After All These Years

05

Chapter 5

Late

Just when Trixie was able to finally walk away, she felt Carlo's hand holding her back so she turned around to face him again. Carlo's cheeks are slightly flushed, catching up with her.

"That's not what I—"

"I'm just trying to feel better," she says, her eyes hot with tears, not heavy enough to gather by her lashes. "I'm sorry. I just don't know how to, yet."

"Stop being sorry," Carlo says. "I should—" Carlo's eyes looked directly at hers, exhaling through his nose and then whispers Trixie's name so quietly it would be lost in the wind if Trixie wasn't listening so intently.

Neither of them knows what to say, Trixie stands on the corner of a street, her sight blurry.

She stares at Carlo, thinking that it was never meant to be like this.

Anything, but not this.

"She's really good," she says, looking back in the direction of the café as she tugs her arm out of Carlo's grip. "Gail. She seems nice."

"She is," Carlo says immediately, sounding miserable about it.

"Does she make you happy? Are you happy?"

"Yes—"

"Do you like her?"

"I—"

Trixie refuses to hear anything else than what she already knows is true. "Please, I am your best friend. I want to know."

Carlo's eyes linger on Trixie's face before he nods. "I think I like her, she loves me so much that I think I won't let it go to nothing." Carlo whispers.

But I love you so much too, she thought.

"Then I'm happy for you," Trixie says, no hesitation in her voice. At the end of the day, that's all she's ever wanted for any of her friends especially for him. Carlo opens his mouth to speak but she stopped him. "I have to go," she says.

Carlo steps back immediately his eyes on the ground, finally letting Trixie go.

This is the first time they have seen and spoken to each other in weeks but just like before, Trixie is the first to leave.

When she got home, it felt like she's about to snap anytime. So she tried to calm down while changing her clothes for bedtime. She saw Grace on her bed grinning on her cellphone- maybe she's watching something, but it faded as soon as she saw Trixie entering their room. Although her sister did not ask her anything, Trixie knows that she's waiting so she told her what happened.

"I saw him at the coffee shop, with her. With Gail."

"Gail? Abegail Fral from the nursing department?"

Trixie nods. "And you know what Grace, I saw that he's happy with her," she paused. "I tried so hard to not give myself away, but when I left, he followed me and asked me if we're okay." Trixie hates how her voice trembled at her last word.

"So I told him we're not, and that I am sorry I had to be honest about what I feel for him because I thought it might help to not feel so burdened by something that made me feel so alive, and not because I wanted them reciprocated. I think it shocked him, but I think it made him a little angry, too. I expected shock and maybe confusion but not anger." she says laying on her bed before she closes her eyes with a tear streaming down on her face, wishing that if all of this is just a dream- a nightmare, then she badly wants to wake up from it.

It's been a few months, and the ache Trixie felt isn't as bad as before and it's the kind of longing she can deal with.

She didn't attend Carlo's birthday party with an excuse that she's not feeling well that day. Trixie texted him a happy birthday message and days after, Grace graduated and so is Carlo. She greeted him congrats when they saw each other at the ceremony.

Her love, which had started as a butterfly, flying freely became this raging wave of endless longing, drowning parts of her when it should be saving her. And she knew that loving Carlo and trying to move on from that love was never easy, but it should not be a bad thing, either.

She's in her room reading a book as she eats, realizing that she's getting better. Alone and enjoying a moment of peace all by herself, remembering how to be happy all by herself.

It's a nice feeling, she thought.

It's not that she wasn't okay before, or that her love for Carlo broke her in such a way that she changed her whole self, but it's become something that she felt like she lost herself for a little while.

Trixie's finally on her last year before she graduates. She focused her attention on her academics, using the experiences that happened for the past few months as her motivation to make herself better. Though it made her busy, being unable to put much time on other things than before, at least the growth she achieved was worth it and everything has been going smoothly since then.

Except for today.

She slept late last night finishing a chapter of their thesis, which was supposed to be done by group effort by the way, but she ends up doing it all by herself. It's almost seven o'clock in the morning when she wakes up, her first class starting in thirty minutes. She's been shouting here and there, asking why Grace didn't wake her up, and she realizes that her older sister is still sleeping only to be bothered by Trixie's loud voice calling her name. Their mother was out for a business trip two weeks ago, and it's only both of them staying at their apartment for now. Both of them bursts, laughing out loud while Grace is making a sandwich that Trixie could eat on her way to school.

She didn't know what kind of preparations she did, putting all the things like her laptop and a bunch of papers inside her bag, running as fast as she can to catch the bus at the bus stop. She's thinking about why she failed to wake up on time as she takes a bite of her sandwich. Trixie is sure that last night, she's able to set alarms to wake her up for the next day earlier than she does so she can read their whole paper again just to be sure. As she checks her phone, she saw that the alarms were set on pm, and she now knows why. Stupid.

She arrives at school, late.

Trixie's trying to catch her breath since she ran fast from the bus stop up to their school's gate, tapping her identification card for attendance. Trixie Andreanna Colin, it says, only to see that it's almost eight in the monitor. So she sat down on a chair at the lobby, checked her things on her bag, unarranged since she remembered how she dragged all of it inside her bag when she's at home, panicking about being late minutes ago. There's no reason to panic right now, she's late anyway. If she chooses to attend her first class, there's a possibility that her professor might scold her in front of her classmates so she thought she won't just attend this time.

When she's almost done arranging all the papers, she stands ready herself to enter the campus. On her way to the cafeteria since she plans to wait for the next class to attend, she bumped with someone who is probably late too, as she guesses it by the impact she felt when they collided, causing her to drop the papers that she's holding on the floor. She curses, thinking of how unlucky this day is for her. Then she picked the papers on the ground when she noticed that the person she clashed into is helping her too. She raised her head to see who it was.

"Trixie,"

It was her first time to come late and she wants to know why of all days, the heavens have chosen today.