This was not where she wanted to be. Sitting at her best friends home, New years eve, this was the exact opposite of what she truly wanted. Only it wasn’t what any of her friends were doing that bothered her… It was the guy she was sitting with. The guy she had fallen for and was now making her regret that.
She couldn’t believe what he was doing. Trying to mess with her head more then he already had.
On a weekly basis he made her know that no one else would ever want to be with her, but that he wanted her more then anything. Not that he loved her, but that he wanted her. She now made note of that very important difference.
He also let her know that if she ever left him he didn’t know what he would do. That he wouldn’t want to live any more. He made that very clear whenever they got into a fight, and he would run off into the forest outside of his boarding school and just sit in the cold alone. That made their friend who went to the same school have to go running into the woods after him.
That scared her.
And tonight was hard, cause the moment she told him she wasn’t sure about them and that she wanted to slow things down, at least for a little while, he shut down. Not just shut up and tuned her out for a period of time. He completely shut everything down. She tried to talk with him a little more, but he wouldn’t respond. His face looked like stone the entire time, dead and cold and just not there at all.
Their friend was there too, the one who would run after him in the woods, and so she tried to get him to talk to her guy. If she couldn’t get to him then maybe he’d have better luck.
And for a moment she though he did get some luck. Their friend told her he was sitting outside on the porch seat waiting to talk to her. Sadly that wasn’t exactly the case.
Yes, he was sitting there. But he wasn’t there at all. Like the other times they’d fought about anything, he was shut off to the world. She checked her watch, Happy New Years. 1:04 a.m.
Trying to talk with him was hard, as always, and now he just seamed like everything was over. When she did get him to talk he walked away from her. Started yelling about how it was all over and how he might as well not exist. He started playing with his lighter, reminding her how much she hated that he had gotten her to start smoking. And reminding her that she hadn’t had a smoke in a few days.
Then she smelled it. The smoke, the burning fabric. He’d set his hoodie on fire. As he stood there as if nothing was wrong she used her hands to put out the fire. Then she heard him flicking the lighter even more. She grabbed his hands and thought she’d got him to stop once she grabbed the lighter from him.
“Doesn’t matter. I can feel the heat. It doesn’t matter” he said.
Then she smelled it again and this time saw the light of it. His back was lite-up by the flames.
She pounded out the fire and then pushed him away. He started screaming at her then. Telling her that she might as well have flicked the lighter and lite his back up. That she was the reason he did all of this.
As he yelled she cried and she knew it was never going to get better. He didn’t care and kept yelling. Their friends came out and yelled at him and tried to get her to stop crying and shaking but it didn’t work.
She ran back into the house and locked herself in the bathroom.
Happy New Year.
The world through my eyes, told by my heart with words and images
