Supernovas & Escapism

Chapter Thirty-Two

     All I could do was break out the weed-whacker and just hope that I could clean up the mess that I'd left behind. It was going to be a challenge, considering they were now overgrown, but it was something that needed to be done. If I ever wanted my head to be fine, then I needed to speak my inner thoughts aloud.

     The sheer thought of that was terrifying. It almost broke me. Almost.

     "You know you can talk to me, right?" she responds after the silence has become too much for either of us to bear. "I know you don't want to sometimes, but... well... there's a reason you're here at ten in the morning, looking like you've done nothing but ran the entire night."

     My nostrils flared, half exhaling a slight laugh, half trying to get my heart rate back down to normal. "I've only been running the past hour."

     There's a pause that she uses to frown with. "You act like that's any better," she says, her tone accusatory but never dropping its subtle warmth. After playing this ping-pong match with me for so long, she knows the perfect attitude to take. I want to salute her for her patience, but somehow that doesn't feel right.

     Shoulders shrug away the pain, mostly to deflect her if only for a short moment.

     "I just... I crashed." The words felt so foreign to me, and yet I knew they fit. It's like I've been searching for the best way to describe my state of mind for so long, and this is the best way to summarize it. But even then, I'm not entirely sure that I understand it all. "Like one minute I was in a moment, and the next I'm here and my lungs are burning, and my feet are throbbing, and my vision is blurry."

     Tears don't fall. I'm doing everything I can to try and keep everything inside. Therein, I guess, lies the problem. I can either pretend like I'm this stone wall, or I can open up. There is no middle ground for me.

     She looks at me with those eyes filled with wonder, and she nods like this makes the most sense. I get that it doesn't. If I said that to anyone else, they'd just look at me like I was an idiot. Which, in their defense, was fair. Garth might get it, but there's so much I don't even know about him right now that it's no longer funny.

     "Can we start from the beginning?"

     It takes me a moment to register her words. Her words are strained as if she can anticipate just where this conversation might lead. Sabrina, more than anyone, wants me to be better, but I can't get better with her.

     She is my friend. Friends look after each other. The girlfriend status of what we were had dropped off some time ago.

     "There was a fight," I started, tentatively at first. Shielding myself from this was not going to help anyone right now. "I had a fight with Glory."

     Sabrina turns her eyes forward, scuffing one of her sneakers against the sidewalk. "Not your dad?" There's a small shuffle as she moved a little closer. It's not the closeness she wants. What she's looking for right now is for one last bit of intimacy, even if that comes from something as simple as telling her how this won't work.