Shambles

Prologue

She laid awake, trying to figure out when she had started letting herself go. She laid awake, wondering why, what she donned as, a figment of her imagination had seemed so real, seemed so true, seemed so possible so many times. She laid awake and contemplated whether she should be wasting her time thinking about that, or whether she should be trying to forget about him.
She thought about that as time wasted because something in her was telling her that what that was, was not real.

However she kept clinging to the hope that maybe, just maybe he would have felt the same.
Am I in denial? she had asked herself. Because that was what Bronte had told her. But she didn't knew who she had to listen to - her mind, her heart or her friend?

Glances, smiles, winks and waves, subtle touches they had shared came back to her in a vivid blur. Patches and remnants of small interactions popping up in color, only to fade away as suddenly as it has came.
Am I crazy? she had asked herself. Because that was what Bronte had told her. But she didn't know who she had to listen to - her mind, her heart or her friend?

She had spent nights, nights like these, awake and had wondered, what really is love?
The world had its own descriptions and examples of love, but she had never before experienced love before, the love that everyone had described. She had had nothing to compare it to.
Maybe it was because she had been so young. Maybe it was because she was lazy, too lazy to dress up and too lazy to put in the effort for a date.
But she had liked to think that, with him, she had experienced love. She sometimes had doubted this as well, mostly because his intentions had always been unclear to her. She hadn't known whether why he had been interested in her was because he had wanted more attention, or whether he had actually felt something for her.
But, still, she had kept going back to him, going back to him consuming all her thoughts, and she had hated herself for doing that, because she would have always felt dirty, in a sense, and guilty and extremely lonely after.
She had made several promises to herself: to never be so weak again; to never let her reason herself into doing something to which she had known the outcome to; to never letting her walls be crumbled as fast as they had been; and many more that she had also forgotten about after she had woken up from her crying-induced sleep.

It was like he had been the flood for a drought-stricken piece of land. It was like he had been sent to soothe and heal for a few moments, only to diminish and destroy the next.
He had been her drug. She had craved him: to be in his arms, to be in his car, to be in his office, to be in his house; to be in his presence.
Unfortunately for her, it wasn't often that she had had a chance to be in his presence.

She had always been lost on the topic of what they really were. All she had known was that there must have been more to the seemingly innocent glances she had been receiving from him than anyone would have thought.