I looked away from Seren, as if I was worried that the sharp fragment I had just released from my mind might have displayed the things that I still wanted hidden.

The truth of it all weighed heavily on my chest, like an anchor pulling me further into the depths of my own mind. My mind was the ocean. I knew that now.

There was no other way to describe it. It was only the ocean. If I don't tread the water, I drown. If I don't float, I sink. If I don't look for the surface, I find myself at the bottom.

I took a sip from Seren's bottle, feeling the burn of the vodka chase away some of the salt water inside me.

"I think I need them to remember me," I repeated, more to myself than to her. The words felt like a confession, a truth I had been avoiding.

Seren nodded, her eyes half-lidded from the alcohol but still fixed on me with a kind of understanding that was rare. It was an understanding I had never quite seen before. She knew my words and what dangers hid beneath them.

"I get that," she said quietly. "It's like... if people remember you, then you mattered. Then you weren't just... here."

"Exactly," I whispered, my voice was almost lost in the night air. "I don't want to be just another person who came and went. I want to leave something behind. Something real. Something beautiful."

She sighed, the sound marked by surrender. "Sometimes I wonder if that's even possible for someone like me. People who feel too much but show too little."

I studied her, seeing the same shadows of doubt and pain that I had been battling. I felt bad that knowing this knowledge comforted me. It's not like I wanted her to be drowning, of course it wasn't that I enjoyed seeing her pain.

But, I suppose it felt like knowing you're not all alone in a pitch black room.

"What do you want to leave behind? What kind of beauty?" She asked me, breaking through the constant monologue of my thoughts.

I stilled, shaking my head. I reached back for the bottle, bringing it briskly to my lips and letting the bitterness distract me for another second. Seren didn't urge me to answer, she was as still as my mind was as she waited.

I searched in my mind for words to answer her. And, I realized I didn't really care about answering her; but the question was something that I felt was owed an answer. Again, not to her. To myself.

"Is there beauty still left in the world to create? Or, has all the beauty been used up?" I asked, the words escaping my mouth like a plea to anyone who knew the answer.

I flicked my eyes back over to Seren, who now had her eyes closed. But I could tell the moment she absorbed my words. A small look of surprise passed through the muscles on her face, but then — the muscles settled. Acceptance. Did she know I was right?

"Everything feels... repeated," I explained, though she hadn't asked for my explanation. "Even the beauty all feels the same. You see one waterfall, you see another. You see one sunset, you see another. You see one cliff, you see another."

"It's all the same," Seren muttered. "It's always the same."

I nodded in agreement, even though she had her eyes closed and would never been able to see my movement. This wasn't for her, anyway. This was for me. And I knew she felt the same way. She wasn't confessing her thoughts for me to hear; she was confessing them to hear them herself.

"And so what beauty do I have hope of creating, if there's no more beauty left?" I said the words calmly, yet the realization wasn't so calm in my mind.

It sent a shockwave of panic through me when I considered that maybe that was the truth. There was no more beauty. What was life worth without that?

"Love is beauty," Seren said quietly. There was hesitation in her words. I wasn't sure if even she believed them.

I didn't answer her, because I had no words to match hers.

"Love is beauty," Seren repeated the statement, this time with more conviction. She opened her eyes, though they only opened half way due to her intoxication. She nodded, landing her gaze on mine. "No one else can love someone the way you love them. There's beauty in that."

I tilted my head, letting her words saturate my mind like they were coloured dye and my consciousness was a blank canvas. And, they did. But not as vibrant as I would have liked; instead a faint water-colour washing.

The people I loved flashed through my mind as I considered what she said — my parents, Gavin, O, and especially Zane. I did love them. But the problem was, my love for them didn't seem healthy any more. Not for them, at least. My love for them used to be like sunlight, but now it felt more like poison. How much hurt could I make them suffer in the name of my love?

I did not bring joy to them any longer. Only worry, and pain. And there was no beauty in that.

It had been a few minutes since either of us spoke. I looked back at Seren, who had a leaf that had fallen from the tree above us in her hands. She was ripping it into small pieces, perhaps in a pattern that she had created, but perhaps just deciding which pieces to rip and discard as she goes.

I wondered if her mind was doing the same thing that mine was — thinking of the people that she loved and wondering if there really was beauty in that.

"Do you love anyone?" I asked her.

Her head moved back up at my words, her eyes finding mine again. This was the first time I had seen genuine shock in her face at my questions. And that was confusing, and intriguing... and perhaps concerning.

"No," she finally answered me. There was a brutal honestly in her tone. She was telling the truth.

"No one?" I asked, looking for confirmation.

I felt my lips wanting to push down. Her answer made me sad, because even though I wondered if my love to others was poison, at least I had love on which to ponder. I remembered my assumptions about her— that she was privileged. But how privileged could you be if you had no one you loved?

"No one," she confirmed. And I noticed the way no emotion passed through her.

"Why?" I asked. A vague question, but it felt insultingly direct.

Seren sighed, reaching back for the bottle that had been sitting between us. She took a drink, a long one, enough that she had to swallow three times. She didn't react to the taste of the alcohol, but I could see the way her eyes were busy.

"Everyone feels like a stranger," she answered me once she had put the bottle back down between us. "It feels like no one knows me. But it feels like I don't know anyone, either. How can I love someone when I don't know them?"

"People would let you know them," I told her, and for some reason I knew it was the truth. "If you wanted to know them."

Seren's lips curled into that same tragic smile. "Maybe. But it feels like we're all just drifting in our own little worlds, too far apart to ever really connect."

The silence stretched between us, heavy and suffocating. I knew that a good person would reach out to her, offer her some comfort, but I felt just as defeated and broken as she did.

And I knew, that just like me, no one's words would really matter to her. Not when she was so far under the waves. The pressure was already in her ear drums — she couldn't hear anyone besides her own thoughts.

"Do you ever think about... ending it?" she asked suddenly, her voice was small and quiet but it was simultaneously as loud as a scream.

The question hung in the night, raw and unfiltered, like a ghost that turned the air surrounding us ice cold.

I blinked twice, the pit of anxiety in my pulsing faintly. "Yeah," I admitted, my voice more distant than I wanted it to be. "More often than I'd like to admit."

But then I realized that the pit in my stomach wasn't really anxiety. It was exhilaration. And that was terrifying.

Seren nodded slowly, as if she had expected my answer. "Me too."

The honesty in her words was both horrible and liberating. We were strangers, sitting in a graveyard in the middle of the night, finding solace in each other's pain. We were sharing our darkest thoughts. And we were toying with the thought of causing our own deaths.

"Why haven't you?" I asked, my desperate curiosity getting the better of me. Maybe her reason could become mine, too.

She looked down at the bottle that was back in her hands, turning it slowly. I noticed that her eyes were wet, but no tears had escaped just yet.

"I don't know," she said after a long pause. "Maybe I don't really want to. Maybe I'm scared. Maybe I still have a tiny bit of hope left, buried deep down. Or maybe I'm just waiting for someone to give me a reason to stay. Maybe I'm waiting for someone to let me love them."

I nodded, understanding her words but for the first time, not relating to them. And instantly, I knew that her reasons couldn't be mine. I knew what I wanted. I wasn't scared. I didn't have hope. And people had already let me love them.

So why wasn't it enough?

"I think I'm waiting too. Waiting for something to change, for someone to notice, waiting for someone to see me... for anything," I told her. But even though the words were true, at the same time, I knew they really weren't.

We sat in silence again, our confessions settling between us. The night seemed colder now, the darkness more suffocating. But there was also a strange sense of relief, like we had finally said the scariest of things that were on our minds and neither of us moved away.

"I see you," Seren told me, looking at me from underneath furrowed eyebrows. "I think I see you."

"Can you see me if I'm in the dark?" I asked her, because I didn't know if anyone could see me.

I think I was destined to be invisible. I wasn't destined to be noticed. I was destined to be forgotten.

Seren nodded, and I knew she wasn't saying yes. Her nod was an acknowledgement that she understood what I meant.

Then, she spoke quietly, and her voice sounded different. It was a shade lighter. Instead of dark blue, maybe it was navy.

"Maybe we can help each other hold on, just a little longer," she offered. 

I peered at her, seeing the slight dusting of hope in her eyes. It didn't light up her eyes from the darkness they held. Not even close — but it was something. Something different.

Something with a small sense of beauty.

"Yeah," I said, feeling a small smile tug at my lips. "Maybe we can."

But even as I agreed, I knew my words were just another lie. I was beginning to understand that nothing was going to help me hold on. There wasn't anything to hold on to.

I had already fallen. I just hadn't landed yet— but I would. It was inevitable.

But, Seren hadn't fallen yet.

She hadn't jumped into the water. She wasn't in the waves. And maybe that could be the beauty that I leave behind before I go.

I would try, as much I could, to save her from falling, too.