Silent Pantomime

Chapter 3 | She loves me not

Chapter 3🌌:

When my mum died, my whole life died. Everything in my life felt like it was sucked into a black balloon, filled with helium, and then let go of. But I swear I never let that balloon burst, it just got lost somewhere. Lost enough for no one to ever know about it, until that moment I suppose.

I must have reread the letter about ten times before the burning feeling in my chest tightened, then dissolved into numbness. I let out a small sigh, then it turned into a half laugh. Despite how sickening I should have found it, someone writing me a letter quoting my dead mother that no one should have known about; I somewhat liked the fact that they knew. Someone spent time out of their day to write to me, they spent money to post it, went through effort to give it to me. They did it all for me. And I loved that.

I smiled to myself and ran upstairs into my room, clutching the expensive-way-to-send-a-text to my chest. As my body clambered upwards, I stopped abruptly in the middle of my stairs, seeing a picture of me and my mum. I was about four, and she had face painted me as a fairy princess. We were sat in the garden eating ice cream and laughing, holding each other's hands. I felt a momentary ache in my chest before I carried on running up the stairs to my room.

My fingers latched around the paper as I unlocked my laptop, and span around on my chair as it loaded. I giggled slightly as it unlocked and I clicked onto my Tumblr. I had an anonymous account on there where I posted about my life. It was anonymous because I had two types of attention I liked. People who payed attention to me because they had met me and knew the 'classic' me; then the people who payed attention to me who didn't actually know me, as they based the attention off of my interests and how I acted, instead of what I looked and behaved like. And my page was very popular, which made me very happy.

"Do you ever wonder how many roses and daisies have died from playing the they love me, they love me not game? Because I do. I read a book once years ago, it was the typical boy meets girl story, but he started to pull off the petals of a rose. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. He went on and on. He tore the last petal in two. He couldn't live with the fact if she didn't love him. Because everyone loves being loved. Being seen.

Why am I writing about a boring book from years ago? Well, a very similar s/he loves me, s/he loves me not situation just happened to me. Someone wrote me a letter, I have no idea who, but it was anonymous and they knew so much about me. Secret admirer maybe? And who doesn't love being admired?

There is no point in living if you are invisible."

I pressed post and my blog went out. Smiling to myself, I got up and hid the letter under my pillow. The world could know about a letter to someone they didn't know, but the world couldn't know about a letter for Hazel Fitzgerald. They would want to read it. Despite how desperate I was for attention, this attention was best left as the anonymous one. I didn't want anyone else knowing about my mum, apart from my new apparent stalker.

I went back onto Tumblr and looked up 'stalker'. A whole bunch of weird quotes came up, which honestly, I should probably have expected. Stuff like, "Stalking is when two people go on a romantic walk together, but only one of them knows about it," and, "A true stalker doesn't follow, they already know where you are going". I rolled my eyes - some people really were weird. But I honestly didn't mind if someone was watching me, what was wrong with it really? It was much better than nobody watching me. Like I said in the post, what was the point in living if you were invisible?

I was about to log off when I saw a comment on my recent post pop up. The profile picture was of some girl, and she was definitely a Plain Jane. Not pretty, not ugly. Not skinny, not fat. Just average. And average meant invisible.

"Lucky you, I never get any attention in person, let alone anonymously". I shook my head at the comment, no attention, how could anyone have survive without that?

"How are you still breathing?" I replied after a while.

The girl automatically replied back, "What do you mean?"

I sighed, she clearly wasn't that smart either. "I mean how can you live without someone noticing you? Surely it makes you feel useless, unloved, worthless?"

I smiled after I replied, then shut my laptop. This girl would probably have put on some makeup, done her hair, then someone would have been bound to notice her.

After that, I walked out of the house to this café near where I lived. I stood in the queue ready to order my green tea (part of the green based diet I was on) and twirled my hair around my fingers. Living in a town, everybody knew everyone, and everyone had their usual coffee orders. Except me. I never ordered the same thing, because getting yelled, "Would you like your usual?" actually blends you in more than ordering a drink. So I had to have a conversation with a barista, and put on my Little Miss Sunshine demeanour. I didn't see anything wrong with it, all I was doing was ordering a drink. To be frank, I was being a good person too - smiling at someone can make their day - and me being remembered as the nice, chatty girl from the café was good in my books.

I spent the rest of the day around Autumn's house, and everything was uneventful apart from me wanting to throttle her every time she asked me to film a TikTok with her.

However, have you ever heard of the calm before the storm? Because that was definitely it. The next day something awful happened. Way past awful.

And it was all my fault.

Because at 9am sharp I got another letter, which was hard to read because I was shaking so much from crying. This time the beloved attention from a letter didn't light up my life, it just made my heart collapse on top of what happened. What I made happen.

"Hey Hazel,
I love you not."