Take me away to where I belong

Chanced upon a read.
Feels like. Very much like.

"How's everything?", she beamed.

He hesitated, long enough for her to die inside all over again.

She slid into the passenger seat while he stowed his gear, turned over the ignition and blasted the AC. The car still smelt the same, as how she had remembered just two months back.

She glanced at the stranger next to her and tried to remember when he used to be a part of her.
Instead, she chose to turn and stared out the window, watching the scenery streamed by without registering a single image.
He seemed to be lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which she could guess.
These days, it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.
She understood better than anyone else that, in the blink of an eye, you might reinvent yourself..
She understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you were tomorrow.
But this time, she was the one who wanted to hold on to what she had, instead of letting go.
The breathing space she gave, had somehow became an inmeasurable distance.

She thought up a thousand questions - How's school? Did you go wakeboarding? Do you think it will rain again tonight? - but she couldn't speak.
It was too much, sitting there on the leather seat, just a foot away from him, the way she'd sat beside him in the car a hundred times before.

He pulled out of the parking spot and cleared his throat.

"You feeling better?"

Than what? she thought.

She tucked her hair behind her ear and glanced down. She thought of how she used to grasp the stick shift, so that when he reached for it, he would automatically be holding her hand. She slid her palm beneath her thigh and gripped the seat so she wouldn't do anything stupid.

"How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"All of it. You know. Go to class. Out. Have fun. Make it through the day. Act like... like none of it mattered."

He stopped the car near the park and reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. Again.

He sighed. "Girl, it mattered."

By now, the tears were coming faster. "But I love you. I love you so so much."

There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them.
She couldn't blame him, she didn't like herself like this, either.
These days, her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.
But she couldn't go back to being the girl she'd been before she met him; that girl was gone.

So where did that leave her?

It was not that he had broken up with her just three months to her final return for good.
It was not that she - a nobody elevated to the level of queen by association, who seemed to have hit jackpot - had lost her Cinderella status.
It was that she truly believed you could learn how love could change the speed your heart beat, how it made you dream in rainbow colors.
It was that she knew she couldn't have loved him this hard if he hadn't loved her that way too.

He was wavering, she could tell.
When he reached over the console and pulled her into his arms, she tucked her head against his neck.
She couldn't remember the last time they were this close to each other.
She couldn't remember a lot of things; like the sound of his breathing when he gave himself over to sleep, or the half smile that slipped out like a secret when something took him by surprise.

"I can be whatever you want me to be," she promised.

"Please", she said, half question, half command.

"Thank you", she murmured, to God, to him, or maybe both, when he held her closer.

His words stirred the hair beside her ear. "You've got to stop. We're over."
His words were like a handful of stones dropped from a cliff.

She disengaged herself, wiping her eyes on the tank top she was wearing that was now a tad too loose for her.

"If it's us, how come you get to decide?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't.