The Many Loves of Samantha Greene

25 | Andrew: Part Ten

"I need you to be packed and ready to go tonight so we can be up early tomorrow morning."

    It was a terribly disgusting day to reflect my never-changing terribly disgusting mood. It had been raining all day long, since the moment I had opened my eyes this morning to the current time, 8:47 PM, as I sat in the guest bedroom that had been my home for the past few weeks. Suitcases littered the floor around me, with clothes thrown in some of them and none of them even close to being full.

    Packing was difficult under normal circumstances, and when I was faced with the prospect of returning home to an ex-boyfriend who I was still terribly in love with, the task became somewhat impossible.

    He hadn't contacted me in the entirety of the trip. He hadn't tried to make me realize that I should take him back. So why was he the only thing circulating around in my head; the image of him and his smile, his laugh, his voice. There was something about him that I simply couldn't shake from my head, no matter how hard I tried.

    No past relationship had managed to affect me like this.

    I shook my head to attempt to clear it, and picked up a shirt from off of the bed to throw into the suitcase. I had been ignoring my mother's constant calls to me about being ready by the next morning, and I was sure that she had forgotten where my guest bedroom was, so I wasn't worried about her finding me sitting on the floor and doing nothing that she had instructed me to.

    My father had been absent from the house for a while, perhaps a few days. I had stopped paying attention to where anyone was around the third day of the trip. It wasn't as if we did anything family-related; my mother went off with her cousins while my dad tried to crack jokes with their husbands and I was left to wander the mansion on my own.

    I truly hated family vacations.

    My mind searched for things to latch on to in a desperate attempt at forgetting about Andrew, but it couldn't. There was nothing for me to think about other than him.

    Would I take him back if the situation arose? If he called me and asked me to consider it again? Begged me to?

    And yet it was so egotistical of me to even assume that he wanted me back.

    I shook my head and stood up, stretching my legs that felt like jelly after sitting for so long. I heard a voice call out from somewhere in the house, recognizing it as my mother's for the sixth time that hour.

    "I'm running to the store! Don't get into trouble!"

    I declined to yell back and instead plopped down on the bed. Now I was alone in the giant house of people I hardly knew.

    Lovely.

    I looked up at the ceiling and let my mind wander for a bit, outlining different scenarios in which my life could have been drastically different, and in the truest sense of the word, better.

    My not being born was the best scenario.

    I was eighteen years old and had been the victim of more terrible relationships than anyone should have to deal with in a single lifetime. I felt that I had a right to be upset.

    Ding-dong.

    The door. I hardly even knew how to get to the door.

    I stood up, remembering that I was the only person in the house and therefore the only one who could get the door. I climbed over suitcases and shoes to reach the door of the bedroom and slipped out, navigating my way through one dimly lit hallway after another.