11 Reasons Why

Epilogue: More Than Alright

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11 Reasons Why

© Bree Stonefield, 2014

It was real, it was right;
But it burned to have to survive

"Bottom of the Ocean" – Miley Cyrus

December, 2012

I hadn't seen him in months.

Since we'd broken up over a year ago, we hadn't talked much, if not ever. Except for that one day in a music store where we accidentally met while I was hanging out with a guy friend, where awkwardness ensued. We still weren't on really good terms that day, and you could say that things didn't really go well at all. But then on my birthday a few months after, he surprised me by calling me at eleven o'clock at night, just before I fell asleep. That was when I knew that things between us were at least neutral.

But it was that. After we talked that day, he never called again. He was busy—he always was. And it wasn't like he had the obligation to call me—we weren't even... "friends".

No, we weren't "enemies", but we weren't exactly on friendly terms either. So we just didn't talk, simple as that. When we walked past each other—which was thankfully a very, very rare occasion—we didn't stop to smile or greet, not even acknowledge each other's presence. We just simply walked away, because it was the only thing we had in common: we ran away.

And it sucked. It sucked because no matter how horrible he'd made me feel, no matter how terrible I had mistreated him when I walked out on him, I never wanted to lose him. He was a great person, a great friend. At least, if I couldn't love him the way I'd wanted to, we could've stayed friends.

But staying friends was also painful. It was painful because it reminded me how we had been more than that.

My eyes stayed glued on the screen, where one of Grant's Facebook photos stared back at me. I had spent hours just looking at his pictures, thinking about how it had been three years since we first met.

He had changed a lot, both for better and for worse. I had, too. But the change in him was very striking, shining bright, so noticeable. He was no longer the class clown I fell in love with in freshman year. He was so much more than that.

I shook my head, and my eyes fell on a thick, purple notebook that I'd had with me for as long as I could remember. In it was hundreds, even thousands of words that I'd never got the chance to say out loud. Quotes from favorite songs, movies, and books, scribbles that you could pass up as poems, some lines of random songs that I wrote—that book was practically half of my life. It had everything in my heart in it.

And inside it was also some scribbles that I wrote during the months that I was with Grant. The reasons why I was so sure that it would take forever to get Grant out of my head if I ever had to do it. A way to convince myself that he and I would always stick through everything together no matter what, because I had these words that would forever remind me of him.

With each word that I wrote, came a few paragraphs that described why those words reminded me of him. And with those paragraphs were the memories that stringed along with them.

It had been a few months since the last time I touched those pages, but now that I knew what I had believed was proven wrong... I wanted to read them all over again.