Forget Me

Chapter Thirty-Eight

There was no cure for the heartbreak.

There was no way to avoid Mew either. So he didn't have the chance to figure out if there was a way to get over him. There was only school and home and an occasional pick-up game to get his mind off the tedium.

With nothing else to do, Korn threw himself into his studies. It was strange how easy it was to focus on the simplicity of things that made complete sense. Math added up, physics followed certain laws, language had rules and clearly known and understood exceptions. The subject material was structured. That was something he could understand.

The other things going on in his life were impossible to figure out.

He didn't know how it was possible to feel more like himself when he was with Mew. Or how things had turned on him in an instant so that—now that they were no longer together—he felt like less than he should be. It was like the math around them was broken or altered by some unknown variable. For them, one plus one was still one and yet somehow a greater singular than just one. Yet two minus one left less than one behind.

There was nothing else to take his pain away. So he tried to focus on anything else. When Korn found out that studying gave him a reprieve from the hurt and the loneliness and the confusion, he wilfully engaged in it freely and frequently. He was pushing himself so hard that his parents noticed.

"You aren't pushing yourself too hard?" His mother asked when he excused himself from dinner after pushing his food around for most of the meal.

"It's just for the next few weeks, Mum. I need to go through everything we've done in the last four years at least once for every subject."

"That is a lot to go through...."

"Exactly."

"Then why are you still playing with those dirty things you collected from the car yard?" His father asked after putting his newspaper aside to join in the conversation.

"I haven't really been doing that as much, Dad. I need to concentrate on studying. I should probably put them away for now so they aren't a hazard to you and mum."

He looked wistfully at the pile of parts and pieces in the corner of the room. He didn't want to tell them that part of the reason he left them where he could see them constantly was that he didn't want to lose this too. His love of things mechanical was a part of him and he wasn't going to let Mew take it away from him.

But it was a distraction he didn't want right now. Thinking of it invariably led to thinking of Mew and that is what he was trying to stop. A few weeks without it wouldn't do him any harm, right?

"That would be nice," his mother said.

Korn saw the look that passed between his parents but he didn't say anything about it. He knew they were concerned about him but he didn't want them to know the extent of his problem. How could he tell them that the tinkering he normally enjoyed felt like torture because the current project was the bike he'd initially wanted to give Mew on his birthday? He'd changed his mind in favour of the medallion but that was only because he thought he and Mew would have all the time in the world to play with their new toys once the exams were over.

That wasn't going to happen now.

He didn't want them to know that if he stopped studying for even a minute, his mind automatically returned to Mew. That thinking about his boyfriend hurt like a real and physical pain that had brought him to his knees and left him in tears more times than he could count. They couldn't understand his relationship; how were they ever going to understand the pain its loss had wrought.