In Which A Million Different Things Happen

Everywhere

Trigger Warnings: EDs, Self Ha*m

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Hope.

Wandering through the tall, thick, black clumps and patches of thousands of trees with the moonlight glinting of the tips of the long strands of grass, my mind goes back to the few words she had managed to mumble out this evening.

"It'll be just this, Arnold. We weren't meant to be. I can feel it; it'll be my last tonight."

It was all she had spoken before collapsing into my arms, crying, sobbing; as she let herself get away from those demons for what I now felt would be the last time. Then she'd slept, and at night, when I had entered her room to check on her, she hadn't been there.

My mind goes back to the happier times that we had spent together; the time when she and I had finally become a we.

She'd sung a sweet melody in that graceful voice of hers- it had the just the slightest tinge of sadness I knew she'd been through; but she had waved away, saying, "There wasn't any phase in my life where I was sad; just some phase where I hadn't been happy enough."

She had sung beneath my balcony in a classical Hope style, had thrown flowers at me and had then wooed me; and that day, we had become a we.

I had been a stupid chicken all through high school and college and hadn't managed to tell her how much she had meant to me.

It was love at first sight.

She had the most perfect aura of calm about her; she was gentle, cool and kind, with a combination of flaming red waist length hair, almond shaped, emerald colored eyes, plump pink lips, a long nose, and big, elfish ears.

She had never been fond of her nose; she said it made her face look like as if it had been punched with a hammer on the nose till it had become just like Lord Voldemort's - almost not there.

Needless to say, it had become my favorite nose in the world.

Hope.

Another scream wrenches itself from my throat, but there is no reply.

Once, she had been cooking a dish in the kitchen, something she had seen on the internet. She poured the oil in the frying pan and some oil fell on the stove on the flame.

As a flare of fire rose from the stove, a flare of panic rose inside me. She scrambled back from the stove just as I moved forward and she went limp against me.

That day I had discovered that she was scared of fires. It had been how her mother had died; she had burned herself alive.

That had been the first time Hope had been through depression.

The countless scars on her pale arms and the thick black circles underneath her eyes were proof of the hardships she'd faced, the errors she had made, the sleepless nights she had undergone, maybe just waiting for someone to fix things, to collect the broken shards of her heart and put them back together.

She had needed patience, love; to make things better.

I had given them to her.

With her, I'd never felt incomplete.

With her, I'd felt us heal.

Hope.

I scream again, but to no avail.

Another memory floats to the surface.

Her ex best friend, Jade, had been hitting on me.

Some part of me remembered her shallow, nasally voice that had sent jitters through me and had made my ears feel as if they would fall off if she didn't stop squeaking.