The Elite ✓

semi-finale | william

WILL SCHREAVE

what is it like losing to someone because 

they're bound to somebody else?

I thought she was perfect and the one for me. That is until she didn't choose me.

One is made complex by the series of layers to their appearance, their personality, their quirks. These layers consist of memories that have shaped them to become who they are today. These layers are an identification. Like the way we can recognize somebody just by looking at them. These layers add dimensions to us, or rather, they define us: Our emotions, reactions to certain occurrences, it's the reason for our actions and the answer to all our mysteries. Every minute, of every hour, of every day, a new layer is formed. Perhaps it's the reason that you're up at midnight, downing shots like bullets, or maybe it's the reason you aren't.

Heartbreak is more than sixteen tubs of chocolate fudge ice cream or the unlimited towelettes. Heartbreak is the way nineteen years of layers are ripped apart by the formation of someone else's layer. At the end of it all, you don't know who you are or what you've become because one decision, her decision, destroys you completely. And you can't blame anyone but yourself. After all, it was you who opened yourself to vulnerability.

Heartbreak is a wave of constant prodding as if you were a specimen being examined by a laboratory, it's an alien feeling. First, it's the way you can't seem to sleep, no matter how much you try. Then starts to change you. Suddenly, you're listening to a different genre of music, your appetite is next to nothing, and the edges and corners to your life turn dull. When you walk down a road, it's not because walking down the pavement exposes you to the sun, the colours, the coffee shops, and the people, it's because walking that road is the only route home. 

With each passing day, the love being drained from my soul morphs into a sense of disappointment. And I ask myself, Why didn't she choose me? Why couldn't she choose me?

Why?

I heard Holly. I heard her tell him that she was ready to finally choose and that she had chosen him. I had seen her be swept into his arms, holding onto him so tightly as if she might lose him. I watched the way they gazed into each other's eyes and twirled to no extent. I stared, at hollow, while my heart sank below my stomach when I watched the girl that I had begun to need to live slip from my grasp. Nothing hurts more than that.

And suddenly, I understood. Or at least, began to. Love would always find it's way back, wouldn't it? Easy love is non-existent. Holly could go a million times making her very own well-informed, decent and proper decisions. "I'm supposed to be fighting for him," "It's his competition", "This feels like a crime." 

But hell, the moment she finally chose to follow her heart, I'd be waiting for her, the same way I always had, and always will be. And from the first moment I saw her, I knew I'd be doing this, time after time, again. And I knew I'd win her over. 

Holly, this is me fighting for you.

END OF BOOK TWO