Untitled Fiction July 2011, Part 2

Day after day her thoughts turned to the way things had been. Sometimes the painful reminder of the sheer memory of being happy was enough to make her lose control. Unfailingly her body and her mind were paralyzed. It didn't even have to be a happy memory, per se, but a song, a smell.... even the faintest whiff of a guy wearing the same cologne brought tears to her eyes.

But why? Why was she still so broken-hearted over someone who had never loved her? Who had never wanted anything more than the convenience of their best-friends-turned-friends-with-benefits "relationship"? To someone staring in from the outside, their relationship, or whatever you wanted to call it, made no sense. No girl in her right mind would allow herself to be tortured as such.

Occasionally she allowed herself the slightest relief from the torture she put herself through. He had been there, after all, when her father had died, when she had gotten so sick and almost died herself... He had stayed with her each step of the way, even wanting her despite the puffy face, the weight gain, the mood swings. There had to be a reason why. But then again, as she always shifted the blame back to herself, she hadn't given anything back to him. In desperate need of being taken care of- and quite well at that, she had forgotten (if she had even known how in the first place) to reciprocate. She had never been privy to the inner clockwork of a functional relationship. No one in her family had ever stayed married, and she had grown up without a father.

She had wanted nothing more than for everything to work out between them. He had made her blissfully happy, safe, important, like she really, truly mattered. She certainly didn't feel that way anymore. There wasn't anything left. No ties to a place she once called home. No job, few true friends... endless arguments with her sisters, health that she couldn't count on, an endless pattern of medication, poisons that would decidedly keep her alive.... no place that she could call her own, no place to disappear to, to cry, to escape. It was all gone, and her best friend had gone too- all because of her mistakes, her errors. Was it truly her fault? She had initiated their first kiss. She had been too attached, too invested, too afraid. Not that it mattered anymore. He was gone, like everyone else, and she was alone.