Sanity // s.m. [IN EDITING]

[4]

Shawn

***

We walk downtown for a while until we take a bus uptown. Neither of us said much, just stayed close to one another in a comfortable silence.

I figured if Mum were here to see this, she might make a joke about how interesting our conversations must me. Me too afraid to say anything and Elle too confused to respond.

After Elle told me she enrolled for NYU, I didn't think it would actually happen. I had this idea in the back of my mind that the Elliot I knew would never leave. But people let you down, whether you like it or not, and most of the time they don't even pretend to get you to understand.

When she became one of those people, I was utterly heartbroken.

I went back to my old room in my parents' house and completely destroyed everything in there. The sadness I had bubbled up inside me turned to anger, complete anger. And having everything contained the way it was drove me out of my mind.

I pushed all the hockey trophies off the shelf and smashed them all, I flipped the table and yanked down the curtains and kicked the walls and cried and cried screamed.

Nothing had ever brought me to such a sense of release.

When Mum saw what I did, she put me in therapy.

Therapy.

Like I was crazy. I guess in a way, I kind of was, but not crazy enough for therapy.

But I did go. And it actually really did help me. The therapist told me that release was an excellent idea, but destroying things because they destroyed me first is not the way to do it.

She told me to let my emotions out in a positive way, like art or sports. Thus, my music.

I created the music completely by accident. I just jotted down all of her broken promises and screamed them at the sky in fury and madness until I was singing them, and then playing them, and then recording them, releasing them, and performing them.

The pain soon turned to numbness. Being on the road all the time kept my mind off of her, but like Sarah knew, like Andrew knew, like the whole damn world knew, I missed her.

Mum never took any of it well. She thought putting me in therapy was her way of helping, but really, Mum wasn't helping me, the therapist was. Mum was like that. Thinking everything she does impacts someone's life in some big way.

She didn't understand what it was like to waste two years of your life thinking you were a part of something huge and wonderful, when really, it was all a lie.

Even thinking about it with Elliot standing next to me, I frown.

"Elliot," I say softly, feeling her eyes on me. We stand outside a coffee shop somewhere in uptown NY, late in the afternoon. The air was still and the clouds race across the wide, open skies.

"Yeah?"

"Nothing between us matters now. But there are some things that I would like to make some sort of sense of. Like, I get that I sort of pushed you away, and I get that you really wanted to go to NYU, and I get that it wasn't easy. But you said we could make it work long distance. That's what you told me over the phone. But then one day you stopped talking to me. How can you just cut me off like that? How? I just don't get it."

It seemed weird asking her all of this when it wouldn't make any difference now. But I had to know. I had to have a closure.

She bites her lip.