Between Two Points

Chapter 32: The Silence That Drowned Me

Why I had been dragging my feet through the days, moving but not living.

Why I had stopped writing.

Why my hands trembled every time my phone lit up.

"Pero finals na, Alliah," she continued. "Hindi mo pwedeng hayaang bumagsak ka dahil lang sa kanya."

Dahil kay LJ.

I swallowed.

The silence cracked around me, pressing against my chest, filling the spaces where words used to be.

"Paano?" My voice came out quieter than I intended. "Paano ko ipagpapatuloy kung hindi ko na alam kung paano maging ako ulit?"

It was the closest thing to a confession.

Aira was the first to move, reaching for my hand.

Dustin leaned forward, his voice softer now. "Dadaan din ‘to."

"At habang dumadaan, nandito kami." Janine’s tone was gentle, like she knew I wasn’t ready to believe it yet.

I bit the inside of my cheek.

Because I wanted to believe them.

I wanted to believe that this, this heaviness, this hollow ache, wouldn’t last forever. That I would wake up one day and not feel like I was walking through the wreckage of something I never saw coming.

But the truth was, heartbreak wasn’t a storm that simply passed.

It was a slow unraveling, a quiet kind of breaking.

And I was still learning how to survive it.

***

I needed air.

The library walls felt too close, the weight of my friends’ words pressing against my ribs like something I couldn’t swallow.

So I walked.

Past the shelves lined with books I no longer had the energy to read. Past the students hunched over their notes, too caught up in their own worries to notice the girl trying to outrun hers.

Outside, the cold air hit me like a whisper of something I had forgotten how to feel.

But then, I stopped.

And suddenly, I felt everything.

Because not far from where I stood, under the soft glow of the afternoon light.

There was him.

LJ and beside him was her.

Aerin.

The girl I had never met but had always felt the presence of. The name that lived in the spaces between our conversations, in the quiet moments when he thought I wasn’t looking. The past he never truly let go of.

And now, she wasn’t just a ghost in my mind.

She was real.

She was standing there.

With him.

Talking, smiling, too familiar, too easy.

Like she had never left. Like she had never broken him. Like she still belonged in his world.

My breath hitched, and suddenly, I wasn’t just standing there.

I was falling.

Back into the moments I should have seen as warnings.

The way LJ sometimes looked away when I asked about his past. The hesitation in his voice whenever I came too close. The lingering distance, the unanswered questions, the feeling that no matter what I did, I would never be enough to replace her.

Because maybe I was never supposed to.

Maybe I was never meant to.

I stepped back.

My heartbeat was a dull roar in my ears, my fingers curling into fists at my sides. I wanted to move, to run, to do something—

But all I could do was watch.

Watch as LJ laughed at something Aerin said. Watch as she leaned in, as if she still knew every part of him. Watch as the boy I thought I was beginning to understand became someone else.

Someone who still loved her.

A sharp breath left my lips. I turned before the pain could take the rest of me.

I didn’t want to see more.

I didn’t want to know just how much of him was still hers.

So I did the only thing I could.

I walked away.

And this time—

He didn’t even notice.