It's The Most I Can Do For You; Once Again, I'm Never Alone, All We Are Is All Behind Us

With a lighter tucked between my fingers, and the letters on the floor, burning them is a real possibility, yet one I just can't quite succumb to.

I think that maybe burning them is the right thing to do; removing their worth and impact from reality entirely, but somehow, I'm far too attached to them to let them go. It's pathetic and I'm far too aware of that fact for my own liking, but it's something I'm stuck with now.

And I feel like the letters are too, because despite all the shit they've caused me, they still feel like part of me; a part of my heart ripped out for the world to see, and part of me hates that. A great part of me wants to destroy that with everything I have, but there's this needy little part of me that's clinging onto them like a lost child, and it's precisely that part that's left me to fall for Vic Fuentes.

It was then that I felt my fingers stumbling over the cursive that had put words onto paper for Vic, and the cursive that had in turn changed everything and I still wasn't sure as to whether it was for the better or for the worse.

The simple fact that Vic hadn't immediately rejected me on sight was worth something though - even I reckoned that. But it was the way it had come to be that really brought on the sickening feeling deep-set within my stomach.

The way Vic had read words off the page that was never really intended for him to read, well in life anyway. I wondered how different things would have been if I hadn't been quite so careless that day, leaving Vic to find the letters beside my body; lifeless and gone. I never really would have wanted for him to see me like that, but in a selfish way, this was worse, because he'd read my thoughts.

He'd read the deepest things inside of me that no one was ever supposed to know, and he'd just brushed it off like nothing. Something tells me that's trust down to the finest level, but I know by now that trust doesn't really exist - you can never really hold your life in anyone's hands; we're all far too selfish, and when it matters, trust is irrelevant, and when it's important, we see nothing but ourselves, and we don't care.

The letter to Vic is important from the start, setting the tone of importance, and allowing Vic to make that 'trust', and of course now that trust is held tight like tightrope string that the whole world tramples over every day, that trust is going to snap soon enough; in one fluid motion, everything I've been clinging onto for dear life's going to fall apart. But I'm expecting it, because that's what trust does - trust, like everything, breaks.

Nothing lasts forever.

And I know that now.

So I think maybe I'll burn them now, because nothing lasts forever anyway, and I'm clinging onto that fact for death life, despite the irony that even that fact won't last forever either. One day, people will forget and those three words will fall back down along the path to irrelevancy, and those three words will never fit together anymore, the three little pieces of sanity in my mind to be one day lost in nothing but a perfect display of irony.

But that's how the world works, and I can't resist reading them over one last time, because they still mean something - in fact, they still mean an awful lot, and I just can't force myself to let them go quite that easily.

Vic Fuentes, I love you.

Five words and I already can't take it; the whole world caving on me as I imagine Vic letting those five words pass through his mind.

How could he possibly have reacted at first? As the words first left the page and became a secure part of reality, how could he have done anything less than freak out? He would have freaked out, for certain. And maybe I don't blame him, but maybe I do, I do blame myself. That's for certain.

I have an awful habit of doing so - blaming myself and I'm stuck amidst this vicious cycle of self-forgiveness and self-hatred, and it isn't working out, because nothing lasts forever, not even recovery, not even sanity, not even love.

And I can't even stomach the rest of this shit. I can't live with knowing Vic's read this, and I can't live with all the compulsory sympathy he's giving me. I can't live the simple fact that somehow Vic only loves me because of those five words. I begged him to love me, indirectly of course, but he took the bait nonetheless, and his corruption is just my fault.

So I punish myself; I lay the letters back down, keeping them safe where they belong and I grab something else out of the drawers; something sharp, something familiar, and something I need right now, more than anything else.

I need my friends; I need the blades and I need the red everywhere I don't quite feel real anymore.

I fix the reality problem with six slashes of red down my arm and I fix the reality of the letters with letting the red drop onto them, damaging them, but not directly, not quite on purpose, and I think that's perfect.

Everything's fine now; Vic's forgotten and yet I still make a seventh, because in my mind, you can never really have too much of a good thing, because in times like this, maybe greed can be irrelevant, because in times like this when somehow nothing quite matters anymore - everything is irrelevant, and I love it.

Because I fall in love with the nothingness, the ghosts walking past, I fall in love with the chances I didn't take, and the dreams I'll forget in the morning. I fall in love with the way he smiled once, and I fall in love with the words I crossed out from the page. I fall in love with the things that don't last forever; I fall in love with the mistakes, regrets, dead, and the living. I fall in love with the calm and the peace, and the raging of the storm. I fall in love with the red on my wrist and the white of it in a week.

I fall in love with the temporary.

But nothing lasts forever.

-

"Why aren't you in school?" I could barely even open the door before Vic barged in, holding himself with such arrogance I was close to laughing, especially since I was in an old hoodie and sweatpants, wrapped up in my duvet like a caterpillar in a cocoon, yet there was very little hope of me turning into a butterfly.

I raised my eyebrows at him. "How do you know where I live?" I met his question with another, mine containing significantly more importance as the matter of how he'd managed to turn up on my doorstep surely outweighs his annoying query regarding my disrespect towards education.

"It's in the school records - you know the school you're supposed to be at right now." He grovelled and I shut the door behind him, getting the hint that he wouldn't be leaving anytime soon.

"I'm ill." I shrugged the ordeal off with a simple excuse, deciding it nothing more than both the simplest and best method, which in afterthought, it really wasn't, but of course by then it was far too late to actually do anything regarding my unfortunate predicament.

He scoffed, eyes rolling back into their sockets like it was something they were made to do and with Vic's level of sarcasm it wasn't highly unlikely. "Sure thing." With his words spat out like that I couldn't even try to lie to myself and convince myself that he actually meant it.

"Whatever." I made my way over to the sofa, curling up in the corner of it and glancing over at Vic; wanting to cuddle with him just a little bit more than my sanity would have liked me to. I pushed that thought aside as my sanity wasn't really a main character in my life anymore. "Are you staying or what?"

"I have to actually be at school, you know. I'm not just as careless as you." He met my gaze with uncertain eyes, and something told me that maybe he wasn't quite sure if I was serious in my request at all, and honestly I couldn't even reassure him, because I wasn't at all sure either. And I think maybe that was insanity at its finest.

"Careless, hmmph." I raised my eyebrows, knowing deep inside that really, I was the opposite, caring only far, far too much, and that too was slowly destroying my life, as if my life wasn't already doing a perfect job of the aforementioned without unneeded and soul destroying assistance.

I cared far too much about everything and in fact that caring wouldn't leave me away, no matter how hard I tried, the need to care haunted me like a disgruntled ghost. And this was of course a disgruntled ghost that had a miserable passion for haunting peoples' asses like a bitchy little shit.

The ghost suddenly gained a horrible resemblance to Vic Fuentes. I am a horrible boyfriend.

"I didn't mean it in offense-" Vic pushed his words out in a display of panic, his mind clicking into the automatic possibility in that he'd fucked something up, and that he'd fucked that something up in one heck of a big way.

"It's okay." I reassured him moments later, interrupting him for sake of quite possibly just my own sanity. He'd fucked me up just a little, but I pushed it away; the amount of insanity already running amok in my head now working in my favour and allowing just a little bit of emotional clumsiness not to matter at all.

"So are you going to stay?" I reinforced my question, looking up at him with big open eyes and the most convincing smile I could muster as I tried to enforce the fact that he hadn't majorly offended me.

Sometimes- well, most of the time, I found that Vic Fuentes really cared just a little too much about me to the point it was patronising and even stalkerish; him looking up my address in the school records and turning up at my house when I wasn't at school today being a prime example of stalkerish.

In all honesty, though, I kind of liked knowing that someone cared about me, even if sometimes it was only a little, and even if it was someone so controversial as Vic Fuentes, that one person still meant a hell of a lot, just like Vic Fuentes had ended up being.

I had never once imagined in a million years that Vic would end up being my boyfriend and when he arrived out of the blue at my house that I'd be inviting him in to cuddle with me instead of kicking him the fuck out or whatever my past self would have done to him.

"How can I?" Vic asked, looking around the room frantically - quite possibly for some kind of excuse, but my walls didn't quite come with the function of reading off various excuses to you when you needed them, so really I was thankful that Vic came along when he did because the dog ate my homework excuse had kind of depleted its usage by then.

"By sitting down on this sofa next to me and staying for an hour or two... I don't know to keep me company. You're my boyfriend, Vic... Or at least I think so." I let out a sigh, not quite sure as to where we stood these days; my life just came with the side effect of being terribly fucked up and really there was no way out of that, no matter how hard I wanted there to be.

"Of course I'm your boyfriend, Kellin." He grinned at me, but things just weren't quite that simple as agreeing to it like that. There was so much else involved; so much that Vic just didn't see and I was both irritated and thankful of that.

Even with the letters, Vic hadn't seen quite every part of me, and I wanted to fall in love with that fact alone, because despite how I had poured every inch of my soul out onto a page that then by an unfortunate series of events had ended up in his hands, the page didn't contain the important stuff.

The important stuff I hadn't even figured out yet for myself, and that shit I could barely put into words; Vic didn't know how my brain ticked and what made me crave the blood against my skin. He didn't know why I hated him or why I loved him, and how I both hated and didn't particularly mind the constant battle between the two.

"Then stay. If you're my boyfriend, why don't you stay?" I gestured towards the sofa and he let out a sigh, before giving in and sitting beside me, shuffling closer to my huddled frame and letting my head rest in his lap. A wave of guilt washed over me as I was hit with a tsunami of thoughts implying that I'd simply guilt tripped him into this, but with one glance into his eyes that tsunami was washed away.

His eyes, they were like the fire that kept me warm at night; protected me, kept me safe, kept me cosy and dry. But sometimes the fire, the flames, they would have to get out of hand, and they did, far too often, and now I relied upon the crackling of the flames too much to even consider putting the fire out. In fact, I even doubted that I could.

And that was dangerous as fuck. I knew that you should never play with fire, but we always thought we could keep the flames under control. It was the fire, the fire that really liked to play with us.

"What makes you think I'm not your boyfriend?" He asked after a while, his words penetrating the silence as he no longer remained content in our peaceful nothingness, and the fire crackled in the silence, the threat of burning me becoming threateningly more realistic.

"I don't know..." I let out a sigh, the situation finding itself very hard to explain indeed. "I just..." I met his eyes and suddenly the words tumbled from my lips with the help from what seemed like gravity itself. "I read over you letter, Vic."

"Oh." Was of course all he could say. "Do you still mean it?"

"The killing myself part or the loving you part?" I managed to push a few words into the silence after a moment or two. It felt like surface tension, almost as if the silence didn't quite want to be broken, but that was an inevitability that I had to deal with; life seemed to be ridden with them.

"Both."

"Yes."

"Which one are you answering?"

"Both."

"Oh." Again came his standard response.

"I feel like you just think you can fix me with the snap of your fingers but you can't - it doesn't work like that, and you know sometimes I just wish it would, but it doesn't - things don't go like that. I can't just forget this mess, it's who I am, Vic, and sometimes I think you don't get that. Sometimes I think you fell in love with the side of me that isn't like that, but let me tell you now, that's just a facade. All of me's like that, and you can't fix it."

"I fell in love with all of you, Kellin." He met my eyes with enough sincerity to blow my world apart; the fire against my skin but not burning me, leaving me to trust it, to grow closer and leave it to strike - burn me black when I trusted it all too much, and I had far too much to lose. "I can promise you that."

"I don't deserve that - I don't deserve you." I took a moment to gauge his reaction before continuing. "I can promise you that."

"You sound like you want to break up with me... do you?" He pulled out his words like they really hurt and my mind made some comment to itself about how Vic was a really good actor. Almost convincing.

"I don't know." I think my three words hurt more than his did, or the way the fire would crawl up my skin in seek of revenge from my words. The three words broke the world apart entirely of their own accord.

"Why?"

"Because everything hurts and nothing's okay and I'm a ship that steadily sinking and I don't want you to go down with me."

"I'm not being Rose, Kellin. You're not saving me, and this isn't Titanic - that's a shitty movie." He pulled his face up into a small smile and it was small but undeniable contagious in nature.

"I can agree upon that one." I said with a grin, catching it entirely from him in a way I both hated and loved.

"I'm glad you can. I'm glad." He ran his fingers through my hair, affectionately creating a terrible mess, leaving me to not quite mind for the sake of not offending him. "I don't want us to end - I don't want to let you go, Kellin."

"I don't want that either, but Vic, you know, nothing lasts forever."

"Can we make things last as long as possible then? As close to forever as we can get?" He asked, eyes widened and far too accepting for me to deserve him at all.

"We can try, I guess."

"Then I guess trying is enough."

And as he kissed me, suddenly everything was just the little bit better again, and to me that little bit meant an awful lot, but nothing lasts forever and neither did that kiss, leaving the emptiness on my lips to allow everything just to get that little bit worse.

"Kellin..."

"Mm?"

"You're not ill are you?"

"What-" My question was answered as his fingertips trailed down my arm, running over the dried red and accentuated bumps of last nights of scars and my general flaws. "Fuck."

"Kellin, please just tell me next time?" And his words were only made harder to deal with by the way his voice cracked half way through; a constant reminder that I was hurting him too. And I didn't want that - I wanted to rip myself apart, but in no way did Vic warrant that fate.

"It's hard Vic, because whenever I do, you break a little inside and I don't want to break you. I don't want you to fall apart." I let a haphazard explanation trail from my lips in the most eloquent manner I could muster, which admittedly, was not very eloquent at all.

"Kellin, look, the good thing about breaking, about fall apart, about losing yourself in the weight of the world, is that like everything else, it is of course, only temporary."

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