I find myself needing someone like Sabrina right now.
The girl who is more than just a carbon copy of what people expect her to be. The girl who chooses to defy expectations just because she wants too. The girl who loves me without ever needing me to love her back.
There's a thought that runs through my mind. It's the one that reminds me that I'm not in love with this girl, and I'm an idiot for not being in love with her. Right now, she is everything I need, and everything I want to be; strong, bold, and cautiously optimistic. It's not wrong to want to be those things when you've been pretending to be those things for so long.
Envy brings my brain to its knees, questioning why I can't be more like her.
Years feel like they have gone by in the flash of an eye, but I know that when I open again, I'm going to be on this stupid sidewalk, looking at my stupid bloodied feet, wishing for a chance to be less of a stupid boy. Because at the end of the day, that is all that I am. I'm a stupid boy who makes these big grandiose statements with his movements but can never say them with his mouth.
It's not the first time that I've thought to myself that I don't deserve a girl like her.
She understands. Instead of approaching me face-on, she allows me space to grieve. With every turn of the season, she doesn't push, rather she gives way. And not once does she tell me that I'm in the wrong for being an asshole, even when I wish she would.
Sabrina Valdez is a girl who is far too nice for a guy like me. How am I just realizing this now?
There is a shift in the light, as shadows cross our hands together. Slowly, I look across and see she is now also seated on the concrete, just a few inches away from me. Her eyes are tracking the view in front of her, as cars pass by. Flashes of metallic silver and the deepest black go by at acceptable speeds. It's as if they can't see a boy whose heart is breaking and a girl who's about to get her heart broken. But I guess most people are oblivious to things when they only have a fraction of a second to react.
"Do you want to talk?" she asks. Even right now, when I'm trying to hold back a flood, and heaving so viscerally that I might throw up at any given moment, she's asking the appropriate questions. She knows better than anyone that if we don't talk now, then we're never going to talk about this.
I guess most of the blame on that falls on me and my incredibly shitty behavior.
Knees tucked tight to chest, I lean my chin atop and just try and focus on getting air into my lungs, and the bad thoughts out of my head. They're stuck there; rooted through months of not talking. Weeds, that's what these thoughts are. Even when you think they're gone, they'll come back and multiply. Not even the suction power of the black hole that was my heart could rip them out permanently.
I'd have to accept that forevermore I was stuck with a lifetime of bad thoughts. Maybe one day I'd have some sort of strength to find some sort of solution, but today was not going to be that day.
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.
"Nah," I reply. It's almost dismissive the way it falls from my mouth. "He was already out by the time I woke up."
"Alright," she nods. "What happened next?"
Blood pools lightly in my mouth as I bite just a little too hard on my bottom lip. The metallic taste is a welcome distraction from the dry air that enters my lungs. I swallow hard, almost wincing at how difficult it is to do this one simple thing.
"We fought, and it's stupid because we fought about stuff that doesn't even matter."
Her head sharply turns to face me. It's a rare sight to see a genuine frown from a girl like Sabrina, but she wears this one like it's her resting facial expression.
Part of me wants to dive straight into the road.
"It obviously matters if you ran out the house without your shoes," she tells me in a matter-of-fact tone. "It matters because you're here, almost crying your eyes out."
"Like I said, I just crashed."
She reels back from me slightly. "I get it, Xavier, I do," she says softly. "You're not the same boy anymore. You don't think, you just act." Glassy eyes give her away. I'm not going to stop her, but at the same time, I don't think I'm going to join her. "I thought maybe that would make you more upfront about your feelings, but it's the one thing holding you back from truly letting go."
Reacting makes me want to comfort her, but I don't. There were times I was a good boyfriend. But those good times are outweighed with all the other times that I've been an incredible sack of shit. The only way to even the scales was to take everything off the table. With nothing left, they'd eventually balance themselves back out.
It's obvious that neither of us is going to get out of this without some emotional baggage. In an alternative universe, I would have loved Sabrina Valdez with the largest piece of my heart that I could afford to give her.
But this was reality. Heartbreak was inevitable.
"As a friend, can you tell me what happened?" The words ambush me. It knocks me through a loop just how unprepared I was. I sit and stare at her as if expecting her to take the words back. "No strings, no hang-up's, no need to lie..."
It's an out if I've ever seen one. And what's more, she's expecting me to use it.
"It... just... got to be too much," the words are strained, tainted from the blood and the dry air that was still circulating inside me. "My mom, my family, you, school, life..." I trail off.
"Garth," she adds.
Once more, I feel like she's come out of nowhere. Though I guess this should have been expected. Even Sabrina isn't blind to things that are happening right in front of her. She's never said his name before, but the instant I hear it, I'm calmer, as if this is somehow a completely different conversation.
I remain quiet. The absence of talking leads me to believe that things will be fine.
"Xavier," she speaks, a reaffirming hand on my shoulder. "I know, okay?" There's a beaming smile that seems to say one thing; she's known what it's taken me a long time to figure out. But whilst most would ask questions and say countless stupid things, she has this calm side-stepping approach that makes me feel like less of a shitty human being. She was going to make someone very happy someday, it just wasn't going to be me.
"My head is just spinning," I say, wishing that the world would stop for a moment. There's a tear that rolls down my cheek and it feels warm, sort of like a loving embrace. "I need to lie down." There's a laugh that leaves me, but it's no laughing matter. I really do need to lie down.
But not before I find Garth.