3. Those Broken Beating Things We Have (Now)
*rewritten*
His hands are white -knuckled on the steering wheel but he feels nothing. The sun is dipping deeper between the surrounding mountains, the sky is painted with pastel colors, various shades of red to pink to orange. He's numb to the morning chill spilling from his slightly rolled down windows, the slight rain plinking off if it and or into his car. Music blares from his radio but his own thoughts are louder.
((FlashBack))
Matt's POV:
"So you want to take me out?" Cory responds slowly, weighing the words on her tongue as the slight breeze in the school almost empty parking lot makes her honey hair flutter. I nod, not noticing her sad smile before she gives me a soft "yes." I grin, the chill vanishing and replaced with a small pitiful hope that consumed me.
...
She laughs wildly after I give her one of my famous, well not so famous, true stories about my younger sister as I we walk down the path behind my house after our disastrous date at our small towns theater. We escaped after some girl started attacking her boyfriend for not getting her the right drink.
The pond was large and was beautiful, sparkles like a million diamonds. It was also shaded by the surrounded by trees and large rocks. Deers speed through gracefully and or stopped to take a drink.
Cory loved it.
I soaked it in, her happiness. Just being with her makes me feel more complete. Maybe that was the first thing that I did wrong. Mistake her for someone that tore me apart and the worst thing was, I expected her to fix me, complete me in return for that thing that someone else did.
“Matt?” Her eyes sparkle and my thought is dry. I didn't notice but it's getting dark.
“Thank you. For this. I really needed it.”
I wish I didn't hear just what I wanted.
Her soft lips brushed mine and I, in reply, hugged her tightly.
Present
Cory's POV:
“I shouldn't have left her!” Matt screams, his voice so scared and helpless I most likely would be able to feel it if I were living. His sadness masked by the anger is only growing. But it only crumbles underneath my own emotions, burning like the sun, each feeling flicking out and over powering each other in mer seconds. I'm not supposed to feel.
Stupidity doesn't cover what I did to him.
His foot pushes on the gas harder and looks at the road without really looking at it. Its cover in trash, littered with broken things, like him, like me and like this whole world. The lights of the stars, the sun, the moon, are off and darkness is forever on, crawling into the pit of my stomach and digging an even deeper, monstrous wound.
The moon, now slight showing in a small sad smile, pools over him, glowing a soft silver blue cast over everything else as well. Matt's eyes are written with grief and shine with tears so much that he can't make anything out. He quickly comes to his sense and Parks to the side of the road.
Not only did he lose me but he now knows I never wanted him but a tall dark stranger instead. The same tall dark stranger who ended my life and ruined Matt's.
I love you now. I try to say to him, who I should have loved back when I had the chance but my words are nothing because now that's all I am.
Nothing.
I still don't love him the way he evidently loves me.
I want to explain. But I can't. I can't do anything.
So I do the only thing I can do.
Watch. Watch him fall apart and let myself join the dark place of broken pieces and broken hearts.
...
His racking shoulders have subsided but his broken eyes have not, still clearly bloodshot and glazed with tears.
I've never seen him so wasted. And no, I'm not only talking about him being drunk. I'm speaking about how small and just over all gone he seems.
No, he is.
But not as much as me.
"Ohgodohgodohgod" he breaths, his voice going into soft choking spasms. He takes yet another swing from a cheap bottle of booze, wincing as swallowing it down then tosses it aside and it rolls away until hitting the wall of his room. I feel so...helpless. More so then him. I feel like crying but I can't because whatever it is I have become - it is not human. I feel almost empty, an echo of who I used to be which was, even then as a living breathing machine of blood and bones, pitiful. I squeeze my eyes shut, listening to his breathing, how it slows and how he ungraciously but gingery sinks further down, resting his head on the floor.
Laying in his arms is not the same because it can't ever be but hearing his heart, but still I do and I will it to beat, his heart, I want it to beat with the life I don't have and never really have ever had. Him living, his chance, is a thing I will not let the wicked but wondrous world take away from me.