Say Something

Stop

STOP

Carver stood away from the mass, letting people walk past him before he moved forwards. There was something to be said for moments like these, but it was a situation where nothing could be said to make things better.

He was passing through the crowd when a hand shot out and grabbed his elbow. Glancing up, Carver saw a man wearing an equally solemn expression, his black hair looking as dull and defeated as his eyes were.

“You’re Carver, aren’t you?” he asked.

Looking at this man, Carver wondered how he couldn’t recognise him earlier. “Griffin.”

Griffin looked as if he was struggling to find what he wanted to do and then he sighed, exasperated and lifeless. “Do you a few minutes?”

“I don’t think I’m the person you want to talk to,” Carver tried putting it gently without being disrespectful. “I just came here to say goodbye to Addison.”

“Just sit with me for a minute,” Griffin insisted.

They both sat side by side awkwardly on the bench, neither of them sure of what to say until Griffin tried to break the ice.

“I saw you outside the chapel on our wedding,” he said. “I thought she would’ve run off with you to be honest.”

That was a new revelation Carver wasn’t expecting and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to take it. “I don’t think she would’ve,” he said slowly.

“She would’ve.” Griffin, to his credit, didn’t look angry as he said it. “I always had a feeling that Addison wasn’t completely in love with me, but something about her pulled me in and I chose to have half of her instead of not having her at all.”

“She chose you in the end.”

Griffin cocked an eyebrow, apparently morbidly amused by Carver’s response. “Not entirely willingly.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“All three of us,” Griffin nodded his head to where Addison’s body laid. Buried by the tree where Carver and her used to climb. “We’re all selfish and cowards because we can’t see past ourselves. I couldn’t let Addison go, even when I knew she wanted more than anything to be with you. I wanted to have whatever I could have of her, even if it meant half of her would remain unhappy the rest of her life.

“You didn’t want to reach out to her, leaving her to stand alone because you were scared of saying something. Commitment scared you and you wanted more than anything to make sure you could walk away guiltless in everything. Having her choose between the two of us was your way of making sure you could say the decision was out of your hands. You were protecting yourself and as a result, you kept her away but you could never bring yourself to completely cut the strings that chained her to you.

“Addison couldn’t bring up the courage to choose. She wanted a bit of the each of us and because she didn’t want to choose, she went with the person that chose for her. She was either too scared of hurting our feelings or she was scared of making a mistake and funny enough, that was probably her biggest mistake. She let us chain her to the both of us and unknowingly, we started to both pull at the same time and she was ripped apart at the end of it.”

Laughing bitterly, Griffin stared at the gravestone marked for Addison, an engraving that had a year far too short for someone with so much light and passion when she was alive.

“They say love is supposed to make us courageous in the face of fear, but we cowered against it and kept praying someone would make the choices for us. For someone to say something to us so we could break out of our cycle, but no one ever did. We lived in fear of being hurt because we were all selfish bastards.”

Carver was looking at the gravestone, not know what to say. Everything Griffin said was true about him so he could only assume that the two years Griffin was with Addison, he saw regret in her eyes. There was only one thing left to say really, the one thing they both wanted was gone, taken away from them because no one said anything.

“Looks like no one won in the end.”

-Power off-