Cassandra
“You broke us. Not me. You.”
The tears drip hot down my face. “You did this.”
I can still hear the words vibrating in my skull, the echo wedged so deep inside me that no amount of squeezing my eyes shut will ever force it out.
Sometimes I wonder if it would have been different. If I had just swallowed the words, just shut up and said nothing, maybe he would still be here. Maybe he would have stayed. Maybe I would have still gone to bed every night hoping I wouldn’t wake up—but at least he would have still been breathing somewhere in this world.
Three years.
Three years and the same words still loop in my mind like a curse I carved into myself.
My therapist calls it guilt.
I call it regret.
Dax Kingston.
I close my eyes and he’s there. Those sharp, pale blue eyes that looked like someone painted them from the sky. His full lips—the ones that brought me to my knees, or made me cry, or made me forget how to breathe. The way his arms wrapped around me until they didn’t. Until they let go.
Dax Kingston was my nightmare dressed up like a daydream, and I often wondered how free I would be if I ever let him go—but that’s the thing about freedom. Sometimes it’s just loneliness dressed up as regret.
“Cass, one day when you’re all alone, you’ll remember I didn’t break you.”
His sneer still hits my spine in all the wrong places.
“How can I break something that’s already broken?”
The last words he ever said to me still haunt me.
“You are broken.”
The words still hurt. The words still circle me like vultures. And as I stand in the same room where he spat them, a room now empty and lined with dust motes drifting through slanted sunlight like a mockery of a halo, I close my eyes and I scream.
I scream for the girl I once was.
I scream for the silence that suffocates me.
But most of all, I scream because he’s not here anymore.
I expect the universe to answer—to crack open with thunder, to drown the world in rain, to split the sky with lightning. Something. Anything that might let me know I’m not alone in this grief. But the crushing realisation lands heavy and cold.
Iamalone.
And when the scream tears itself raw from my throat, when I’m stood there heart racing, lungs burning, cheeks soaked, the only thing I hear is that same suffocating silence that has stalked me ever since he walked out of my life.
My legs buckle. I sink to the ground, pain vibrating through my kneecaps as they slam into the hardwood. My hair spillsaround my face, my head bowing like I’m praying to something I stopped believing in a long time ago. Something that was never coming to save me.
Girls like me don’t get saved.
We get left.
We get left to gather the shards of our own hearts, knowing we will never be whole again. We are told to pick ourselves up, to be strong, to not let our pasts defeat us—but I don’t want to be strong anymore. Strength in pain isn’t strength at all. It’s a mask. A performance. A way of making everyone else more comfortable.
And I’m tired.
I’m so fucking tired of drowning quietly so no one else has to get wet.
