Freefall ✓

32 | truth

Comfortable silence is so overrated

—harry styles

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All I Want - Kodaline

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CAMERON

Pulling my black Nike hoodie up, I lumbered through the school hallways like a literal zombie.

I hadn't slept properly in over 30 hours. I'd tried to. But every time I laid down, closing my eyes and trying to relax, my body would stiffen as if it was being dipped into ice water.

It'd adapted this tense agitation ever since I'd witnessed my girlfriend being hit by a car. 

This was the second car accident involving someone that meant a lot to me, that I had been at fault in. The thought drove me insane. Made me want to jump off a high building. I didn't know when and how I'd manage to sit behind the wheel the next time. Scratch that, I didn't know when and how I'd manage to just sit in a car the next time.

Talk about trauma.

It was Monday, and the only reason I wasn't skipping school was that threadlike possibility of meeting Audrey here. However naive and however improbable that possibility was. I held on to that thread, tighter than ever. But of course, she didn't come.

I had risked calling her three times on Sunday. Each one went unanswered. I'd told myself that it was alright, that she was still recovering, that I needed to give her space.

But with each lifelong minute that dripped past without talking to her, the knot that my stomach was tied into, got tauter and tauter. It would kill me, sooner or later. I needed to see her.

I remembered fighting my way into that hospital room, pushing through nurses and doctors, paying 0 attention to all their "You can't go in there"s and "You can't be here" s. They'd given up, in the end, leaving me on the bed next to the one Audrey was on — the only other bed in the room. 

I'd honestly attempted to sleep somewhere through the night. I'd get into some snippy phases of relative calm, I'd drift off, but would wake up less than an hour into them.

There was no way I could've fallen asleep. Not until my girlfriend woke up.

So I stayed up, listening to the soothing patterns of her breathing, watching her. My eyes trailed through all of the familiar details of her peaceful face. The sweetness of her rose lips, the dip of her cute little nose, the delicateness with which her eyelashes rested on her sunkissed cheeks. I knew, by heart, the mellow tone of honey that her eyes would sparkle with.

If only she'd open them. I'd nosedive right into the comforting sweetness of that honey. I'd never let her close those beautiful eyes again.

She'd wake up, I kept telling myself. She'd wake up, we'd talk, sort everything out and it would all go back to normal again. 

If only she'd just wake up.

I didn't get the chance to be there when it happened. 

Her mother practically forced me out come morning, insisting on how my parents were probably worried sick. I wasn't going to explain to her right then that my parent probably hadn't even noticed I wasn't home. I just gave in. 

Sydney texted me that she woke up right when I'd already arrived home. I'd have left everything then and there and bolted back to the hospital if it weren't for her subsequent message to better give her some space for today.