SINCE DAY ONE ― luke hemmings ✓

35

what's mine is yours to leave or take
what's mine is yours to make your own

*・。*゜・。・o゜・。*゜・。・o*゜・。・o*

There's always something bittersweet about being lost in a city you don't know.

As usual, being lost meant not finding your way back, and not finding the way back meant missing my job and flight for Liverpool, and missing Liverpool meant missing the chance to see the man I love with the number of days I have left to see him without creeping over his social media every day.

But being lost meant nobody knows you in that city. Being lost meant you could walk around aimlessly until you hit a pole, and then walk around again and nobody will ever remember a half-drunk girl wandering around a city so dark and yet still so alive at three in the morning.

I clutched on my chest, hard, while I was looking down on my converse. Every step of the way beat consecutively with my heart I feel the pain would urge it to throw itself away because it's too much. The last time I've felt pain like this? It was close to the days I shut myself and voided me of reality that things might or might not get better. The last time my chest ached so hard was that night, where I woke up in a soft hospital bed clutching to my body as if everything was going to burst if I breathe even more. And the pain was so familiar it struck a memory months before I was considered in recovery.

I was in my bed, as usual, and couldn't stand up for the life of me. My brother hovered around while my Mom took the rest of the week as her rest. It was a routine that never went away with the times and the only ever time I could coerced my brother into doing the bad biddings for me. He'd bring me waffles against his better terms, hiding it beneath all the blankets he brought with him, and he'd help me eat all of those as my hands were incredibly very useless.

And then, that specific morning I remember watching the television of this really flashy cartoon and Eric was laughing his ass off while sitting at the edge of the bed. It was fun, just like a normal day when we were kids where we used to have peace only by watching the same cartoon we love. It was the only time our parents managed to calm us down enough they even bought a dvd set—that we fought for an hour before they played it and we just—synced in as if we never hated each other. That day reminded me of my uttermost childish rage until the doctor came in and told me I had a visitor. Unsurprisingly, it was the cancer version of a genie. It wasn't blue, it wasn't flying or singing in tunes. They were just normal friendly faces with big smiles and warm hearts. They grant your most wanted, most dreamy wishes and they could never say no to you—unless of course it harms you and your disease in any way. I was way over the age of eighteen but I guess they felt sorry for my progressive frail condition that they just—offered me one. But they'll make a way, for sure, and they explicitly told me the details, all that it entails and I just lay there, with this one wish in my head already made up five minutes after they came in and introduced themselves.

"I wanna see 5 Seconds of Summer. Live. But I wanna be far away. Like the back of the crowd. Really far." The genies looked at each other as if my wish was absurd, and yet they took it into consideration and in that moment, all I ever hoped for was the day to come. Because if I was dying, at the very least, I'd get a chance to see my boys on stage. If I was going to leave the world with but a speckled memory of me, I'd rather use my existence to see Ashton play his drums aggressively while taking his top off, his curly hair falling into perfect place no matter how hard he bang his head around. And I wanna see Mikey, and I wanna be able to see what color he made his hair again. And if he still looked happy as ever. And Calum, my bassist best friend who never failed to be with me on the hardest of times. I figured then I never made much friends when I met them. I guess I just closed myself off in the world because I figured, how couldn't I be happy with these guys?