She was the girl who was afraid of love. Terrified of it. It isn't permanent, she believed, it leaves you and it leaves you broken.
He was the boy who desperately needed it. Love--the only thing that could've rooted him to this world.
Ophelia and...
“I beg you to come. I need your forgiveness. I'm dying.”
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I didn't hear from Alastair for the next few days. The days then turned to a whole week and I felt each day passing by slowly and painfully, without any contact from him.
I tried calling him. Each time it went straight to his voicemail. There was also one time when he hung up on the other end--worse than being left on voicemail. He didn't reply to my texts either, or even read them. It was almost as if he wasn't even there in my life anymore.
And that started scaring me.
It started getting frightening at nights when I laid down on my bed, thinking things through. It started getting scary when I thought too much about it, about why I had to mess things up when they were finally starting to go well.
Him avoiding me for so long was terrifying. It made me feel like I was letting go of the only thing that ever made me feel fully happy; myself. And that was scary because it made me feel alone--the one thing that I always got whenever I fucked things up. The empty loneliness.
I needed him. I wanted him. Because I have never been this scared to let someone go.
I love him, I realized.
I cried myself to sleep that night, because I had been so stupid to not realise this sooner. That I do love him and I've always loved him from the very start. From that time I saw that beautiful pale boy in that hospital room for the very first time, who could hardly sleep, who was always so afraid of opening up, just like me. And I realised that I will stupidly love him till the end.
I'll love him no matter what.
The awful hollow space where your heart was supposed to be, the hollow space that only seemed to be full when he was around me. Love isn't a feeling, I realized. It was the absence of that hollowness in your heart, the one that we all are deep down so scared to let go of.
******
The next night, with just two weeks left for me to go back to America, Luce noticed that something was up.
"Did you both have a fight?" She asked me one night while we sat in a local burger restaurant, just after ordering our food.
"Both?" I asked her, sipping on my giant glass of iced water.
"Alastair and you."
I kind of wished she wasn't sitting right across from me. Her gaze got so unnerving at moments like such. And just hearing Alastair's name made me realize how long it had been since I last saw him. I missed him so much.
"No." I lied, then remembered that we had both agreed on not lying anymore. "Not really. Um...we had a minor disagreement."
Her brows raised up even further. "And you both haven't been in contact for weeks?"
