A Twist of Fate SERIES (Pentatonix)

(39) Thinking About You

( SCOTT )

When sleep decides it wants to be a bitch and not take over my body (and sleeping pills are fucking overrated), I tell myself that Mitch is still here. That he's not in his room right now because he's on vacation in Paris or Iceland or somewhere, but that he'll be back in a couple of days. After I pick him up from the airport, he'll have two days to recuperate before we hit the road again for tour. I think we're headed to Denver next, and after that is Phoenix, Sante Fe, Salt Lake City, and then we have a four-day-long break in the one and only Las Vegas. We'll get drunk off our asses, we'll gamble too much, we'll likely pass out so many times that Esther will yell at us, but it'll be the best time of our lives.

And sometimes I'll get too caught-up in this fantasy that I have to open my eyes, stare up at the dark ceiling and listen to the whirring of the ceiling fan and the ticking of the clock, beginning to feel everything sink back in as I slowly return to reality.

The days are becoming easier. I'll hang out at home or with friends, drive around the city or decide to go on random road trips, hit up Jonathan at the studio if I'm feeling bored, grocery shop with my alias and a subtle disguise. Slowly but surely, the weight of pure guilt is being lifted off of my shoulders by some invisible force.

As messed-up as it sounds, there are times, though, that I want that weight to stay there and serve as a reminder of all my mistakes and evoke self-criticisms. If I've been too happy for a particular day, I'll return home and let my mind wander to a not-so-good place. Or if I've woken up in a good mood, I'll spend a couple of hours in Mitch's room, lightly running my fingertips over his clothes, most of which has been packed up in labelled cardboard boxes (just to make the rest of the crew think I've moved on), and then spend the remainder of the day beating myself up for letting him go.

And it's not that I don't want to move on, or even just smile, laugh, crack a joke, sing, let loose a little bit. It's not like I haven't in the last ten months. But the thought of doing any of those things just feels like a betrayal. A betrayal because I feel like I should be living the rest of my life wallowing in my own self-pity—I watched my best friend, and boyfriend, crumble to pieces right in front of my very own eyes without even knowing it. He told me his plan to leave. And I let him go.

Forgiving myself for the termination of Pentatonix back in 2017, and every event that followed, was already a long and tedious process. But eventually, with the help of my best friends, I was able to do it. I was able to recover.

But this? I'll never be able to recover from this. I let Mitch die. He's fucking dead, and he's not coming back. Ever. And part of me thinks that I should just take that piece of knowledge and use it as closure—pack up all of his things and donate them to charity, find an apartment of my own in northern California like everybody else did, leave Mitch's face in my mind as a happy memory rather than a sad one. But I just can't. And everything physically hurts because of that.

I stand in front of Mitch's bureau, going through his photo boxes. Every once in a while, I'll take out a picture and set it aside to keep in my own photo boxes in my closet, but, for the most part, tears mist my eyes as I reminisce on old memories and come up with some random backstory for pictures I've never seen before or I don't remember being taken.

Slowly but surely, I've been going through his room, and just the other day I found a dozen photo boxes, overflowing with pictures and ticket stubs and CD booklets and pieces of paper, in the back of his closet. I hadn't even known he had all of these. Looking through them feels like an invasion of his privacy, considering he likely wanted to keep them secret, but it's bittersweet, recalling old memories that I had forgotten about. In a way, it's a coping mecanism.