Everything I Never Say ✓

[ sixteen ]

Sixteen

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I was nineteen when you decided to come back home.

For a lot of people, it probably wouldn't have been home anymore. They'd have grown used to the sense of liberation, the distance between the place they'd grown up in and the place they were living in now.

But you aren't most people. And home was still home to you, Daniel.

Of course you didn't go the past years without seeing your parents; they always insisted on visiting you rather than having you fly down— or god forbid, drive— to Birmingham.

They never understood why I declined being a part of those visits. Then again, my excuses were always valid. Very reasonable.

I wonder, at times, if you were hurt by it. And then I feel this sharp sting slicing through my chest, right down the middle, and I have to switch my mind to other topics.

I was nineteen, and used to this new bitterness that lingered in my mind after every thought of you—much like the aftertaste that clung to my tongue after I accidentally bit into a clover during dinner with Vivian at that Pakistani restaurant.

And you, you were twenty-three, and coming back home, coming back to me, to me, to me, after almost four years.

I remember wishing that I didn't choose to take a break after my A-Levels. I remember wishing so desperately to go back in time, to right after getting through upper Sixth Form, and being able to tell Mathew and Vivian that I didn't want a break from my academic life. That I wanted to follow a degree, right away, right away.

Because then—then—I wouldn't be home when you came back. I'd be somewhere far away, not in a place and time where I was about to breathe in the same room as you, where I was about to hear your voice or feel your presence or catch your eye by accident.

Oh goodness, Daniel, I was a mess.

Where was that bitterness I'd let grow and grow inside me to the point of loathing? Where was all that anger towards you I'd allowed myself to feel at every mention, whisper and murmur of your name?

But I disliked you for only a year, Daniel.

Disliked you only for a year when I felt something for eleven, and loved you for eight.

And eight years of being in love with somebody cannot, in this reality or any other alternative version of it, be wiped out and burnt down by a single year of anger.

Especially when that anger came from a place of pain and heartache, which in turn came from a place of hopeless longing.

And maybe it was then, with Vivian and Mathew rushing about the house making sure it was in a welcoming state, with Hadley and Noelle pulling out chicken bacon rolls from the oven and the aroma flooding the entire place, with Bash loading the refrigerator with soft drinks, that I realised my love for you will always, always be far greater than my want to turn it into hatred.

Because love is pure, love is good—and maybe I had let my inability to accept my feelings taint it in a way, to darken it with something angry and sour— but there it was right then, drawing the line and saying enough, fighting me and refusing to turn into hatred. Refusing to turn into poison.

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