Broken (AU Calum Hood Fanfiction)

LXXVI

Calum's POV:

Humans. We're selfish beings. Take funerals, for example - the dead don't care if we gather around their lifeless body and choke out words that mean nothing after they're gone. But the living, oh, the living. The living are judgmental, grief-stricken, greedy, suffering creatures.

And even when you're losing somebody, it's a selfish experience. You think about how you're going to go on without them, how you're going to fall apart, how unfair you think it is, how it affects you.

Not them. No, they don't matter.

Only you.

Selfish. Human.

They're practically synonyms.

In a dumb, midnight insomniac effort to debunk my own theory I take a second to try to imagine what it must be like for mum. If she finds some kind of comfort in the finality of it all. Or if she struggles with the idea of leaving us behind. Truth be told, I can't even begin to understand or relate because - as is the natural human reaction - I'm freaking out about it myself. Theory proven.

I can't sleep. I lay in bed, burning holes into the ceiling with my stare, wearing holes in the sheets as I rub them between my fingers anxiously. If you were to ask me what I'm anxious about I couldn't give you a single answer. I couldn't pinpoint one thing. There's too many things. But it does ultimately boil down to one thing - feeling completely and totally alone in a world filled to the brim with people.

I shouldn't feel alone in a place like this. In a house like this. In a home with my sister in the next room and my parents right down the hall. No, I should feel the opposite of alone. But that means nothing because I've never felt more isolated than I do right now.

I get out of bed with an inaudible huff and make my way to the backyard, moving through the house as quietly as possible. I walk past Mali's bedroom on the way, seeing the giant 'M' that decorates her door and I remember eleven or twelve year old her pointing to it, sass filling her voice as she lectured 'See this?' and I'd nod, rolling my eyes, 'It means that you can't just barge in whenever you want.'

Kids. We were kids. Innocent and naive and pure and unpolluted and I wonder when that ended and when adulthood showed up to the party, its metaphorical arms brimming with horrors and unfulfilled promises.

We were always so desperate to get away from everything. To get to something better.

My parents wanted to get away from Australia, to move to California for "better opportunities".

Mali wanted the opposite - to get away from California, to move back to Australia because she always claimed, and I quote, "California fucking sucks."

And then there's me, with the irresistible urge that's bubbling up inside of me right this very minute. The urge to run nowhere in particular. Just to run. To leave. To get away from everything and get to something better. Maybe better has already come and gone.

I sit on a lawn chair that's been rotting in our backyard for who knows how long and look up at the eternal blackness flecked with dead brightness. They say that the stars that you can see with your naked eyes are already dead. That by the time light meets our mortal pupils the star's already lived and died. That it had a full, meaningful, starry life or whatever it is that stars live for.

So I look up at the bright ghosts. And for a second I imagine that they hold the answers. That they know what's going to happen. That they know everything. Then I remind myself that they're dead and that they probably never possessed consciousness because they're stars for fuck's sake. And even if they were these magical glowing orbs of all-knowing consciousness they are so many thousands of millions of trillions of miles away. And I'm here. Bare feet brushing the grass of our backyard, noticing the tears running down my face for the first time as I gasp for air, wondering how I'm going to handle the inevitable.