Learning To Love - Ruby Rose -

**part thirteen**

She's gone. She's gone and she's never coming back.

Just when I thought things were getting better, she took her own life.

I had to attend her funeral. I had to see her body laid peacefully in her coffin, with scars running down her wrists. I had to see her dead.

She called me, too.

I had the chance to save her, but I missed it because the fucking self-checkout malfunctioned.

I missed the signs. I wish I had noticed how she zoned out when I spoke to her. I wish I noticed when she pointed at things that weren't there. I wish I noticed her and I wish I had stayed with her. I wish she had stayed with me.

I couldn't stand seeing her any longer. I couldn't stand seeing the people who tormented her in school pretend that they had some connection. I had enough.

So, I stood up.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" I yelled out whilst a boy (the one who called Alison a faggot) read out a bullshit speech that he probably found online. "Shut the fuck up, Callum. I'm tired of this crap! Do you remember, Callum? Do you remember?"

"Remember what?" He questioned. He acted as though he didn't kill my girlfriend.

"Do you remember my first day of school, when you tripped Alison up in the corridor and called her a faggot?" I heard the crowd gasp and I turned around looking for specific eyes in the crowd. "Do Amy, George and Clarice remember calling us 'greasy lesbians'? Do you all remember being homophobic arseholes and making Alison's life a fucking misery? Because I sure as hell do and now Alison is dead and it repulses me that you have the audacity to come to the funeral of the girl who you killed." I heard more gasps, my message was clearly getting across.

"And I cannot believe that you're giving speeches about how 'you were close friends', it's bullshit! All of it! And the worst part is that her mother came." I looked at Juliana accusingly. "Remember when you burnt her hand with your cigarette butt? Remember when you kicked her out of your house because of her sexual orientation? Yeah, well, she's dead and she's never coming back." I let a tear fall peacefully down my cheek as the entire church gawped at me.

"How are you any better?" Callum asked me, his face red in frustration. He was still standing at his podium and his face was filled with regret.

"Because I loved her! I loved her so fucking much but I never got to tell her! She was the only thing keeping me alive!" I said in almost a whisper. "The only thing keeping me alive is dead. Kind of ironic, isn't it?"

"Why don't you go fucking kill yourself too then, it's not like we've already lost someone." A person in the audience retorted sarcastically.

"Watch me." I said.

I ran around the side of the church, to the stairs. I took them two at a time, racing up to the roof. I was done. I had nothing left. I could feel the cold breeze on my face and I heard people who never even knew me tell me not to do it, but they don't know my brain like I do. It felt like the only option.

I jumped.

I didn't want to join her, it wasn't like that, I never believed in that kind of shit, i just wanted a way out. I wanted it.

I had been too busy fixing my own broken pieced to notice Alison was falling apart.

There's nothing I can do about it now.