A.N.- Not actually a prompt, just something I wanted to write about someone I lost, but transferred it into the form of Callahan thinking about Nash.
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Callahan Abraham sat on his bed, lazily scrolling through Facebook on his laptop. His headphones were in, and music blared into his ears, lyrics he barely registered filtering through his brain.
He grabbed a water bottle off of his dresser, uncapping it and taking a swing of it. He paused, the bottle resting on his lips, a little water trickling into his mouth.
“The I.V. and your hospital bed, this was no accident, this was a therapeutic chain of events.”
The lyrics were simple, a lead in to a fun song. A song Callahan had heard plenty of times before, because he had always loved Panic! At The Disco, they had all loved Panic! At The Disco, but Nash had especially loved Panic! At The Disco.
The trouble with loving someone was that people were not immortal, and people died. People died in accidents, people died of illness, people died of murder, and people died of suicide. And there was nothing you could do to change that deceased state, no matter how badly your chest ached when you thought of them, or how much physical pain it caused when you just wanted to talk to them one more time.
And the even bigger problem was that you could never truly forget someone you had loved and lost. They crept back to you in the strangest ways, assaulting your memory with the slightest of triggers. A song, perhaps, by a band they had loved in life. As the lyrics entered your brain, so did they.
Callahan shakily set his water down. “Stop. No. I don’t know,” he groaned.
Stop what? No what? He didn’t know what?
He wasn’t sure. He was never sure. Just like he wasn’t sure why Nash had taken his own life. He knew all that had happened, but he still didn’t understand why Nash would do that, why he would put a gun to his head and think no one would miss him, why he would kill himself and think that would end the pain when all it did was throw everyone around him spiraling down into the bitter agony of loss.
Callahan stared at his laptop, watching as the numbers in the corner changed slowly. Time shouldn’t go on. When Nash blew his brains out, didn’t that stop time? What even was time? It was just an accepted concept, so why couldn’t it stop when Nash’s life did? Why did the clock keep ticking when Nash heart wasn’t beating?
Callahan groaned again, gripping his head as his eyes watered. He hated when this happened, he hated when he remembered his best friend, he hated when he forgot his best friend, he hated Nash for doing this to him, and he hated himself for hating Nash.
Deep down, buried in the darkest parts of his heart and mind, hid a thought Callahan would never share with anyone.
Sometimes, he wasn’t sure if it had been worth it. To know Nash, grow to love him as a best friend, get so close to him, only to lose him so soon. Wouldn’t it have been easier, better, if none of them had ever known Adrian Nash? He was so young, why did he have to come and steal hearts and smiles and happiness if he only planned on leaving and taking all those things with him?
“Why? Why? Why?” Callahan whimpered, rocking back and forth, his face in his hands.
He hated that question, that taunting question, that unanswerable question. He could scream “Why? Why? Why?” for the rest of his life and he would never get an answer, and would never get relief, and he would never get closure.
Losing someone who was old or sick was so wildly different than losing a healthy young boy. Maybe Nash had his flaws, but who didn’t?
And all the kids around school who cried what a shame it was that Nash was gone, and hadn’t he been such a good kid, and such a good friend, and they had never known him at all, never talked to him, only seen him around school, but he was dead and he couldn’t scream that he had never known them so they could use him for all the attention they wanted because everyone loved you when you were dead. Everyone became an angel when they were dead, but Nash wasn’t an angel when he screamed out Francis’s name in bed, or when he abandoned his friends for Francis.
Callahan knew the dark parts of Nash, the parts that stripped those angel wings from his back and left him bloody with a gun in his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit those faults out loud. His hand trembled as he pulled up his music and put on a playlist simply titled “Nash”.
And he allowed himself to cry into his hands as songs that reminded him of Nash, that screamed the angst of losing someone too young, too tragically, began to play in his ears.
Wounds could heal over, but they became scars, and scars could be ripped open. You could pick at it and pick at it until you picked a little too hard and all of a sudden there was blood and a sharp pain, and putting a Band-Aid on it didn’t stop the bleeding, no, it just hid the bleeding.
And that’s all Callahan Abraham, Francis Phillips, and Damien Knowles had been doing. They had been hiding the blood with Band-Aids, hiding the pain with smiles, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t feel that sharp pain anymore.
You couldn’t just switch off emotions, and the pain that rang sharp and hollow in your chest at the same time would drive you insane. Callahan had dreamt of Nash so many times, but he always woke up knowing that Nash wasn’t there, that Nash wasn’t going to come back to life, that the dead stayed dead, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t look around the halls hopefully in the morning. That he didn’t stare at Nash’s empty seat as the bell rang, hoping Nash had a late pass. That he didn’t wait for Nash to take his seat at lunch so he could start talking about the annoying math teacher.
And Callahan continued to struggle with that ugly question. Were the memories, the good times, knowing that green eyed boy, worth it? Or would it have been easier to have never known him, never laughed with him, never loved him, never lost him?
“Stop,” Callahan whispered, pleading with his mind to just abandon thoughts of Nash for once. Because he could push Nash to the back of his mind, but he could never forget him, never lose the imagine of that green eyed, black haired boy.
What did his laugh sound like? His mind was playing tricks on him, he hadn’t heard it in so long. And what did he look like? Callahan didn’t trust him memory to conjure up the image of Nash anymore. What were real memories? What had his mind made up? It was just a confusing swirl inside his brain and his heart.
Nash was dead, and it was easy to say but hard to understand. This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like Callahan, but here he sat, crying while he listened to a playlist titled “Nash” because Nash was dead, and dead by a bullet he had put in his brain, and was it fair, should he morn, had it hurt, did it matter, why couldn’t his mind stop, why did his chest hurt, why were his cheeks wet, why, why, why, but no answers, no closure, nothing, just why, why, why, over and over again, why Nash, why, why, why.
Pulling his knees up to his chest and pressing his forehead against them, Callahan allowed himself to cry, choked sobs because crying wasn’t attractive, and death wasn’t attractive, and people said that he was an angel but only people who didn’t love him would say that because you didn’t want an angel, you wanted Nash, you wanted the person you had lost beside you, not above you, but was Nash above them, or was he gone, or what, why, why, why, what, so many questions that would never get answered, just a never ending stream of agonizing, torturing thoughts in the brain.
Why, why, why?
Because this was loss.
