and oh, how i’m tired

of all these stolen goodbyes

i hold on tighter

but their claws are stronger

my fingers are ripped from your hair

and i leave-

no-

i’m sent,

away

with only swollen eyes

and a heavy heart

(In which only I know which one is the lie)

My eyes are blue

I like to read

I have three dogs

(I have two dogs)

My favorite movie is Pride and Prejudice

I have never been in love

You are my favorite person

We have been friends for years

I wish you happiness

I wait anxiously for your call

I hate the way I look in the mirror

I miss you

You always make me happy

I write about you all the time

I listen to every word you say to me

Your words make me feel good

I think about you daily

You are beautiful

I will be yours forever

The sky is blue

I still love you

The third one is always the lie

For a very long time, I was a dancer. I still am, but it's not my entire life or being anymore. I love the way it feels when I dance. I like feeling like my legs are powerful and having something unique.

But the pageantry of Irish Dance caught up with me after a while, and I didn't have time to love the dancing anymore. It was more about feeling ashamed for not wanting to or being able to spend $1,500 on a solo dress- because look it's a dress, and I want to go to a nice college!

I was isolated from the rest of my dancer friends who didn't see the logic in aspiring to go to Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, or the like. They just wanted the sparkly dress, the spray tan, and the big trophy that wouldn't get them a job, but maybe they would feel nice for a while. Feel superior.

It hurt, feeling like the thing I loved wasn't all that I thought it was.

I feared the isolation, being set apart. But I pushed myself away anyways.

That's life.

And that's people.

I wouldn't say that I found running.

I knew about running.

My mom is a coach. She loves running.

I hated running.

But I was alone, and freshman year was hard, and one of my friends said I should join track.

So I joined track on the spur of the moment. Which is how I've done most of the best things in my life.

And god, how I love running.

Once again, my legs felt powerful, even through the pain.

And I was alone.

Yes I was alone.

On the track, it's just you, your lane, and the race.

And I don't fear it anymore.

Surging through the woods during a cross country race, I listen only to my own ragged breathing, and I am separate from everyone around me.

I don't feel isolated when my spikes hit the dirt.

I've got myself, and that's all I've ever had, all I will have for the rest of my time.

So I push harder.

And when the race is done, and when I've won over the people who force loneliness like a punishment-

I hug the other individuals. Lonely people.

Who run.

I recently saw Frozen 2 in theatres, the sequal to a Disney movie of my childhood. The main song of which is titled "Into the Unkown" and sung by Elsa. She sings about how she knows there's more for her, and to her, and something is calling her, there's more to her that needs to be uncovered, more growth to be found than just the first layer from Frozen 1. A spirit, her own spirit just waiting to be found.

After crying steadily through most of the movie, I was asked why. What had I, a moody teenager found so touching about an animated princess film.

I was crying because as Elsa and Anna both grew from the princesses we all dressed up as in elementary school, to adults who had to learn to deal with change, and finding their purpose in life, the scariest of unkowns that never truly has an answer, my own childhood was being let go. (No pun intended) It's been almost 7 years since I saw the first Frozen movie and I was thrown out of the safety of youth before I was ready.

I dealt with great tragedy at just 14 years old. I sat down in my room over the summer, and wept for all I had lost. For the innocence and naevity, (just like my lookalike Anna) I could never get back because the unkown, the next step, takes you, ready or not. I grieved, and then I cleaned. I cleaned every inch of my bedroom, removing clutter and books I no longer needed, poured over yearbooks for the last shreds of being a kid, throwing away the guards I had around my heart, that told me change was terrifying, and I started fresh.

I told myself that with what I had lived through, everything is unknown. You just have to keep going.

And write.

Write what you know.

Wrap yourself in a blanket of the solid truths.

That they love me. I love them, my success is on my own shoulders, and I just have to keep stepping forward and know;

I am not lost in the unkown.

Im searching for it.

It's not all black and white

It's not all you and me

She and Him

Flowers in her hair, flowers where she walked

Life.

Darkness and bone chilling cold, skulls broken, empty

Death.

Spring.

Winter.

Persephone

Hades

Opposites, those meant to be kept apart

The very epitome of one cancels the other out

Longing must be staunched, the candle blown out

It's not all black and white.

They weren't supposed to fall in love.

I tell you I love you every day

In hopes you will say it back

I tell you with my words

So that you might respond with your lips

I tell you I love you every day

To make sure that you will one day believe

That I believe

I tell you I love you every day

Because truth always slips out

You pulling me close doesn’t linger long enough

To feel my heart throbbing the feeling

I tell you I love you every day

Because I know you will eventually say it back

I tell you I love you every day

Because I never told him

And now it’s too late

With you I‘m so scared to lose

I tell you I love you every day

Because I know now not to wait

there are moments

when i put my photos in

black and white

because i find it simpler

then trying to understand

all the colors

The morning is crisp and bright. The air of early fall chills my skin. The grass is moist and glistening, laden with early morning dew. Step to the line. Shake out my hands. Every muscle in my body is shaking; a dead weight in my stomach clenching iron fists around my heart. I’m nervous. This is normal.

One whistle. Feet behind the line, hasty last-minute coaching instructions. Two whistles. Tense up, sink down, spikes grinding into the soft dirt. Stress is rising. Swallow it down. God, why can’t we just race already? The gun goes off.

I run.

The start of the race is the hardest battle. To achieve good positioning for the rest of a cross country race, a full sprint must be started and maintained, your body struggling all the while to catch up with your brain and eventually the pounding heart and steady stream of runners pushing you harder and faster, drowns out the earlier panic of the moments before the gun went off. The race has begun.

If you’re a 5K runner you would say the second mile is the hardest. Perhaps that’s true. No running is easy, the entire race is a burning pain as your brain battles your muscles, screaming that your body isn’t meant for this.

But it is. And I enjoy the race. For just a moment, I have absolutely nothing to focus on except my feet hitting the ground over and over, as fast as I can.

When the race is over, that’s when it hurts. Sprint through the finish line, and suddenly I feel everything. The not-so dull ache of every limb, the scorching desert in my mouth, and the dry heaving and gasping as my lungs swallow as much air as possible. Focus in on that moment. The trembling. The pain. Tears leaking out for no reason other than that’s all my body knows how to do in this moment of shock, the numbness as mind and body struggle to catch up, to send the signal that everything is okay. It’s over. You ran a good race.

That’s when I think of him. Because the heart-pounding sickness that comes in the few minutes after a race is what it felt like to lose him. Amplified and never-ending, every day waking up in that panicky state, with no reprieve of having run a good race, and no guarantee that this feeling will ever go away.

A tragedy is only a tragedy until it happens to you. Then it becomes a movie playing on repeat. A moment in time looping endlessly. It’s cruel watching your life fall apart again. And again. And again and again and again, again, again, on the back of your eyelids.

It’s funny, but as a talkative person I don’t remember saying much that day. It was a normal day. Quiet, but normal.

“You talk with your hands a lot.”

“Don’t make fun of me, David. I just-yeah,” I continued to talk with my hands, sticking my tongue out at him. A bell probably rang.

“I don’t want to go to healthhhhh.” Something I complained about on a daily basis.

“You got this Abigail, we are just killing this whole school thing. I’ll text you.” A normal day. Normal smiles between my best friend and I. Normal.

A study day first period made me dazed and sleepy. Earbuds in, blaring music, I didn’t notice the almost eerie quiet of my peers. Quiet was normal for us in the morning. Each of us struggled to define our own normals after losing a classmate, a teammate, a friend.

Advisory was confusing. Something seemed off, but then again, last week had been off. Last week the wariness, the quiet, had seeped into the classrooms and hallways. But this week was supposed to be better. The worst was over. We had survived the chilling quiet that came when we lost Jacob. Everything was going to go back to normal. Normal.

Normally students don’t leave math class in droves crying. Panic set in. It was a curious panic, nervousness, not yet a fear.

I should have been more afraid.

“What happened?” Two words that I never want to hear again, for all the times they flitted between the lips of students.

I shouldn’t have asked. The answer I received would never leave me, forever etched in my brain, a perfect mental image of a text, not even one sent to me, but a text that broke me. Even now, almost mostly healed, I’m unable to type the words I saw on that screen.

As a reader, as a writer, I should’ve been able to find the words. I always have words at my disposal, sorted and categorized in my brain, ready to be displayed.

Normally, high school students don’t have to learn how to live with the heartbreaking question marks attached to two lives taken by their own hands within a week of each other.

I was rendered speechless.

One might say I was in shock, or denial. But I knew. I knew in the deepest cavern of my heart that it was true, but that would never stop me from wishing otherwise. My mother, later reflecting on the fact, said that I kept repeating that I was scared. And I was, how could I not be?

The details from there are hazy. Trancelike and stricken, I waited. In the gym, in classrooms, in the arms of those who mean the most. Like most of the student body, I left and went home. Looking back on it, I should’ve stayed to run.

I should’ve stayed to run.

I didn’t stop crying until I was asleep, having rubbed my eyes raw. There were other people that week - there always are - who offered comforting words and hugs to share. We came together as we all fell apart.

I loved Ben the way you love every person you think is going to be in your life forever; not enough. He was my first crush in a new school, the object of my affections with very good reason. He was bright. He was funny. He was the perfect boy next door. But even that term isn’t right. I’m still speechless and lacking, always grasping for just the right thing to say about him. I don’t have enough memories. I always assumed I would have time to make more. Of course I loved him. If you knew him you would have too. The real tragedy is that I only started loving him properly, loving him without fail, loving him with that love you’ll never let go because your hearts are too tangled, when I lost him.

I lost him.

We lost him.

I could argue that it isn’t fair. Only 14 at the time, I wasn’t, I’m still not ready for losing him. You shouldn’t be ready. It isn’t “normal.” Fair isn’t a factor.

“Life isn’t fair.” A popular saying by any and every peeved adult. Think about it and you might realize that really, death is the one making life so unfair for the living.

A nice embroidered throw pillow could tie things up with a pretty bow, making it all seem okay with an inspirational quote about strength, or moving on. We all eventually found our own ways to heal.

It hurt. It’s honestly the most broken, most completely torn open and lost I’ve ever felt. In times like now, writing this story that I’ve written hundreds of times before, trying and failing over and over to get it right, not for someone else to understand, not for someone else to feel sorry for me, not for my school, but for me. It’s just for me.

Others might read it. Maybe that will help them to hold on tighter. But it’s for me. It’s for me to know that it’s okay that this part of me shattered in a way that can’t be fixed because I gave the pieces to him.

This story, while about Ben, isn’t for him, no matter how much I loved him.

It’s for me to separate myself from being haunted and hunted by my own deep sorrow.

Although he follows me everywhere, it isn’t because I haven’t recovered.

I cross the finish line of a race and feel that aching, crushing, terrifying, heart wrenching, gasp of completion.

I’m not running away from him.

I’m not running away.

I’m running with him.

I’m running for him.

My own inability to move on isn’t shoving me back anymore, preying on my heart.

I’m just running a race.

I’m just running to run.

I’m just running.

In another world you wouldn't have the scars, thin lines on your legs.

In another world I would have stopped them from appearing.

In another world you would still be alive, your hands clean of your own blood, your eyes still shining brightly.

In another world I wouldn't still be learning how to live without you.

In another world perhaps you wouldn't be mine.

In another world I would be lost without you holding me, close to your chest, close to your heart, hands on my waist, my heart on my sleeve.

In another world she wouldn't hate her, you wouldn't hate me, I wouldn't fear them.

In another world I wouldn't be a runner, I might be running, always running away.

In another world I would learn how to love you, learn how to lose you, know how I lost you, know why you left me, know if you love me.

In another world I wouldn't be me, even if I still had you.