Katie Taylor's Guide to Heartbreak

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I'm so lost. Please, please, I love you.

–Katie.

Afterword:

You end up getting kicked out of the bar at closing time. It's early in the morning, but the city never sleeps. The sidewalks are just beginning to teem with people: not threatening to overflow into the street as they do during the day, but bustling comfortably with early risers, late workers and the aftertaste of the city's nightlife. You fit into that category, now. It fits you, you think, or at least, it helps to piece together some of the shards of your heart.

Normally after a night of drinking – of drowning – you head home and sleep off the hangover, but tonight you're not drunk enough to collapse and you can't face your apartment and unmade double bed without a head clouded by alcohol. It occurs to you that you're not far from the coffee shop that had been your haunt all throughout college. You've got nowhere better to be, so you walk there, but the doors are shut and the notice hanging behind the glass doors reads 'CLOSED' in block letters. You sink to the curb, feet in the gutter and heart in some indefinable, locked away place, as far from you as Jenna, buried six feet underground after the accident that left her fatally comatose.

When you close your eyes, it could be eleven years ago.

When you open them, you're alone and your heart breaks all over again. It's starting to rain, and the wet streaks on your cheeks could be raindrops, if not for the fact that when you lick absently at one sliding past the corner of your mouth, it tastes faintly of salt.

Please.