The story of Him and I

For you.

It was never supposed to be like this.

When we met, I liked him in a 13-year-old-likes-an-older-boy way. He was a little crush I had. I was never actually in love with him. Of couse, yes, duh, I absolutely loved him to the universe's ends, but I never fell in love. I never felt the need to. I was young and naive. I had no idea what love or heartbreak was like.

Until we got older.

As we got older, he became more aggressive because of his father, and I became more in the need for something more than a middle school crush. I wanted love, he wanted revenge, and the two never met. He coped with drugs and sex and I coped with my own issues with music and cold metal blades. We never talked much during this time of uncertainty and angst. I wondered what triggered him to turn from the sweet, happy, and caring boy I met online, the boy I talked to until 10 at night every day about the simplest of things in our young minds, how he turned into the man who got drunk every night and called me a bitch before going to fuck another one of his girls at whatever, whoever's party he was at that weekend. It may be the one mystery I haven't solved about him.

That was when I felt my first innocent heartbreak. I had officially lost my best friend.

After that horrible summer season of ups and downs and unhealthy friendship, he completely went off the grid. I tried calling, texting, even emailing. I never got anything more from him than, "I'm going away for a bit." After realizing there was nothing I could do, I sat, and I cried, and I missed my old friend. Then I began bettering myself. I worked hard to get my mental health back into a healthy state. I hung out with my friends, I laughed and joked and told stories. However, he still never left his place deep, deep down in my mind. I always wondered if he would ever talk to me again. As the months went by, I began to lose hope, and so did the rest of my innocence.

Almost 4 months after he rid me goodbye with that simple sentence that burdened me for weeks and weeks, I got a message on twitter from the old friend.

"Hey"

The one word made me jump off my bed and tears begin to pool at my bottom of my eyes.

He'd spent the past few months off of social media, and what do you know, bettering himself as I was too! He was nothing like what I remembered. As we caught up, pride filled me as I noticed how much softer he was, like a new teddy bear. He was sweet, happy, making jokes and making me laugh. He was sober, stopped going to parties, had a close friend group, and only talked to me again once he knew he was better. I remember never feeling so proud of someone other than myself, never in my entire life had I been so proud of another person. Of course, his mental illnesses still lingered due to his father and his never-ending fight to take his children back, the children that he traumatized with angry words and loud slaps, kicks, punches, and pushes down stairs. But they were dormant, and he intended to keep them that way, and I was very, very okay with that.

After that day we only became closer and closer and closer than we had ever been before. We had our fights that lasted a bit too long when we were both too stubborn to make up. I soon realized those fights were caused by a higher reason we didn't even know ourselves - We were scared of the truth, and we were scared of losing each other.

The truth, you may ask?

We never got the chance to meet. We knew he was going off to college soon. We knew we were only getting farther apart and we weren't going to meet any time soon. Fighting and arguing with each other, well, it was a way of not having to deal with the problem. We were cowards, and we refused to be cooperative. It's easier to pretend to hate each other than stay realizing we won't be meeting, if at all, any time soon. We didn't try, and we were foolish to not do so.

On September 13th, 2016, I got the most dreadful phone call I never thought I would ever get in my whole life. My best friend in the whole entire world had gotten into a horrible car accident leaving him in a coma. The initial shock I felt made me literally at a loss for words. It was like the world was paused, and suddenly every single memory I ever had with him the past 5 years I had known him came rushing back and I cried tears that resembled waterfalls - they never seemed to stop. I was dead to the world because another part of me was almost dead, too. All I was thinking was, it's all a sick joke, he's going to call me tomorrow morning saying "Gotchya!" and things will go back to normal.

That, unfortunately, never happened. For two weeks, he was living only on artifical breath. If they took his life support off, he would've died in a few minutes. Any kind of god I ever for one second thought could have been real, became a lie to me, but it was at that time where I did nothing but pray and pray and pray. How could this happen? He's too young. He's only 19, just turned 19! He'd just started university at a place he never even thought he'd get into! So why? That word was on my mind more than it had ever been. I felt myself falling apart along with him, and if he didn't survive, well, I wasn't so sure I would either.

Two weeks later, his sister called me with (almost) the best news. He could breathe on his own! I felt life come back to me, and I knew he'd be back soon.

Soon turned into a little longer and I lost hope more times than I wished I did. I always knew he was strong. I knew he was brave, and I knew he could get through anything, but as time went on I wondered if he would ever decide to wake up.

He did, 1 1/2 months later on October 25th, 2016. The day I felt alive again. The day my best friend came back to me, his family, to the people who love him. He came back home.

Today, he sends me sweet messages and tells me when he meets me, he'll play with my hair and take me on lunch dates in the park. He learns the songs I send to him that remind me of us, and he sits on facetime with me, and he sings them with his Southern English accent. He tells me he's sorry, he's so sorry for hurting me in the past and he hates himself for it. I tell him, stop saying sorry, don't hate yourself, I can't love you if you don't love yourself. I think he starts to love himself a bit more every day now.

I don't know how to describe our friendship, our relatonship. For once in this whole writing I am at a loss for words. How do I explain something so darkly beautiful? Quite the oxymoron to descibe us. All I can think of is the immense passion between us. Through everything, even through the four months without him, he told me I was always his motivation. I think that may have knocked a few tears out of me, flooding my heart with something I have never felt. That, amongst the plentiful number of sweet words, late night conversations, guitar-playing sessions, little "I love you"'s sent with a little more meaning than we even thought ourselves, getting a little jealous when we told each other about our significant others, the protectiveness, the softness in our words, the rarely genuine funny jokes that we told each other that we laughed at the same way as the shittiest jokes we've ever told each other, the different kind of understanding we had for each other since the beginning, the arguments we had where we apologized an hour later because we couldn't stand being away for any longer, the security we felt in each other, the breath of relief when I finally picked up the phone and heard your voice, and how we have always found our way back to each other even after the fights we never thought we'd get over. All of those little things made me realize something, something I had been feeling for a very, very long time, and it had me screaming out one day in the middle of November,

"I am so unbelievably in love with you."