Save Me

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A.N. This is the PENULTIMATE chapter! And because I only add a quote every odd-numbered chapter, this last quote is pretty appropriate for this book. I've been saving it for the end. Xoxo, Clay.

"You're the broken one, but I'm the only one that needs saving."

-Rihanna

♔ Chapter Twenty-Nine ♔

I felt myself moving backwards, back into the corridor, until I hit a wall behind me. My eyes stayed on the empty bed, the thought finally settling in my head that he was gone.

Darby was gone. All the creases he'd left in the sheets, gone too. The smell of him in the air, all gone. It was like he was never even there.

And there came that familiar feeling, that feeling inside of me that I'd known for a long time, like a song I couldn't remember, the lyrics on the tip of my tongue. It was an old friend, one of the few lasting friendships in my life: grief.

It was the feeling of missing something you once held so dear, now lost to you forever, the emptiness left behind after that something was gone. It was an especially daunting feeling to realise that you'd never see that missing something again, that all you had left were fuzzy memories that would get harder and harder to recall with time.

Perhaps that would make it easier, I thought, knowing that everything heals with time, but it was only reassuring to a point. With time, I'd forget what it was like to have that missing something, that spectacular something, so maybe that made it even worse. Learning to live without that something ultimately meant losing it altogether.

Any therapist will tell you that there are five main stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. All five flooded me at once. It was nothing new, nothing I hadn't felt before, but that didn't stop it from hurting just as bad. The acceptance was the worst, and it struck me like a slap to the face.

Why did he have to do it? Why did he have to fucking overdose and leave me behind, leave me like this?

I ran straight out of the hospital soon after I realised, not bothering to linger around or stalk the hallways. I headed straight for my car in the parking lot. Once inside, I couldn't calm myself down. I tried to pull myself together, but I couldn't. I felt my hands in my hair, pulling at it, my scalp stinging. My heart was racing, its repetitive beats pounding inside my chest, a strange and familiar hurt covering me like hard rain in a storm.

I didn't save him, and I couldn't bare the thought of it.

I forced myself not to cry, gave it everything I had. I was done with crying, with repeating the same pattern of fuck ups over and over. I couldn't handle it. I was so sick of the same old cycle - breaking down, putting myself back together again, rinse and repeat. I couldn't handle it anymore, I had to keep it together.

My hands grabbed the wheel of the car, my breathing ragged as I sparked the ignition, putting all my focus on the open road ahead of me. I didn't know what to do anymore, where to go, who to turn to. It felt pointless, driving onwards, but I didn't see any other way forward.

I knew going backwards could only be worse. Regressing was the last thing I wanted, trapped living in the past, surrounded by ghosts and guilt. I knew that it was the guilt that fed my imagination, that envisioned the ghosts before me and breathed life back into them. I couldn't let the guilt get to me, or I knew I wouldn't be seeing the last of Darby Darling.