I hate how desperate it sounds for an answer.Like a man dying of thirst asking for water.
“Into something that belongs to you instead of something that owns you,” he repeats softly.
I sink into the chair across from him, staring at the concrete floor like maybe it’ll start offering answers.Like a kid hiding from the truth that’s already got its hands around his throat.
“Everyone keeps telling me to ‘move on.’Or let go.But I fucking can’t.”
“People say that because they’re scared,” Nick says, leaning back.“It’s never a waste to try and see where things go next.Whether they work out or not.”
“So I’m just supposed to be grateful for the pain?”I snap, bitterness slicing through every word.
“No.You’re supposed to be grateful for the capacity you have to hold it based on what you experienced and survived through.”
His voice deepens with conviction—the tone he only gets when he’s talking about something he’s lived, not just learned.
“Do you know how many people sleepwalk through life never feeling anything real?Never experiencing feelings that rewire their entire understanding of what it means to be human?”
“Then why does it feel like dying?”
“Because it is in a way,” he says softly.“The version of you that loved her that way—that version is gone.But the person you’re becoming?He gets to love differently.Maybe better.”
I don’t know what to do with that.The truth sits between us like a challenge I don’t have the strength to accept.Knowing doesn’t kill the wanting—it just makes the wanting feel pointless.That’s the cruelest part.
“I thought after everything that happened last summer I was finally out of the woods.But everything fucking hurts all over again.”
“Yeah,” Nick says.“Unfortunatley, acting like you don’t have feelings doesn’t protect you from them.”
His tone sharpens, just slightly.
“And for someone who’s survived half the shit you have?The real problem isn’t that you feel too little.You feel too much.All the time.”
I look up at him, and something shifts in his expression—like he’s seeing the part of me I’ve spent years burying.
“You know what Javier once told me about people like us?”Nick continues.“The ones who were broken early and often?”
His voice drops low, intimate.
“We don’t feel things normally.We feel everything at maximum volume.Love isn’t just love, it’s obsession.Sadness isn’t sadness, it’s a bottomless pit.And pain becomes its own living thing—sets up camp in your chest and pays rent in sleepless nights.”
Something cracks open in me—quietly, but unmistakably.
“The drugs weren’t about getting high, were they?”Nick says.“They were about turning down the volume.Making everything manageable.”
I can’t speak.
Because it’s true.
When everything is at eleven, zero starts looking like peace.
“The fucked-up part,” I whisper, “is that even dulled down… even through all that haze… I still felt her.Like she was carved into my DNA.”
“That’s because she probably was.Is.”
Nick spreads his hands.“People like us, when we love someone, we don’t just give them our hearts.We give them our entire nervous system.And when they’re gone?We’re left with all these exposed wires sparking around with nowhere to go.”
He pauses, letting the weight of it settle.
“At some point, you have to take that power back.Own it.”
