Coping With Clarity

Chapter Twenty

They’re all laid out in a intricate pattern on her floor. In order. Most are anyway. There are some more in boxes and others that Selena has found still saved on her camera. She wants them all. Every single picture they took together.

Her calves are pink from where her hands have slapped down on them in frequent fits of anger and frustration because she can’t remember the order or some of the photographs, the ones that had been close enough, have miniscule speckles of crimson that Selena wants to scratch off. But she won’t. She can’t. Because its Demi.

The stinging from her legs is nothing compared to the stinging in her eyes. The tears never end and each one that makes it past her swollen lids prick and cut, like salt in an open wound. Selena doesn’t want to know what she looks like. She can’t tell the colour of her eyes or how matted and disgusting her hair is. Selena doesn’t know because its been two days. Two days of hours and minutes and seconds that stab her relentlessly because she exists while Demi doesn’t.

The only fresh air she’s felt since then was the time it took for Henrie and her mom to carry her to the car. Her hollow eyes had scared them, her defensive grip on everything left in Demi’s room, worried them. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to say or how to reach for her.

Selena has paper-cuts on her fingertips. They fascinate her, they keep her grounded and after the first twelve hours of organizing, she doesn’t feel them anymore.

She can’t remember the drive home. Just flashes of traffic lights blurred in tears and the restraint of the seatbelt. Selena can’t even recall her mom’s expression. She’s heard her though. Stopping outside her door. Although she stopped knocking after Selena stopped screaming. The lock on her door might have helped.

They didn’t know how to save her. Just like they didn’t know how to save Demi.

Selena doesn’t really want to be saved.

She’s living in a reality of her own. Lost to fresh air and the sun. She lives in the photographs. In the warm light, closed curtains and Demi’s smile. Her brightness. Her life.

Its for those split second moments that Selena now lives for.

Her legs erupt in pins and needles but Selena is too busy putting together the last wall. The wall Demi’s bed was rested against. The closest wall.

An incomplete to-do list is laid next to a photograph. Its bent at the edges and Selena can feel her hands shake. Wanting to hurt, to cry and apologize all at once. Like the photo, she was alone. Demi had been alone.

Nothing is more important. The floor of her room is covered in the perfectly printed photos. The only path around leads to Selena’s bathroom and to her door - Selena hadn’t opened it since. Two days in a place she’d hardly spent anytime in. Two days piling anything on the floor onto her bed, the bed Selena had wanted to pull Demi closer on. The room she had wanted Demi to come home to.

Now its a rubix cube of mismatch pictures. So many that Selena can’t count. She’s endured the happy smiles in them with an aching heart. The serene expressions that hit so familiarly fall on her defeated spirit. The single snapshots of Demi, the ‘flawless’ ones where she’s staring right at the camera- right at Selena-, have many times almost forced Selena to give up, to run to her mom and crumple. But she can’t.

She has to do it. Nothing else matters. Not even the dull thud of footsteps resting at her door. Or the meek knock the uncharted knuckles make. Or that Selena actually feels the next photograph catch on a healing paper-cut. And definitely not the flash of blue robes, folded and forgotten, on her desk.