amity // phan

five.

-dan-

I'd only known Phil freaking Lester for two weeks, and he was already making unimagible imparts on my life. All the formalities that I'd held so close to my chest had started to crumble and fade, making way for new patterns to emerge.

It was a good thing, though.

When I was little, all the kids in my neighbourhood loved to play hide and seek. They'd stay outside for hours upon hours, until the fireflies came out and their faces were flushed and full of fallen stars. Back in those days, I played too.

All of my friends and I- we weren't just ordinary children. Because those late nights full of games and laughter, they had filled our veins up with moonlight and starlight and oh my god, we were magical. Jonathan, Sara, and I. By the fifth grade, we all had flowers growing in our bellies and wings sprouting from our heels. Times with the three of us, they were something special. Even though none of us really fit in, we fit in with each other and it was always enough. Because we could fly high above our enemies, where their words could never catch up.

But even back then, emptiness had this funny way of leaking into my life.

Because right as I was starting to bloom into something truly spectacular, right as the daisy inside of me had petals sprouting from my hair and roots sinking into our laughter- he died.

He.

Died.

And just like that, all my roots were ripped from the ground, my stem was cut, and I was shoved in a cold glass bottle. And then when I wilted, the whole wide world asked why I wasn't happy anymore.

The sun went out. That was the first big thing that happened after I found out. I'd wake up to a spring day and it wouldn't be spring, because the sun was gone. Or I'd walk to school on a crisp autumn morning, but it wouldn't really feel like fall because there wasn't a sun in the sky there was only black.

Those endless winter days, after he was gone and before the flowers were back. Those were when people stopped talking to me. Sara grew up in a matter of minutes, and suddenly all she cared about was kissing boys, not our adventures. And Jonathan joined the track team, and he had to clip his wings so he could run faster.

Because nobody knows how to talk to someone who's wilted away into nothing.

But it was okay. Because I had my guide to wildflowers. It could always keep me company.

It was the very same one that they found his note in.

I never got to read it. My mom said it wouldn't have helped.

Soon, my old friends stopped saying hi to me in the hallways. And after their pity had all melted away, they promptly forgot that they'd ever known me at all.

It didn't really matter, though. I forgot about them, too. I was busy thinking about the lack of him in my life, and how he'd never come home again. I stayed inside more often, during those cold cold cold cold cold winter days. I pressed all of the flowers he'd ever given me, so that I could immortalize what little of him I had left. Whenever it got too bad, or my brain started going to that place where everything was fog, I'd just pretend that he wasn't really gone, he was only outside picking some more buttercups for me.

It was also during that endless winter that I started to study the names in that stupid flower book he gave me. I used to read over those names and definitions until my mind went numb because at least a numb brain wasn't thinking about him.

Before it happened, I'd always assumed that grief was some little thing that bothered you for a few months, and then went away. But my winter never felt like ending. After the sun left the sky, it never really came back. The sky was black until studying did no good anymore because I already knew all the names and all of the definitions. As winter persisted to spring melted to summer cooled to fall froze to winter again, it all hurt just as bad.