Lost Stars

xxii. vega

The darkness was still inside her burning through every memory of him. It still had the same sorrow that trapped Elle in a prison of tears. This never ending abyss of torment was still ruining her from the inside out, but she finally learned how to keep everything inside. She finally succeeded in persuading everyone that she was alright and that she was getting over everything, even when she was far from it. If anything, her misplaced emotions averted everyone's attention from the fact that she had to muffle her tears with a pillow every night that she woke up from another brutal memory of her happiness.

But slowly, her days started recovering and becoming what it used to be. She started going out more and getting her favorite mocha frappe from that coffee place at the corner of the street. She started smiling more, and people knew not to bring anything up about him, which only disappointed her knowing that he will live on in everyone's minds as a strange enigma that no one was close to cracking, which was a bleak thought compared to the way Elle remembered him.

But whenever she came home from trying to resurrect her former life, the box that Jack desperately wanted her to have came to her sight. Even when it was stationed casually on her desk, it still demanded more attention than anything else in the room and drove her insane at the temptation to see what unspoken secrets it had, but she made a promise to herself that she would only ever lay her hands on that box when she was in a better state of mind; one that wasn't self destructive and ready to implode and take her down with it.

And as the sun declared a new day, it felt like finding the missing pieces of a puzzle she could never come close to figure out until now; her broken heart. School had resumed and she found herself with the surprising ability to process everything normally. She finally had her old life back, and she and Melissa even made up because Melissa knew that this would be a challenging phase of her life that she couldn't go through alone, and those were the few times when Elle allowed the hurricane of catastrophe seep through after everything she has done to distract herself and focus on anything other than this grief that seemed to go onto infinity.

But she knew that the quest to fully complete and mend her broken heart would never be complete, since the most important and most precious piece of all has disappeared, but she learned to live with the knowing that the remnants of the all-consuming torment would immortalize him and fulfill her promise, as well as remind her of what true love looked like.

And the day has come when she was ready to open the box. A month ago, when she had first gotten it, she couldn't even let her eyes linger on it for more than a second, but she was ready now. Her hesitant steps grew braver as she approached her table and finally, the box was in her hands and was being taken along with her on her bed.

She sat in the middle of her pillows with the mystery in front of her, and the first thing she saw was that her name was written on top of it in Jack's perfect cursive that he knew she adored wholeheartedly. She couldn't help the brief smile at the effort he must have put in it with the small energy he had left.
Slowly, her hands lifted the box off and laid it down beside her, and she saw a lot of things properly placed accordingly inside. 

The first thing she got was a leather bound notebook with the leather scent as prominent as ever, and she couldn't help but flip through it before she realized that he had trusted her so much that she was chosen to be the lucky recipient of his life's documentation. His journal. She looked at it for a moment longer with awe before a specific date was set in her mind to look for. The day they first met. She soon flipped through the abundance of painful acceptance before she arrived at the beginning of hope, and she read through every word that was written in his beautiful penmanship.

Every word was detailed and so filled with his emotion. Every feeling was pure and beautifully worded out. Every sensation that was written stirred butterflies in her stomach knowing that she had the power to make a man like him feel every face of bliss that he wrote down. There were things he had written that she didn't even know he saw like how she nibbled on the skin on her thumb and how her foot started nervously shaking when the introductions started approaching her.

The next thing she pulled out of the now exciting box was a set of keys that were tied together by a ribbon, and Elle looked at each one skeptically wondering why the heck he would give her three sets of keys. Two keys had masking tape on them; one was the key to his house, and the other was to his room, and it just shined the spotlight on the million dollar question: what was the last key for?

For some reason, she found a miniature version of the French flag inside attached to a toothpick, and she smiled as she twirled it between her fingers. This was a testament he had left her for her dream of going to Paris and seeing it for the beauty that it was.

There were also stacks of Polaroids in it of their little dates. There was one that rang fresh in her mind. Their trip to the music festival. Her eyes glimmered, something that they haven't done in a long time, at one picture. It was of them standing in front of the Ferris wheel. Elle was clutching at her puff of cotton candy, while Jack wrapped his arms around her from behind. The colors were so radiant that it made her relive that happiness of it.

There were also other little things in the box like his favorite books that he looked at were too important to just leave in his room to accumulate time's ignorance like his favorite books and a random sock that had a few quarters in it, which was where the little toothpick flag was originally placed in.

And Elle thought that with the abundant time they spent together that she would have the relief of knowing that every word that needed to be said was said, but the time that they have went separated proved otherwise, since she has thought of a million and one things that have regretfully went unspoken and were just choking her.

And as she put everything back in the box and opted to set it beside her table, where she can always get it when she missed him, something flew out of the box. It was a Polaroid shot. She picked it up and looked at herself. She was facing her back to him as her past self, the one that was happily ignorant, gazed up to the night sky and just looked at the firework show, and it had something written at the bottom.

Thank you for giving me my firework show.

whuttup brosephs, sorry that I've been m.i.a lately. I'm in youth camp lololol and the only place where there's wifi is at the cafe and I can't just go there and chill while using their free wifi cuz there'd be a waiter who implied that we'd have to buy something -_- even when I feel like I'm gonna explode hahahaha

guys, stay put. I hope that none of you disappeared just cuz Jack died...

lololol luv you :*