AllFreeNovel
Share Us
?
??Of course.” I sigh, then make a mental note to stop the sighing. Nothing says I’m a bottomless pit of black angst like a noisy sigh.
“You should really take an Ativan.”
And be transported back to January 2012 in yet another way?
“No thanks.”
“Stubborn.”
“Pushy,” I snip.
“You’re allowed to be stubborn,” she says with her own sigh. “Right now, I’d say you’re allowed to be whatever you want.”
I don’t have a reply for that. I don’t have a reply for most things, so I just look at my cuticles, then at the road, lit up some ways ahead by the rear lights of what I think are several eighteen-wheelers in a row.
The truth is, I wish I could take Ativan. Or Xanax. I wish I could take anything, but these last couple of days, I’ve been haunted by those first few months after the accident. I don’t even want to see an Ativan, much less swallow one and enter zombie mode. I might not have much right now, but I have my own thoughts and feelings—awful though they are.
I take a sip of my McDonald’s latte, lift my gaze up to the car clock. It’s 12:39 a.m. Soon, I think Jamie will want to stop.
It doesn’t matter where we stop, or when, really. Even without the Ativan, I’ll go to sleep at some point. I’ll wake up. We’ll have to find breakfast, gas the car back up, and get back on the road.
And in another day or two, we’ll be back to Gatlinburg. Home. And I will see my bears. I’ll keep on sleeping, eating, showering, because what else is there to do? Dig a pit and fall inside and die? I’ve thought of it—believe me. But giving up is pointless. Not to mention, difficult. I’m not wired that way. I never really have been. Even in 2012. I never really gave up. I got sad, but I didn’t quit holding on.
That’s the worst thing about life, I think. The way it doesn’t stop when your heart does. It feels illogical, the way time marches on, and you walk too, slowly, surreally, feeling like a fish on land. Even when you can’t make sense of it, eventually, you kind of have to. There’s no other way. You do—because you have to. End of story.
I wish they wrote books and made movies about this: this helpless, numb continuum. I wish I could go off the deep end. Shave my hair off. Bash someone else’s car windshield in. Refuse to leave the bed. But that’s not real life.
What is?
I don’t know.
What will I do when I get back there?
Will he be there?
Jamie told me “no.” She said Nic’s been keeping up with him through his friends. Breck’s buddies. Of which he—Nic—was apparently one.
Nic says Bear isn’t even in the South. I heard Jamie on the phone with him last night from where I stood outside her door, crying silently, about to go inside and cry in her bed. She was saying, “So he disappeared? Back to that cabin?”
Then her super ears picked up my sniffling and she got off the phone. But I know what she meant, I think. Bear had a cabin over the summer. He spent some of this past summer up here in Breckenridge. Before deciding to find me, I guess.
I look at the dashboard and I see us walking down that road. I know what I know about his real feelings for me because of how he disappeared. Jamie found me in some PTSD fugue, lying in the snow, but there was blood under my fingernails. My knuckles are still bruised and cut. My right elbow is sore and looks a little greenish. When I tried to talk to her that night—two nights ago, I think—I barely even had a voice.
I think I screamed at him.
I know I hit him.
I don’t really remember…but I have this feeling. I remember feeling…rage. I can almost kind of see his face. Wide eyes. Red eyes. I can feel the difference in our sizes. He was solid underneath my fists. He was mine.
Tears pool in my eyes and start to streak down my cheeks.
I loved him!
I wanted nothing more than him.
Barrett.
