary is in thirty minutes, I didn't plan on going but my aunt Angelina begged me to go, so now I'm waiting for her to pick me up. I unlock my phone and open Instagram. I scroll through my timeline, smiling at the memes and liking some of the pictures people are posting.

After a while, I hear my aunt Angelina honk at me. I lock my phone again and stand up, then walked up to them. I sit the back and she says: "Hi," I smiled.

I'm going to see my mom again. I thought. My eyes widen and the panic attack started. Aunt Angelina saw me and her eyes soften.

"Just breathe in and out honey, noting will happen." She reassures me.

I follow what she says, I breathe in and out, in and out. Miraculously, this time it works.

"Dr. Helen will be there, just in case, but I'm pretty sure you'll be fine without her." She informs me and smiles at me through the mirror. 

"Okay." I say quietly and nod.

This is my third time going to one of her death anniversary. The first time I went, it was her first anniversary. I saw everyone in the family, the ones that came just to say, "I miss her so much" and shed fake tears, no one actually cared about her but they came anyways. My Aunt Angelica and my Grandma Lolita were the only ones that were genuinely sad. They cried until they couldn't anymore, kinda like me but they're better at containing it than me. They aren't actually fucked up in the head, unlike me.

My second time was her fourth death anniversary, my dad's sister was there. She dropped a message from him, "My brother said that he regrets everything he does, and that he wants a second chance with you." She repeats, with no emotion at all. She leaves  after she delivered the message to us.

I threw up multiple times that night, and I only stopped crying when I couldn't cry anymore. But even when the tears stopped, I just stared at a wall and felt my heart slowly falling into tinier pieces every second that passed. I've heard Aunt Angelina talking about how my dad was there at her fifth, sixth and seventh. 

My breathing picks up and seconds later, I'm at the back of the car bawling my eyes out while my aunt tries to calm me down.

She pulls over and turns to me, "Do you still wanna go?"

"I never wanted to." I whisper, but I said it loud enough so that she could still hear me through my sobs.

"Do you wanna go back?"

I nod and laid on my side, slowly calming down knowing that there will be a zero percent chance that I would be able to see him.

******

I sit outside on my front porch, staring at my my neighbor who was struggling to put the key into the lock since he was carrying a paper bag at the same time.

He curses repeatedly until he opened the door. He walks inside and closes the door.

It wasn't the last time I saw him, at midnight while I was still outside. He sat on his window ledge while smoking a cigarette.

The days after that, he had somehow went in my daily routine, at six is when he would come home and at twelve he would sit on his window ledge smoking a cigarette. I was intrigued by his british accent and the way he would always ruffle his hair when it took him more than five tries to unlock the door. From what I could see, his lips were thick and pink. His eyes were a beautiful shade of green and blue mixed together. I also noticed that every other time he would ruffle his hair, he would bite the left side of his lips.

Before I knew it, I was addicted- and I didn't even know the boys name yet.