Twenty: Rapid Breakdown.

“You can love someone so much... But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

-John Green

I don't know how friendship happens, exactly; how a relationship can go from strangers to acquaintances to friends without your even realizing it. I didn't know how, since that day in the teashop when I first saw you, we had become so inseparable.

Sometimes, when I thought about it, it all seemed too good to be true. Sometimes, I wondered where I would be if I hadn't seen you on that day in the teashop; if there had been an empty seat on the day you sat next to me. I couldn't imagine it, but I guess that was strange, because I couldn't grasp the idea of you not being in my life and I couldn't get my head around the fact that you were.

I didn't want you to ever leave. Every time I saw you I wanted to grab your hand and meld it with mine so that you'd stay, because people were always leaving me and I hated feeling sorry for myself but I just needed someone to prove to me that there was such thing as forever.

As I watched you scribble into your notebook on Thursday afternoon, I wondered if that's why you wrote. Because words are eternal, and even when you're gone they'll be there, and maybe that's the reason why they meant so much to you. Through them, you could be immortal.

Maybe that's why all writers write: because their words and sentences and phrases make them everlasting. That's how Shakespeare and Jules Verne and so many past figures are still here, even though they're not, because when you crack open their books or read the letters they combined, they come back to life.

And I wondered if that's why sometimes writers are angst-filled and tragic and the slightest bit out of touch with reality. It must be hard, always trying to outsmart time. I thought that must be the reason why, when you wrote, you didn't show the joy on your face that you say you feel. Your lips were a thin white line and there were creases on your forehead as you frowned at your pen. Every word had to be torn from your mind and cocooned the the folds of paper, and it wasn't pretty or easy but somehow it helped. It was just the price you had to pay for trying to last forever.

But you were lucky, really, in a strange kind of way. Writing drove you crazy, but it immortalized you. I knew very well that not everyone could be eternal.

“Sam?” Your concerned voice dove into my head and grabbed my thoughts, pulling them back to the surface of consciousness. I turned to you, your hand on my arm and your eyes were worried.

“What?” I mumbled.

You shifted your hand away, leaning over to pick something up off the floor. It was my book, lying open on the ground, the page lost.

“Here.” You handed it to me, pressing a hand against your notebook so that it wouldn't fall. I thanked you, softly, and tried to trace my thoughts back to where I'd gotten lost. As I did, I heard you say, “Wait, here's something else. Is this yours?”

I looked up, and you were reaching for the familiar slice of a photograph that served as my bookmark. No, no, no! My stomach twisted, and I tried to grab it before you but you were closer and your fingers had closed around it by the time I'd lifted my arm.

I watched you pick it up, your features knotted in confusion, and set it on the notebook on your lap. You were silent for a moment, and I was dying to know what you were seeing and what you were thinking and praying to God that you wouldn't ask the question—

“Who are they, Sam?”

Your voice: soft and reverent, barely above a whisper. Your thumb: trailing the jaggedly scissored border of the photograph. Your eyes: turning to me, gentle, questioning.

I could see the picture in my head: the tall man with dark hair and kind brown eyes, the brunette woman with smiling irises the color of sea glass. Both of them, arms around each other, grinning at the camera, back when they were still here and the world was still simple and none of us knew anything about grief or loss.

Somehow, I managed the response. Two words. “My parents.”

You nodded, very slowly, then became very still. You didn't pass the photo back to me, and I didn't ask for it. I just stared at you, staring at it, and wished again that I could read your mind.

“She has your eyes,” you murmured.

“Had,” I corrected, automatically.

And that's when it started—the rapid breakdown that overtakes my mind whenever I think of my parents, whenever I remember that they're past tense and not here and that they never will be again.

I was seeing it all over again, even though I hadn't been there. I'd been coming up with reenactments of it in my head, and I didn't know why I was torturing myself but it started when I was twelve and they'd told me, and even though I could cope with it better now, sometimes I just couldn't. I couldn't.

And so I lived through it all, the event I'd never witnessed. My parents on a bus, going out for their anniversary. April 14th. They were going up to Seattle for the day, but their car was being being repaired and they had to take the bus, even though Aunt Sheridan had told them never to trust public transport in the city. Aunt Sheridan. So much younger then, but still odd. That time, she had been right.

The bus driver wasn't thinking straight. That's what he told us. That's the excuse he gave for plowing his goddamn bus onto railroad tracks and into the path of an incoming freight train. That's the statement that he, as the sole survivor of the accident, gave to the court when he was tried for killing twenty innocent people.

My parents among them.

I saw the smoke in my head. The shriek of tires, the protesting cries of gears, the skidding cacophony of metal against metal. I saw the flames go up and expand, swallowing that bus and making sure that everyone who had survived the impact was gone too. And in my mind's eye, I watched the bus driver crawl from the rubble and run, run like the coward he was, a man covered in soot dashing away from a hellish horizon.

Too much. Too much. It was too much, it was a breakdown, and then my head was in my hands and I was biting down a scream and I didn't even realize I'd spoken out loud until I felt your hand on my back, warm and familiar and your voice whispering the words, “I'm so sorry.”

We didn't like sorry but I guess you knew that there was nothing else to really say.

Deep breaths: three seconds in, three seconds out. Then another. And another. And one more for good luck, to stop my swimming vision, so that when I looked up I wouldn't see everything on fire.

There were no tears. The tears had been gone for years now, dried out by all that fire. But the pain was still there, and fresh, and sitting up sent a new wave of it into my chest. It wouldn't go away ever; it was my personal demon, always inside me.

You swallowed hard, your hand slipping down to mine and lacing our fingers together beneath the table. “When you said you knew what it felt like to lose someone,” you breathed, “you meant it.”

I nodded harshly, leaning my elbow against the wood and trying to draw air into my lungs even though there were shards of glass in my heart.

“Yeah.” My voice was nearly silent. “Yeah, I did.”

It was another one of those moments, the kind that doesn't need words because it explains itself. It was the kind where you forget that there are other people around because your breathing is deafening in your ears and there's a pretty girl beside you who's your friend and who's holding your hand and maybe trying to make you just as everlasting as she is.

As you are.

I wished that other people could have the forever that you do. I wished that my parents didn't have to just leave, because leaving is cruel and leaving hurts and leaving doesn't care about stabbing holes in hearts. It's even harder when the leaving isn't just leaving, but it's actually gone. Gone and never coming back. Gone forever.

My parents were gone forever, but maybe that's the sick plot twist of life. I wanted them to be eternal, and they were. It's just that they were eternal in absence, in death, and you were eternal in life. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to stop walking tightropes and stop missing them so much. I wanted to turn back time so you didn't see the picture and I didn't have a breakdown. Everything was a mess, such a mess. And I wanted relief. I just wanted something to for once, last forever.