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“And it romanticizes cheating,” he grumbles, which draws another stifled laugh from me, his quiet outrage making it easier to ignore the way my chest tightens at his words.
“And the shit you listen to romanticizes death,” I toss back, before I can think better of it.
Our swaying slows almost indecipherably.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
“S’okay. You’re not wrong.”
“I think…I think it helps,” I whisper. “Making sense of the ugly by finding the beauty in it. I mean, what else do we do with it, you know? How do we make room for it otherwise?”
Jeremy says nothing to that, but I can practically hear the thoughts—memories—filling up his head, taking him far from here, to another time. Another time where he’d be drawing or pouring over some poetry book, while I chewed on my pen staring at a blank page in my journal.
So many words in my heads—thoughts and feelings—but none of it felt…right.
No, it didn’t feel good enough, I silently amend, seeing it for what it really was now.
I was a fucking coward.
An itch scratches at my brain, one I haven’t felt in months, and when I close my eyes, I can almost hear that distant melody from so long ago—the song in my head I could never get out.
Spinning, spinning…
But then it’s a flash of Izzy I see, and it’s no longer my song, but our song. The one we manipulated until it was something else completely. And in my head, she’s seated at the piano that now collects dust in her parents’ basement, head thrown back, brown hair spilling down her back.
She’s laughing at the heavens, and I’m watching her with my heart in my throat.
We were so happy.
So naive.
So unprepared for what was to come.
Now, outside the school, Jeremy shifts in my arms, and my hold on him tightens instinctively once more. Don’t leave me, don’t go. My eyes open, and the images in my head shatter into a sea of stars.
The song plays on, and no more words are spoken.
Either he heard my silent plea, or perhaps he too is afraid of what we’ll return to when we finally let go.
So we sway and we sway, spinning slowly in place to the music filling the night, as one song gives to another and another, mindless of the fact of what’s playing.
I let myself get lost in the warmth of his body, only slightly smaller than mine, making me wonder if I’d lost that much weight, or if he’s just gotten bigger.
Sometimes he feels bigger. His presence. His being. My awareness of him…
Like it’s this immeasurable entity just hovering on the edges of my subconscious. Pulling at me gently, with just enough pressure to slowly have me sinking back, back, back…
Deeper, and deeper, and deeper—a gravity I can’t escape.
Perhaps that’s why I hang on so tight, despite knowing how wrong it is. Unhealthy… Depending on him as desperately as I do. Clinging to him like he’s all that’s keeping me from falling into oblivion. Despite how much it eviscerates me when I do.
Perhaps that is why I continue to burn and burn for him. Because in these brief moments of reprieve, like now, where just for a second, the noose loosens, the flames retreat just enough for the smoke to clear, and gravity no longer feels like a curse but a relief…
I can remember what it’s like to breathe freely again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Graduation was last night. We’re officially done with high school. I never planned to walk, but with you not here…
