Trapped in Forever

30 ~ Fragments of Broken Hearts

I nodded, bringing my lip inside of my mouth so I pressed my front teeth against it, until it bled or throbbed, or until he left, and I could go back to pretending that things never changed, that the earth didn’t continue to revolve, altering our glimpses at constellations that weren’t attached to ceilings, whether someone did or didn’t exist there anymore. She was being forgotten, by everyone—her “friends”, by her mother, and now, in my room, chuckling over Orion’s Belt with half-bitten smiles, me and Orion were beginning to forget her too. Eventually, he would get tired of constantly telling girls that his relationship status was complicated, that he was still in love with a girl who had a thing for Michael Jackson and dramatic exits, who also happened to be dead, and one day, through the haze of cigarette smoke at some party he went to for Louis and his band or whatever, he would see a girl, tall in high heels and head held high with confidence, and Roxanne would become nothing to him. More like a memory, a blurry, out of focus one that made me reconsider if it were even a memory at all, or simply a dream.

And then soon after that, when he would find that girl’s gaze through the grayness of looming fog of putrid cigarette smoke, and slowly fall back into love, but with someone else, someone who didn’t eat chalk or ruminate with thoughts of suicide, he would realize, then, that he didn’t want to be tied down with her best friend either—the one still plagued with memories she knew weren’t dreams, who still couldn’t listen to a stupid voicemail of a dead girl, who constantly was a reminder that that summer wasn’t just a dream with an unpleasant ending, but real. A reminder of a person who was real, not a hazy dream during a summer’s night.

Whatever friendship we managed to generate from fragments of broken hearts, vivid memories, and thick regrets that lingered in closets and under our beds, locking their fingers around our wrists, would eventually crumble, and I was sure that we both knew that. But I didn’t want to be left behind anymore, on the other side of a slammed door, after apparently it had been decided that this was where I wasn’t needed. They could go on without me now.

I didn’t want to believe that we could actually be friends, and then feel that breathless feeling again when you realized that some people had a thin definition of friendship.

“Yeah,” I told him, nodding once more, even though his gaze had shifted away from me and was now lingering on the floorboards or the small fraction of the glossed surface that wasn’t obstructed by the white, slightly stained rug adorning the floor. “She . . . thought it was kind of cool.”

I could see as he nodded to what I had said, his lower lip slowly retracting into his mouth, a glimmer of white revealing and then concealing itself amongst his lips, and his eyes were still averted to the floor, or maybe the scuffed toe of his Nikes that he kept pushing back and forth across the narrow, straight crack splitting the gleaming floorboards apart, the red swish blurring. But somehow, he appeared different—for a moment, I thought it was because his eyes weren’t glistening or purposely trying to avoid me, or that maybe it was because I could properly see him now, in the light, without the darkness of the night where Roxanne usually lurked, reminding us just at the right moments that we were not free from her grip yet. That we could attend as many parties as we wanted (whether it was because I caught my sister, in mid-escape, on night, lipstick applied and heels in hand, or if it was because of some band thing Louis had) or eat a million Tollhouse Cookie Ice Cream sandwiches in parking lots, listening to soundtracks that used to be drowned out by Michael, but we weren’t normal. We weren’t just two people, finding each other at parties or arguing over which Hans Zimmer score was the best, we were Roxanne’s past.

And it took me the time I thought up of this, that we were both shackled by the ghost of a girl, with a half-eaten stick of Crayola chalk in one hand, gnawed at the dusty top, and a finger pressed to her lips, a secret gleaming in her eye, for me to notice that he was almost smiling. His eyes almost had a glimmer of nostalgia running through the hazel pooled in the orb, and it struck me as odd for a moment. Whenever someone dared to mention her name, or even her existence, they merely made sympathetic sounds, averted their gazes to the left, and then, after a few moments of awkward silence, changed the subject to something safer, like the weather or something. But no one ever looked nostalgic, if anything, the most they ever appeared—other than depressed, or an attempt of depression—was dumbfounded. Then, as the flowers wilted from the funeral and the prayer pamphlets got lost beneath more important paperwork, they would remark that they had a feeling Roxanne wasn’t right. Something was off about her, they would say. When I would overhear this, a few feet away, hidden out of sight from their eyes, I never had the audacity to ask if they even knew about the pica, or if that was just one more thing to add to the list of Roxanne’s Astonishments.