DEAR MR. PETERSON,
This story isn't about me. It isn't about my life, my hopes, my dreams. It's not about my friends or my family, those that are present, passed, or perpetually irrelevant. It's not about them and it's not about me.
I guess if asked, I'd say the story was about him. It was about the hell he witnessed, the hell he endured, the hell he caused. Most of it to me. Some of it to others. All of it to himself.
This story is about the silently broken, the ones that have nobody to turn to. This story is about the double edge of a sword, the way that even the happiest people can have the darkest corners.
This story is about how no matter how dark those corners may seem, no matter how cold and torturous they are, light gets in. Love gets in.
This story is about Sebastian Grey. My worst enemy, my best friend, the only person I've ever loved.
This story is about how when we'd found that love, we did everything we could to hold onto it. But sometimes you can't. Sometimes you have to let things go to save yourself, and hope that someday, somehow, they come back to you.
I think standing back from it, I can see how much this messed me up. How much it messed him up. I'd be lying if I said I walked away from Sebastian the exact same person I was before. But I didn't; I couldn't.
Maybe that's what happens when you fall in love. You change because you have to. You change because this new person that you've become doesn't fit the soul that you've outgrown. You shed your skin and you grit and bare the new one, no matter how scarred the last one left you.
You asked me to write about something true. You said that I needed to find my pain and face it head on. You said you wanted to see me: not who I thought I was, not who everyone assumed I was. ME.
Pardon me for taking so long to be able to show you. I'd never really been asked before. But the only way for you to truly understand me is for you to understand him.
This story is about the boy I loved. This is about his suffering. This is about my suffering. All of it due to one thing.
Affluenza.
- braylen adams.