Forever Love Sick

Back to November

                It all starts with a song. Then soon there are crowds and lights and questions people shouldn’t know the answer to. It all ends with a goodbye.

                I’m sitting on the couch staring at the book on my lap. For some reason I’m waiting for a text that will never come. I dive into my homework and swim through articles about governmental policies I don’t care about. Every flipped page elicits a lonely and desperate look at my phone. Eventually it gets too hard to breathe.

                I end up in front of my piano hitting the keys furiously and saying all the things I wished he could hear, all the things he wouldn’t understand. There are sharp long keys that stab the air like a knife and short sweet one that kiss the wounds. Words rush out like a tidal wave hitting all the walls I built. I flip my head back and let out one last scream. I reach for a pen and try desperately to recreate the madness that came out of my mouth. I scribble lines and dots all over the paper taking the madness and pain and pushing it all into one page. The air feels light and good for one second like I had been submerged in water for hours and was finally breathing.

It all starts with a rash decision. Then there’s silence and clapping and camera flashes that show every dark part of my heart. It all ends with a goodbye.

                The next day runs by in a montage of useless worksheets and failed quizzes. I start off my day in creative writing where I write about failure because that’s what my life has been all year. The rest of my day that rips everything in me making me feel worthless. Even worse I see him so many times I want to gauge my eyes. I find his tan face in every crowd. After the first time I see him, his smile is tattooed on the inside of my eyes. He looks so happy. I wonder if he knows that I’m having my darkest days without him.

                Hannah begs and I keep saying no but she never listens. She is always trying to get me to sing in front of people. I hated it. I would get up there and freeze like a statue. She insists over and over again. My teacher does too. Somehow they end up signing me up to sing at the Broken Hearted Veterans Dance. It was for veterans who spouses had left them or died while they were gone. I wasn’t good enough to perform. I would just be another disappointment in their life.

                Despite my protests, I end up in front of my piano that night with Hannah showing her the heartache I’d scribbled out on a piece of paper. She says she really like it. My fingers tripped over themselves as they raced to say everything I couldn’t. I tell her I think it’s too messy.

“Love is messy.” She says.

                I stand behind a curtain waiting anxious until they call me. When they do, people clap but it’s not happy, it’s slow and hollow like an empty promise. I walk out to the piano and take a deep breathe. They look up at me and I want to shrivel away and die but my finger start to dance on the keys. They osh then they salsa across the keys before taking giant angry steps. I close my eyes and play before my mouth finally gets the courage to open. My words come out like a volcano like I’m erupting with all the things my friends were tired of hearing me say. I flip my head back and let out one more scream. I slow down then and remember myself. My fingers slow to a ballroom dance and I realize this isn’t a rock song, I’m not rock star. This is a death march and I’m a mortician. They clap as I stand but I don’t look at their faces.

                This Monday isn’t like the others. I walk into creative writing and a small picture of me is pinned to the board. My teacher points out the picture and reads the article in front of the class. She doesn’t know that under my dark skin, my cheeks are enflamed. I drag myself to my next class wishing desperately that no one else would bring out my performance that the paper hailed as “amazing” and “enthralling”. No such luck. My next class is with a bunch of girls and one of them was actually in attendance. I don’t look at her as she describes my performance to everyone. I want to run home when she mentions a line that made an obvious allusion to him. The girls let out sounds of sympathy for me but I just thank them for the compliments and sit. The girl who went googles the event and find a video of me. I ask to leave class.