Letting Go|✔

epilogue (1/2)

January 19th 2016

Third Person's POV

"-But then you find out that she's hurt. She's lost someone she loves, and you know how painful that can be because you have lost so many people yourself " the boy ended his presentation and after a moment of silence, the whole crowd started clapping, the whole garden filled with joy and appreciation for the young man, as his words were real and sad, but most importantly they were honest, coming from the depth of his heart.

The girl that was sitting in the front row with the rest of the interviewers that came to confront the boy stared at him with tears ready to escape from her eyelids and to form a small path to her face. The boy's hazel eyes never left the girl's green ones. She was everything to him and seeing her after all this time, awakened all those feelings that were kept hidden inside him for almost a year now.

"Any questions?" the boy asked and that's when the girl raised her hand, almost taking by surprise the author of this remarkable book that was presented to the world today, with already a million copies being sold.

"Tell me please, in an interview last December, you said that you romanticized pain. Why?" she asks, staring for a second not at him, but up at the clouds and then focusing back to him.

"I think I did it to understand it better" he answers truthfully and she frowns.

"How does that work? There's nothing beautiful about pain. Beautiful things can come out of pain, sure, but pain in and of itself is not beautiful"

"Maybe...maybe we do it because it is the only way we can stand to think about it. We, as humans, want to reject the ugly things in life. Take 'ugly' with a grain of salt, though, because in the past, those we have rejected for being 'ugly' were not at all, but our brains are limited and easily corrupted by preconceived ideas. So maybe, because we can't get rid of pain, we try and make it more...glamorous, so we won't just shut it away, because part of coping with pain in a healthy way is being open about it"

She laughs, the sound itself forming butterflies to the pit of his stomach. "You're very smart, you know that?"

After all this time of being away from her, the boy is blushing at her comment, while the crowd laughed. "I guess" he couldn't even tow his eyes away; his eyes were piercing through hers, connecting in a way nobody except for those two could really understand. It felt like he was stuck in some enchanting moment.

"It doesn't make it right, does it?" she inquires, "it's not good to make pain seem beautiful, it makes people think being in pain is good, that it makes you beautiful. So really, by trying to understand it better, we really aren't understanding it at all"

"Well, nobody wants to be sad, but everyone wants to be beautiful, whatever their definition of 'beautiful' may be. So if you're sad, romanticizing it may be the only way to feel beautiful"

"But it's toxic; it hurts you. If you become so convinced that your pain is beautiful that it's art, then you never want to be happy"

"I wouldn't say that" he squints his eyes, pursing his lips. "Everyone wants to be happy, but I think... I think people just settle, after a while. They get tired, so they rest assured, knowing that people on social media find their sadness attractive and romantic, so they still feel beautiful, in a sense"

"Is that what you think?" she asked.

"Yeah, it is" he says. "Maybe I am wrong, though. I don't know. I've just never really understood why people think kissing scars is going to make them go away, or that saying suicide is beautiful is going to make it stop from happening"

"Because everyone wants to be beautiful, right?" the girl asks, smiling.

"yeah", he chuckles, sadly, "right"

And that's it. Even if, after that conversation between them two, several interviewers bombarded the young man with questions, he was still smiling, they were both smiling. For the pain they both felt, for finding themselves again.