Paper Hearts

16 | resolution

[ dedicated to NegativeWriter26 and sexyuniicorn for being such fantastic readers because neither i nor this story would be where it is without your guys's love and support. thank you so so much for being so wonderful <3  ]

PAPER HEARTS | 16

TWO YEARS LATER

The day she'd walked out of Micah's life was the day she'd finished the slowest, longest chapter of her life. When she read it over, thought about it more, Ellie began to realize why readers preferred substance over sex. Love had to be characterized evenly by a physical connection and a mental stability, but when touch, taste, and sight becomes the foundation of a relationship, the chemical makeup of it goes awry. When the scales are tipped in favor of contact, the brain conforms to the seduction of lust. Lust doesn't lead to love; it leads to obsession.

Ellie had scrapped that chapter, crumpling it and chucking it into some unforeseen corner of her new home. Remembrance came with nostalgia - the constant revisitation of past events out of fear of forgetting them. She didn't want to remember. The key to moving on is accepting the past, and Ellie knew that if she accepted the past, she wouldn't want to move on; she knew she'd go back to him. So she created a new means of moving on - she would forget.

She would forget Micah and Isaac and Isla. She would forget every Bowman Bash and every Fuzzy Friday and every birthday celebration.

She wanted to start anew and that she did.

Without Micah by her side at every second, Ellie found that her productivity increased tenfold. She was back in nursing school during the day in the hopes of being a registered nurse. While her parents helped her to keep her single-bedroom apartment, her savings as a nurse assistant and her publications kept her from being kicked out of school. While money had been a problem when her book was first published, as the months had gone by, the income had begun to roll in steadily. She was, in some sense, making enough to keep the water and electricity running. Cable was a different story. And though Ellie had enough time in everyday to balance writing and studying, she realized that the lack of company made her feel as if there were one too many hours to each day.

She might have been getting more work done, but she wasn't enjoying any of it.

When she'd been with Micah, she'd been living, and without him, she was only existing. Things she used to find fun no longer seemed as appealing when she did them alone. In some sense, he'd ruined her in ways she hadn't realized. Ellie had become so dependent on his presence, on him, that she didn't know who she was. When they'd first parted ways, she'd feared she'd become nothing without him - the hole his absence left in her chest couldn't be filled by any family member or any new friend.

Empty - that's how it felt to leave someone who had started to become her world, as problematic as that was.

Ellie had thought the published life would be a little more glamorous than it really was. She was hoping that being a New York Times bestseller would provide her with enough to quit her assistant job and write full time, but her five seconds of fame were short lived. There were demands for a sequel, and when she announced that she would be writing one, press moved onto the next biggest author. If she wanted her spotlight back - if she wanted to be making banks - her next book would have to be a hit, just like the first one. She'd have to make it bigger and better, if she was writing for the crowd; if she was writing for herself, she'd have to trust her gut and write what she wanted to write, not what others expected her to write.