She wanted to die.
He wanted to live.
•••
A hand grabbed onto my wrist, yanking me back just as the train rushed past, before I'd even had time to comprehend whether or not I'd carry out the action. I stumbled back into the person's chest, my hear...
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Overthinking the past was one of my many unhealthy tendencies.
Compulsive and addictively torturing, I did it so much to the extent where my own thoughts hurt me more than the actual memory did. I would deliberate and ponder over every morsel of the moment, pensive as I forced myself to practically relive the memory – whether good or bad – because at the end of my overthinking I would always face the same end result:
Hurt.
At the start of tonight, I admitted to Romeo that I was scared of being happy; I didn't want to face the inevitable hurt that would hit me when the blissful moments had passed and the negative nature of life kicked me back down again. That was why I was reluctant to make memories with Romeo – to allow him to form stars to shine in the darkness of my mind – because I knew that the memories would only serve to haunt me in the aftermath of it all.
Staring at the words covering the page of my journal, I had to blink back the tears threatening to blur my vision, only now realising that I had written a poem encapsulating all our memories together.
I had written a poem representative of everything that would hurt me now that Romeo was gone: seven stanzas for the seven hours we had spent together, portraying our progression throughout the night from strangers to something I was in denial about putting a name to.
Reading the words on the page, I suppose I should've felt a rueful sort of joy, or gratitude for the sacrifice that he had made, but all I felt was an overwhelming barrel of hurt as I overthought all the memories that had inspired the poem. I felt hurt that he'd done what I'd always known he would do, and despite the positive intentions, I couldn't help but feel let down that he'd left.
But it wasn't the act of him leaving that hit me the most, or the fleeting phrase he'd spoken before sprinting off down the road – it was the overthinking that came after his departure: the worries about whether or not it was my fault that he'd left, the anxieties of if he'd been caught or whether he was okay, the stress of not knowing what might have happened between us if we'd been granted just a little more time together.
It wasn't the memories that hurt me; it was the thoughts that imminently attacked which caused the most pain.
Sat in an oddly quiet McDonalds, hearing the muted silence from outside and the quiet movements of Matteo behind the counter, my thoughts had been the perfect breeding place to birth myriads of new possibilities, swarming me with ideologies that cut deeper than the loss of Romeo's presence ever could.
But the thought that hurt the most, the thought that was louder than all others, was enough to make me shut my journal abruptly, shoving it back into my rucksack as I desperately tried to rid myself of the thought:
What if I had actually been... happy?
Romeo had spoken about how darkness and light could exist alongside each other, and how I should hold onto memories and turn them into stars to brighten up the darkness of my mind: but what if those stars that we'd created had been moments of happiness?
