Imight be the first teenager to ever say this, but I can’t wait for summer to be over.
I’m spending today the way I’ve spent the entire first month of break–alone.
Hugging my knees to my chest, I look out at the still surface of Larkspur Lake from the bench I usually occupy with Abby.
I’ve been avoiding her–and everyone else–since the nuclear fallout that occurred the last week of school. I’ve been stuck in an endless loop of emotions I don’t know how to untangle.
First there’s the anger, so visceral sometimes that I can’t stop shaking. Then comes the confusion, which always ends with me taking Tylenol to counteract the massive headache that comes when I try to pinpoint how I missed what they were doing.
But the sadness, the loneliness, the absolutemiseryis debilitating. Some days I can’t find the energy to dragmyself out of bed, so I tell my parents I’m just taking a day to stay home and read.
I haven’t cracked a single book open–but I could draw every crack on my ceiling from memory now.
I haven’t told Abby. I haven’t told my mom either. Every Friday at the diner, I tell Abby to go ahead, that Jack is running late but he’s on his way. Then I walk down to the lake park entrance, and sit in silence until it starts to get dark, when I make my way over to the coffee shop in my neighborhood.
I sit there until closing, and by the time I walk back home I know that my parents are asleep, and this is a believable hour for me to come home on a Friday night during summer.
I don’t know why I haven’t told them–they’re usually the first two people I tell about anything and everything. But something about this feeling is so foreign, and so lonely, that I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe it. And it feels more daunting trying to explain something I know they won’t understand.
So I sit here, alone, again. I can feel myself putting up walls, collapsing into myself, but I can’t stop it. All I do is replay that scene over and over in my mind until silent tears run familiar tracks down my face.
I sit, with no one but the birds playing in the water to keep me company, and hope that no one stumbles across me and asks how I’m doing.
I think if someone asked me that question at precisely the wrong moment, I would fall apart and never be able to put myself back together.
The worst part of everything isn’t the anger or the betrayal. It’s how much Imisshim. I can control the rage, and I’m no stranger to melancholy, but missing him is the part that makes me feel like a belt is tightening around my chest and I can’t do anything to get it off.
Unfolding my arms and stretching my stiff limbs, I slowly stand up, peeling the back of my thighs off the bench they adhered to in the summer heat. No plan for the rest of my day–or for anything, really. It’s just me and my thoughts on my walk home.
***
Sitting in my reading chair, staring out my bedroom window, I’m feeling very ‘Bella in NewMoon’ right now. I always thought she was being melodramatic, but I get it now.
I don’t bother even looking at my screen when my phone rings once, then twice, then a third time. When it dings again with a text, I finally check it in case Abby needs something. My heart drops into my stomach when I see that it’s from Jack, not Abby.
At first I consider just deleting the text without reading it, but morbid curiosity gets the better of me.
Jack:Ellie, can we please talk?
What even is there to say? I can’t imagine any sort of explanation or apology that would make things even fractionally better.
Ellie:No.
Tossing my phone over my shoulder onto my bed I go back to watching the blue jays at the feeder in the backyard.
A barrage of non-stop notifications eventually irritates me enough to get out of my chair. Snatching my phone off my bed, I flop down on my stomach and read the five additional texts that just came through.
Jack:Please Ellie
Jack:Come to lunch with me
Jack:Just give me an hour
Jack:I won’t even bring him up, I just want to apologize
Jack:I miss you
It’s the last text that gets me. I might miss Jack the most–holding a grudge against him has taken the most effort since he was the least involved in the whole debacle. Letting my loneliness get the better of me, and against my better judgment, I finally reply.
