𝒮𝓉𝒶𝓇𝑔𝒶𝓏𝒾𝓃𝑔 (Stargazing)

𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝟦

Friday night, my second to last shift. I should have been quaking with excitement, but for some reason, I felt nothing. There was nothing to look forward to. There was nothing I could set my sights on except for the knowledge that I would leave this place. Everyone smiled and laughed alongside me, but as time went on, they felt more like shadows of the past.

The shift went by so fast I swore it was a daze. The orders all blurred into one and my mind was constantly in the same thought, looking at the same message in disbelief. Everyone's voice, while different in tone, sounded the same.

"Hey Kev," I heard someone say to my right. Glancing towards the voice, I noticed it was Kyle, a warm smile forming across his face. He was a tall, skinny guy that would usually crack jokes or laugh at the most nonsensical stuff. Despite his jokester personality, he seemed to be serious for once.

"What's up Kyle?" I asked, as he looked towards the ground for a brief second.

"You've made working here a lot of fun, and it sucks to hear that you're leaving us. I wanted to personally congratulate you on your new job and say bye to you," he explained, sympathy shining in his green eyes. I was taken aback by what he said, something about it knocking me out of this saddening daze.

"Oh, thank you Kyle. It means a lot to me," I said quietly, looking back down to the sandwich I was creating. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kyle shifting with my response. Glancing towards him, I saw his fist raised up in a fist bumping gesture. With a smile, I raised my fist and bumped knuckles with him, joy running through the two of us.

"Stop looking so gloomy Kev, turn that frown upside down," he said with a ginormous grin across his face.

"Ugh, don't say that stuff." With a chuckle, I was knocked out of the daze I had been in for so long. This strange, depressing mindset that I had been in for the past couple of hours had seemed to dissipate within my fingers like grains of sand. A moment of clarity in which the voices didn't all sound the same and the images weren't so blurry. As everything became clearer though, the thoughts of what Abigail said the night before swayed within the waves of my mind.

I tried to push the thought away, but despite my tries, it was too powerful. When all hope seemed lost though, Cassey came to my side like every good friend.

"Hey, Kevin, are you doing alright?" he asked in a concerned tone like a mother would ask their injured child.

"Huh? Oh yeah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it," I explained, trying to smile away the doubts in his voice. Cassey watched as I cleaned the dishes, my arms trembling with the thought that people noticed the sadness that was coursing through my veins.

"Kevin, I know how you are," he said, grabbing a dish from the sanitation table and walking it over to the green shelf we used as a drying wrack. "You can talk to me about anything."

"Yeah, I know." He walked back over towards me, grabbing another dish from the sanitation part of the sink, and carrying it over to the drying rack.

"It's something Abigail said?" He hit the nail on the head, and upon looking back at me, he knew he did. "You know what my father told me when I was going through my first break up?"

"What?"

"If you let a person become your happiness, you let them become your emotions." He paused, reflecting on the conversation he had so long ago.

"Thats a nice quote," I stated quietly, thinking about the words and its meaning. All the sounds of the restaurant seemed to fade away as I reminisced over its meaning...

* * *

Taylor quietly sat there, listening to me speak to him.

"I don't remember the rest of that night very well, but I do remember that conversation." There was a long pause between him and I before he quietly spoke.

"Have you ever made that mistake again?"

"What do you mean?" He looked away from me, trying to avoid my eyes as he restated the question.

"Did someone ever become your happiness again?" I thought to myself for a long moment, trying to think of how I wanted to answer the question. After a while, he looked back up at me, anticipating my answer.

"Yes," I began. "There are many people that became a part of my joy or, in one other case, the entirety of it. Just because you don't want one person to become the core of your emotions doesn't mean that multiple people can't be a part of it." I gave him a reassuring smile as he quietly looked away from me.

"Is this story hard for you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I know you have mom and I but do you ever miss that girl you knew before?" I could tell he was taking this conversation seriously; it was the way he looked at me with a strange sympathy that I understood he was old enough for the story.

"Nah, not really," I stated with a loud chuckle. Despite my joy, I could tell Taylor didn't fully understand why I was laughing.

"Why not?" The smile I wore slowly faded with time, the memories of that night starting to slither in my mind.

"I'll explain that to you, don't worry." Tayler leaned back against the wall, looking at me with anticipation, waiting to hear the rest of the story.