I've lost the count of days. I know it's been over a week, but it hardly seems like I've been living in this nightmare for fourteen days. It feels way longer, the days are static and bleak in my eyes. 

There's a grey blur in the sunrays, all grass leaves have a line or a spot of brown somewhere amidst the green, and the running water in the fountains lost its trinkle and became soundless. 

A simple task such as going out to resupply the groceries or going to work has become a total bother, a real burden. Going to the dance studio, entertain the kids and smile and nod at their parents and my co-workers drains all of my energy, and I stopped jogging altogether, even though I know it'd make me feel better. Instead, I stay in my bed or I cuddle up with a thick blanket on a couch and scroll on my phone with the TV in the background, cheesy Christmas movies being broadcast in the middle of summer. 

I've never watched so many Christmas movies in my entire life, and they only ended up saddening me even further. The man is always noble, love is an indestructible force, and a Christmas miracle brings the two people in love together. The force of love in my life is fragile like glassy figurines, and if the past two years have proven me anything is that miracles like that only exist in movies. The past two years have proven me that point twice already. 

I bet that if I were a character in a book, people would sigh in awe and call my misery a tool for character development. The truth is that none of this is some big trial, just a sad, sad reality. 

Like the previous days, I'm in my bed, postponing getting up for four hours and still going strong. If I could turn it all off, I would, and I would start a day, live my life, stay hopeful that someone might come my way who will make me happy and I him. Instead, I'm here scrolling on Twitter, Instagram and solving quizzes on Buzzfeed. I do anything and everything so I don't have to think about him. 

Somehow no matter how hard I try, he always creeps back into my mind along with his many a smile - devious, playful, dirty, innocent, surprised, cocky, shy... Regular events in my life are narrated by his comments and remarks - the other day when the kids were practising their choreography, I was stricken with pride, and with his voice saying: 'Fifteen circles so far. Oh, look, we're on sixteen already.'

It is easier to hold tears back at work. There I can shift my attention to something else, and ignoring the occasional pop-ups of him is easier. At home, I have to take care of that myself, and so far staying in bed, browsing the social media, reading about all sorts of unimportant gossip has done its job. 

Apparently, I'm an ISFJ-T personality, also knows as the Defender, altruistic, tend to be excessively kind, and I believe in working with enthusiasm and generosity. I've read ten articles or more on ISFJ-T, and watched around six half-an-hour long videos of people making jokes about it. From the data online, Beyonce, Kate Middleton, Dr Watson, Captain America and Pam Beesly share the pain of this personality with me. 

On Instagram, I've discovered about twenty new profiles that post regularly and several times a day. That way I can always have something new to see. One of the profiles is tied to astrology. I generally don't believe in it, Mason, for example, is a Libra. Every article out there says Libras are no good for me, yet somehow, we were in a six-year-long relationship. I'm putting the fact that we broke up aside because after all, we were a happy couple. It's still fun reading about astrology, or finding out what type of a person in a horror movie am I or if I were a witch, what animal would be my familiar according to my sign. 

I come across a post with the title The signs when they find you attractive, and I skim over it till I find that I get flirty and seductive, which is not far from the truth. I don't check out other signs, like Aries for Caitlin, because I know I'll end up checking for everyone who's left an impact on my life. The second post on my newly refreshed feed reads The signs as kisses. I read what it says for Taurus - smiling-against-your-lips kiss, but this time I glance over the other signs as well. For Libra, I get flirty air kisses, and based on Mason, I can't agree with that. Then I check for Scorpios. Hickeys. 

I get nauseous before I'm done reading the word. I lock my phone and sit up in bed as if sitting upright will suppress the need to cry, the one I feel in my lungs. 

The hickeys he put on me... They've faded away, but I can still feel them scorched in my skin. 

At that moment, I'm swarmed with so many different feelings. My first reaction is anger, but even if I want to take it out on anything, be it throwing a pillow at the wall or screaming into it to muffle the sound, it's replaced by the guilt for blaming him for how things ended. 

I have all the right to blame him for everything he's done and said to me. Going after Mason, playing some evil mastermind behind my back, being a sardonic, jealous, controlling jerk, all of it and more is more than a good enough reason for me to hate him, but there's something that is keeping me from doing so. 

It's all the moments we've spent together. His devious playfulness that made me laugh so many times, the contrast between his warm, sarcastic personality and the mask of a bad boy he'd always wear, the sudden shyness that'd sometimes hit him. 

It's not like I can say it wasn't bound to happen. Caitlin, Austin, Nathan himself, they've all told me the same thing - he doesn't do relationships. But like an idiot, I stayed hopeful, believing that I don't know what kind of a miracle was going to happen. 

Didn't it, though? He did catch feelings for me. He even acted on them but in all the wrong ways, and when it mattered, he hid - to put it mildly. 

All these thoughts are giving me a headache, one that has become too familiar since last May, and I hope a shower will make it all a bit more bearable, but that again is only wishful thinking. I guess I just can't learn my own lessons, can I? 

I climb into the bathtub of boiling hot water. It's the type of stinging that makes me forget about everything else, even if only for a brief moment. I take the shower head and pour the hot water over myself, and for a second, it feels as if I can breathe. 

I sit in the tub what could be either fifteen minutes or a whole hour. The water in the tub is progressively getting colder, and whenever that happens, I just add a bit of warm one. Doing that is easier than having to get up, dry my body and hair, put clothes on and go back to bed. 

I pull the legs to my chest and I lean my head on the knees as I try to comprehend what's happening to me. 

The fact is that I don't know. I don't know how could I feel so bad as if Nathan and I were in a long and serious relationship, and not Mason and me. 

It was tough with Mason. The apartment was empty without him, I couldn't put our pictures away, yet I couldn't look at them. I felt unloved when he broke up with me, even though he did it in the nicest way possible. 

Now I'm here feeling frustrated, but still weirdly loved, despite all the things Nathan has said and done. How could anyone understand that?

I take a deep and loud breath, trying to overpower the screaming doubt of my mind that somehow finds all the right excuses for Nathan's behaviour. It's as if I have two personalities, and they're fighting over who's going to get me, each pulling me to her own side, while I'm powerless. So, who's it going to win? The one that is in love with Nathan and wants to forgive him, or the one that can't forget how he hurt her but, just like the other one, is in love with him? 

Hugging my knees and resting my head, I squeeze my upper arms, when the one thing that I begin to wonder is if it's even physically possible both Nathan and I could fit in it. It's stupid and it hurts, but I still think about it. He's tall, so I don't know where he'd put his legs, but I'm sure I'd get comfortable in his arms. I think he'd go through it despite being in an uncomfortable position, but I'd probably have to let him slap my ass or something. 

I giggle out loud when I think about that. For a moment, I'm okay. I'm okay when I think about this fantasy and what if it were real, even if just as a memory. It hits me harder than I thought it would when I subconsciously give myself a pat on the shoulder and tell myself that it's probably never going to happen. 

I force myself to get up because I feel myself getting nauseous, just like before when reality became a bit too much for me. I dry myself with a towel, and I focus every brain cell on patting my skin, I try doing everything and anything not to think about Nathan because I usually get either all dizzy from being hurt, or all dizzy from thinking how great he can be, and I don't like either of these two possibilities. 

Leaving the bathroom, I look at the clock with drawings of blue and pink birds on the wall and realise I was taking a bath for two hours. Well, at least this one time, time actually moved somewhere. In my experience, it mostly stands still when I'm feeling down. 

I don't feel like I have any other choice than to call in sick for the day. I can't do the stretches, the jumps, allegros, or as I call them the tippie-tappies, like I'm super passionate about it. I'm only passionate about one thing, and that's getting better, getting rid of this insistent pain, a feeling of dread that lingers around me like fog and follows me everywhere. 

Interestingly, no one noticed anything different about me. Caitlin, my parents, my friends, it's like they didn't notice a thing. One did, and I simply nodded when she said if it's about Mason, so it must be what they other are thinking as well, that everything is still about Mason. Who am I kidding, even Nathan thought everything was still about Mason in my world. It's easier to simply nod and say that this bad mood I've been in is about my ex-fiance, even if I get the urge to shove Mason up someone's ass already because they keep mentioning him. 

How would it even sound? I was depressed for a year because of Mason leaving me, and in the span of a few months now, I'm depressed again but because of another guy I never even mentioned to anyone? Even my parents didn't ask me a thing about him, despite the fact that they've met him and probably guessed that he was not my gay best friend. 

I'll keep myself busy somehow, it's what I've been doing for the past year and a half, so finding things to do, even if they're the smallest little things, has become some sort of a hobby of mine. Now, that speaks volumes on how sad my life has become. 

I think about the things that I could do. I could cook, but I don't feel particularly hungry. I could clean the apartment for the fourth time this week, but it's already tidied up, so there's not much for me to do. I could glue my ballet shoes to try and make them last longer and risk getting poisoned with it, but that doesn't really sound too healthy for me. I'm feeling awful enough already. Jogging is out of the picture, so is dancing. I dread the mere thought of having to move around. 

I slide down to the carpet in my living room and lean my head back on the couch. I don't know what to do. The only thing that's been on my mind is Nathan and everything about him. 

I used to question everything after Mason decided we shouldn't go through with the wedding. I would think about Mason all the time, but that was to be expected, we lived together, literally, everything around me reminded me of him. With Nathan, I can't explain why I'm being like this, and it's frustrating. 

It's just all of him. Not only his good looks, though, yes, they help. It's the charm, the magnetic personality of his. He could stand in an empty room, and you'd think it full. 

I like to think that I had a way of resisting him and his charms, and maybe in a way I did. However, it doesn't erase the fact that whenever he'd look at me from the side with his head slightly tilted down and do that damn half-smile of his I wanted to squeal. 

None of that changes the fact he literally asked me to be there for his emotional relief, while he could with no guilty conscience go and fuck around with others. And that's just one of the many things he said over time. 

I've lost count of how many times I wanted to break his nose for one of the stupid things he said, but then he did the other things, like taking me to dinner, giving me the little praises that said more than if he had written me a sonnet. For every single one of his weird, narcissistic impulses, there was something sweet and caring he'd do for me. 

I don't know what has to happen for him to be that nerdy kid that helped me with my AC. Sitting there by the bath and just talking, it was those moments that would make me question his cocky attitude towards the world. 

He simply slipped under my skin faster than Mason did. It's impossible comparing them, for they couldn't be more different than they already are. 

I liked Mason for being the artist and for giving me this boy in a band vibe that's apparently attractive to most women. When he wasn't on stage, he liked to be in the background, and he would always say 'thank you' and 'please' in a way that'd make your day hearing it. Nathan is everything else. He is like a bulldozer with his confidence, and I can't imagine how engulfed Mason must've felt when he met him. 

Here's the thing. If there were an incident in the grocery store about a product, Mason would take my hand and ask me if we could go away from it, while Nathan would probably be the cause of the incident. 

The more I think about Mason and Nathan meeting, I realise one thing. I'm... not even mad anymore Nathan went to see him. He did for the wrong reasons, and when I first found out about him going there just to bang on his chest what a piece of nice ass he is, I wanted to kill him. I was ready to spit in his face if need be just to show I will not tolerate that kind of audacity. The moment Nathan felt silent when I confronted him, and the moment when I realised what that silence meant, the anger and the fury evaporated. It suddenly wasn't about him being a controlling 'friend with benefits' (I guess we were that at the time?), but about him liking me and showing it in the weirdest way possible, not to mention kind of toxic. 

As much as I hate to admit it, he slipped right under my skin the way I slip my ballet shoes on, it went as easy as that. The more time I spent with him, the more charming he got, and the more I was convinced this ego of his has to be compensated for something. Not to mention the chemistry. Mason and I had a cute dynamic, but with Nathan... The chemistry, the energy between us, so energetic, binding, encapsulating, seductive. If I simply think of the sexual tension between us... Just down right immaculate. And just like down, he completely swept me off my feet. Unfair. 

I get all dreamy recalling how we 'thoroughly soaped' each other in the shower and straight after had a shower fight, or how the entire desk thing happened with him, or how I pushed him into the closet so Caitlin wouldn't find him, or how I felt his eyes on me the entire time when we went to his nephew's birthday party. The list goes on, and it continues with how a simple look of his would get me thinking one thing, and then how one word would make me want to dump his body in the ocean. 

I run my hands through my face, my hands acting as erasers of these images of memories I have in front of my eyes right now. 

I don't get it. Why would he do all of that and then say all those things? How can you say you love or like someone and do something that demonstrates the exact opposite? 

The reasonable Annabelle is telling me that he's simply toxic like that and that if I simply think of Patty, I'll realise it's a recurring thing in his life. But the other Annabelle, the one that misses him despite all the horrible things, is telling me that both Patty and Nathan told me enough to know that they were toxic for each other, still are. 

I slap my hands down against the carpet, expecting it to act like a gong of sorts that will clear the field of thought for me. The gong doesn't work. Everything is still cloudy and unclear. It's how I know that I don't regret it, any of it. 

It's painful, yes. It's worrying, yes. It has really become a chronic problem for me apparently, yes. Do I regret experiencing whatever I did with Nathan? No, because of all the reasons I mentioned above, all the good and the bad tensions between us, it made everything strangely passionate if you take into account we had no idea what the other one felt. Do I regret the thing I said to him? No. Simply because it was one thing that I ever said or did to him, so based on all the stunts he pulled on me, he deserved to hear it. I feel evil being so pleased about it, but it's true. 

The thing that's getting to me is that I can't understand a thing about him. I can't understand his actions, that are either fueled by jealousy or sex, according to what he's let me believe. Seriously, in what kind of a sick, cliche, romance book do I live in? 

He said that he likes me, but he won't act on it. He was as jealous as if I intentionally tried to do that, but he won't confess that he felt this way because he felt threatened by other single guys. Instead, he chose to hurt me. 

I get all teary until I let myself to cry a little. Crying never hurt anyone. It's just that I've done a lot of that recently. 

I jump when my doorbell rings across the apartment, and my heart sags down to my stomach. I consider ignoring it. I have a funny feeling it's Mr Dibra from down the hall coming to ask me something about the new smartphone. The poor old man bought himself a new phone to be up to date with his grandchildren, but he has no idea how to use it, and when he messes up the security code with his meaty fingers enough times for his phone to lock temporarily, he begins to cuss in Albanian, scaring me to death. The anger is not real unless the person begins to cuss in their mother tongue, mark my words. 

I do feel sympathy for him, but I can't sit down with him and give him the same instructions over and over again. I'm busy being heartbroken over Nathan. I think I called him that once - a heartbreaker. 

It turned out I was right about one thing. The ego, the confidence, the cockiness and pride, all helping him compensate. 

I was quite shocked when he suddenly decided to spill all the beans of his past on me because he was so secretive about everything before. Am I stupid to believe that if you're very concerned about your privacy, that the person you decide to share it with is, I don't know, in some way special? 

What am I even asking myself... He told me that I'm special to him, he's simply not willing to do anything about it. Even if he had no intention of telling me, I think he showed it in the most obvious way he could, he began to stutter and his whole demeanour changed. 

The doorbell rings again, and I begin to feel guilty if it really is Mr Dibra standing in the hallway, holding his phone out because he tapped something he can't come back from. 

I rise up from the floor, which takes a lot of effort, more than I'd like to admit. Much like the effort Nathan needed to even try and say my name. I guess that's one way that I can hurt him, the plosive sound in my name will forever leave in incapacitated. 

It's those eyes that gazed back on me, eyes of a lost little boy. If he could once look at me and make me weak in my knees, they were not the same eyes. I know those eyes were forever present, it was simply that in that particular moment, his mask completely shattered. He couldn't be the infamous lover of Boston, the seductive stud he likes to advertise himself as. He could only be that boy that once in bed told me why he can't trust his mother and why he can't be kind to her. That same boy that was so surprised when I couldn't believe even his father made no effort to be a parent. 

When I open the door expecting an elderly neighbour of mine, I instead see that boy, wearing no mask, looking at me with those wide, scared and lost eyes. "Hi..."

A/N: And now we've seen the world through Annabelle's eyes. I don't even know if I want to ask you what you thought of the chapter and everything that happens in it, but I sure hope so that you liked it!

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~Blackie