Stagnant

Dejection

"...I never knew." He interrupted the silence, his voice carrying on the wind, it filled with confusion and guilt for his lack of knowledge.

"It's not your fault." I heave a sigh, shrugging. "We learn about the holocaust, the kings and queens of Britain and we do learn about the slave trade but we don't learn about what our country did. We learn about how we abolished it here thirty two years before the United States and somehow that makes everything okay. We don't really learn about how the Brits, and other Europeans, went over to Africa and kidnapped men, women and children, contributing in the triangular trade and sold them to America. If we don't learn about how Bristol was built off of the slave trade then how are we supposed to know it?"

"You know about it." He raised his eyebrow.

Rolling my eyes, I glanced at him briefly before setting my gaze back on the still water, watching as boats floated and bobbed on it, disrupting the perfect image. "Elliot used to read history books and he used to tell me facts and rant about the stuff he learnt."

"Ah so you're the literary nerd and he was the history buff. I always wondered what you were reading." He murmured, more to himself than me but I still heard.

"What do you mean?"

Chuckling awkwardly, he scratched the back of his neck. "I always saw you at rugby practice in high school, every single one and you were always reading something. You always had a book in my hands."

I nodded in understanding, remembering how my head was always stuffed in a book as I sat on the grass of the field, not paying attention to the training and the shouting of my fellow high school students. "Yea I couldn't really go anywhere without a book. Elliot and I would go to the library together, him reading history books while I read fiction. Every now and then he would tell me something he found shocking or interesting. 'Lizzy listen to this!', he used to say." I chuckled as I remembered, hearing his voice in my head and the look his face conjured when he read something like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Pain erupted in my chest, a couple hundred knives driving themselves in to my heart, as I remembered his hazel eyes, black hair, his goofy smile and the nickname that I had absentmindedly let escape and run free. I quickly banished the thoughts from my mind.

"You two were so close."

I nodded. "From conception." I continued to stare out at the harbour, watching as the colours shifted from teal to steel to midnight blue as the sea and the harbour met at the break in stone, waves crashing against the walls.

"I can't even imagine..." He mumbled.

He didn't finish the sentence but he didn't need to. I knew what he meant.

He couldn't imagine losing someone who had been by your side your whole life and someone you had been so close to.

For him, it was the equivalent of losing his best friend but losing Elliot was so much worse than that. He wasn't just my best friend or my brother or my twin. He was all of them, and more, wrapped in one. He was my life, my happiness, in a way he was a soulmate: someone who is ideally suited to you as a close friend -not in the romantic sense. That's what he was. He was my platonic soulmate.

I was gifted. I was given my best friend as my twin.

Siblings and twins don't have to like each other, in a way you're stuck with each other because you're family. But when you're siblings and friends, it's so much better and because it's so much it better it means it's so much worse when they're gone.

Elliot was gone and no matter how much I dreamt, wished, pleaded and begged, nothing was going to bring him back.

"I'm sorry." He whispered in to the wind. "I never said my condolences at the funeral. I did to your parents and I payed my respects but I didn't say anything to you... it wasn't intentional."

"I wouldn't have accepted them if you did." I still don't.

"I know but I'm so sorry, Eliza. Elliot was-"

Shaking my head, I stood up, swallowing the lump in my throat and turning my back to the harbour. "Let's not do this. We have to get ready for the game."

I couldn't talk about him, I wouldn't talk about him.

Talking about him brought pain and as much as I hated the numbness that spread through my veins like ice, I didn't want that pain again. I had experienced it once, I had lived through it for months before the numbness set in and that was enough... that was too much.

I've experience so much pain and suffering, so much heartbreak, I don't even know how I was still sane. I don't know how I was still alive.