ETHEREAL

CHAPTER 28

My first day back at UMD is nerve-wracking, but exciting. By the end of the day, I'm exhausted and drained from running around this mammoth campus, but I've also met a lot of nice people. Despite all of the walking, I love staring at how the campus looks in the fall, with the changing, colorful leaves, and it feels peaceful and hopeful here. I feel energized when I think about how I will see Damien later. My phone vibrates and it feels like he always knows whenever I'm thinking about him. He sent me a picture of last night's sunset, and it is beautiful. His sunset pictures are literally breathtaking. It feels like there is a bit of himself within them - wondrous and slightly anguished. The vibrant colors of the sky swirl around in sensational shades of scarlet, vermilion, and ochre to settle into soft, moody clouds of indigo and sapphire. I text back, "that looks amazing, babe!!! I can't wait to see one of your favorite spots to take pics, tonight," and it feels like my compliments are insufficient to fully describe just how astonishing his sunset pictures are. Even if we separated for some reason in the future, his pictures would always impress me.

    I peer into the window for my last class of the day, Intro to Physics, and I sigh. It seems like the professor has started the class five minutes early, and the whole room of over 100 students is nearly filled. The only empty seats are in the front row. Ugh, how embarrassing. I open the creaky door, anyways, and rapidly skip down to the front row as quietly as I can be, with my head down, until I plop into the nearest empty seat, and take out my notebook and pen. For some reason, the professor is droning on about the quantum Zeno effect. I look to the side of me, and I causally adjust myself to peer behind myself. Mostly everyone is furiously taking notes on their iPads or tablets.

"Um, excuse me?" I whisper to the guy to my right. He appears to be slightly athletic at a height of most likely over 6'3, albeit studious, and he brushes his chestnut brown hair to the side to smile kindly at me. "Is this the Intro to Physics class?"

He looks over to the professor and then back to me. "No, sorry - this is Intro to Quantum Physics... yours is actually next door," and he smiles apologetically.

My mouth drops, and I internally groan. My eyes dart between him, the professor, and the whole class behind me that would have to watch me leave.

"It happens a lot - don't worry about it," he tries to reassure me.

I make a face, and he whispers, "Good luck." I thank him, gather my stuff, and basically attempt to run out of the room.

Hours later, I'm finally picking up Damien, and Wavves is blasting in my car, as he leans over to kiss me hello. I moan into his mouth, suck on his tongue, and twist my hand around his head to bring us closer. He smiles against my lips as I gasp for air, and I feel so incredibly ecstatic to be with him. He guides me to the nearby park, and the sunny, humid afternoon has turned into a brisk fall evening as the sun sets. I shiver, as we sit on a smoothened, large rock. "This is one of my favorite places to shoot... oh, I took this picture earlier," and he shows me a picture of a beautifully broken butterfly laying on the gravel road. Its' effervescent, oil slick and glittery wings are sadly torn. It is mostly black, with orange and white specks on the outer edges. "It reminded me of you," Damien points out, and it makes me feel slightly devastated and disconsolate. Will this be what I look like, once he breaks me again? Is that the omen for my future, as my positivity and excitement for life becomes more and more extinguished until I'm a tiny, minuscule flicker of who I used to be, as I lay, drained, broken, and exhausted, on the ground?

The sun sets, and I'm silent, as he takes the most perfect pictures, as always.

The next day, I'm scrolling through my Instagram, and I click on "Recent Activity." I see that "damien_b" has liked two pictures of a user named, "ohhhayybiancaayyyy." That is such a corny name. I click on the pictures, and he actually liked a picture of Bianca's butt. I throw my phone down. This is fucking ridiculous. Why is he dedicated to making me look as foolish as I can be? He doesn't even like my own (way better) pictures! He is excessively obsessed with her, and I'm fucking tired of it.

I angrily tap out a text to him with a screenshot of what he did. "Why are you so obsessed with her? Why are you liking her slutty pictures?! Maybe you should just be a stay-at-home Dad for Bianca, since you're so obsessed with her, and you lack any ambition of your own to actually do something with your life!"

"What the fuck, Skye," he actually has the audacity to type back. "I'm not obsessed with her. Sorry I'm not perfect."

"You have double standards, like if I did the same thing, you would call me a whore and break up with me."

He doesn't even deny it. "You're crazy."

"You think that you can treat people however you want, like if you just say that you're sorry and that you're not perfect, then it should be automatically ok. You think that you can keep hurting other people however you please, and your apologies don't need to come with changed behavior & WHAT DID YOU EXPECT WHEN I NEARLY DIED FROM WHAT YOU SAID TO ME, you knew what you were getting into." I'm not crazy.

"I know, I'm sorry babe, give us another chance. Don't give up on us, like you give up on everything else. I'll stop talking to her, and I'll delete her from Facebook and Instagram."

UGHHHHH, I groan out loud, and I think about how for his 21st birthday last month, we went to a neighborhood cookout, saw the latest Harry Potter movie, got drinks and food at the Cheesecake Factory, and went to Aaron's party, but he still wasn't pleased that we spent the day together, because I told him that if he got blackout drunk again that I wouldn't go home with him, and he pouted like a toddler. I think about the disparity between how I tried to make his birthday somewhat exciting, even though I have almost no money, and how he basically forgot mine to hang out with Bianca. Why do I keep making allowances and excuses for Damien? Why do I love him so much that I lower my basic standards for him? Why can't he treat me better, like how I deserve to be treated? Can I even trust him, when he has shown me an infinite amount of times how he cannot be trusted at all?

I thought that Damien had changed, but I was wrong.