But In The Worst Way Possible - Tumblr Posts

Nobody But You

I was too late.

I knew this as certain as I knew the Sun would rise in the morning. It was confirmed by the burning of my lungs as I breathed in the smoke and ashes that were once the people and place I had come to save. Stray embers kicked up by my boots singed the skin of my bare arms, making my failure all too evident as I traipsed through the fresh graveyard that used to be my home. I ignored the pain, and continued undeterred. It was nothing compared to what had happened to them. I was supposed to save them, the least I could do was stay and watch them burn.

My foot connected unexpectedly with the hard shell of what I could only assume to be bone. Tears sprung to my eyes, but I blamed the burning on the inhospitable environment and blinked them away. I already knew they were all dead, a reminder should mean nothing to me. I tried to focus straight ahead and keep moving, but instead my eyes connected with the remains of a charred doll with blonde hair dyed dark with soot and burned short by fire. It wore clothes of bright colors, standing out against the grey and black that blanketed the ground as far as I could see. A perfect mirror.

I loosed a scream of anguish that left my throat rawer than before. The sound carried wide across the open plain. It didn’t matter.

There was no one here but me.

No one but me-

And Him.

A figure stood tall and alone on the other side of what should have been a joyful place full of people, full of children, full of families, full of couples, full of love-

I had never been in love.

I had never been anywhere close, never so much as kissed a peer in school behind the gym, never held hands with the neighbor under the big oak tree, never confessed crushes with my best friend during a late-night sleepover.

I wondered, now, what it was really like.

How did it feel to carry another in your heart, to be connected so intimately? Was it heavy? How did it feel to be carried in the heart of another, to trust so deeply? Was it freeing?

I knew of butterflies, the so-described fluttering of the stomach that sounded curiously close to fear. Fear, I had felt before. I knew it well.

Now, however, I felt no fear. There was nothing left to fear; the worst had already happened.

When I found myself standing in front of the man responsible for destroying everything I had ever known, there were no butterflies. The only thing I felt in my stomach now was a deep, cavernous pit.

I longed for comfort, for warmth, for the chatter and bustling that should have surrounded me here. Instead, I heard only a solitary voice, smug and victorious.

“How does it feel? To lose?”

Heavy.

I heard once that, sometimes, love hurts. I was definitely hurting now.

Certainly, it was not supposed to feel like this, tinged with a festering hatred, full of a craving for anything, and topped with inexperience and confusion.

I looked into his darkened eyes, reflective of what he had done. We were close, too close for being in such a vast and empty place.

I did not know what love felt like, but I knew what it felt to be desperate for it.

Although I knew this wasn’t right, that this was no where near ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ or true love, I also knew it was as close as I would ever get.

I was out of time. For me, there was no later, there was no where else, there was no one else.

Not anymore.

And so, when I found a pair of lips hovering so very close to mine, I closed my eyes and shut out the decimated landscape. In that moment, I could almost believe that this wasn’t the same man that guaranteed I would never get the chance to experience the very thing we were pretending to have. We kissed, and he held me close with the very same hands that brought such catastrophic loss and devastation into my life. I let myself fall into the feeling, get lost in the touches—wrong as it all was.

Freedom.

It was over.