We Are

I'm Left

Drew's lips are moving but I can't hear a word of what he's saying. It's peculiar somehow, how I can hear the rain beating against my window, and the door to the apartment above me slamming shut. I can hear weak thunder at a distance and even the silent buzz of my computer in the next room. But I can't understand any of the words that are rapidly spilling from her brother's mouth.

When he'd knocked on my door this morning I had known what he would say, before he opened his mouth. I had felt his look of panic burning my skin long before I even opened the door. I had known what was about to happen. But yet, when he says that first sentence, my breath catches in my throat and every word after that is toned out by the violent silence in my head.

Laoel is gone.

I stare at the seventeen-year-old at my doorstep with eyes glazed over by chock. He's tall, several inches taller than me, wide shouldered and without a sharp line in sight. He looks nothing like his sister. Darker hair, darker skin and hazel eyes. You can see that he spends a lot of time in the sun. No, I decide, there isn't a trace of Laoel in her brother's features. If younger siblings might have stolen some of her beauty, Drew is a creature of his own. In some sick way that frightens me, it feels as if a stranger is standing at my doorstep asking for her, not a boy I had taken fishing with his brother just this summer, not a boy that for the last year had become my family.

When he finally manages to get my part of the story from me Drew leaves, shoulders hanging, his wet curls sticking to his forehead and him not even bothering to wipe the rain from his face. He leaves me his number, in case of her showing up. I toss it in the trash. We both know that she isn't coming back, all this searching is just to numb the pain.

She's gone and there's nothing I can do about it... There's nothing I can do about it, so I grab my keys, grab my jacket and leave home, leaving my phone behind. I know that she isn't going to call, and I can't stand looking at the screen every five minutes, waiting for her to. It's stupid really, how well I know what's going to happen and how sternly I refuse to accept it. Because she's gone, and because I simply cannot take that.

So I leave my apartment, I leave the bedsheets that still smell of her and the phone that keeps buzzing, her name never being the one to light up the screen. I leave my stairs and run out in the rain letting it wash over me. Letting it wash over this godforsaken town with all it's faded colors and dirty walls. Letting it consume New Hill and all of the people who live here. Letting its drops beat against the broken aluminium of the factory, wearing it down to nothing over time. Letting it ruin my clothes, my home and me.

Because it doesn't matter anymore. Because she isn't coming back and because I know that, yet cannot seem to accept it.

Because she's gone. And I'm left.

And because that hurts more than I could have ever imagined. 

Thanks for reading // Alex