I hope you’re safe.
I miss our dumb messages. The ones that didn’t mean anything but somehow meant everything.
I don’t even know if you remember my favorite color.
I hate how weak I feel because of you.
I still defend you when people ask about you.
I don’t know why I protect someone who didn’t protect my heart.
I think I’m mourning a version of you that might not have even been real.
I don’t need you to come back. I just need to stop hoping you will.
I miss you.
I miss how you make me smile when everyone else makes me feel like I don’t belong.
You were my favorite person, Judas.
I don’t know if that makes me crazy or just lonely.
Tomorrow, Catherine will deactivate your number, so I can’t text you anymore. Maybe it’s for the better, because I can’t wait for messages that will never come. I can’t wait for you. I keep breaking over and over again, knowing that you will never come back.
Maybe we were never meant to be ride or die.
Goodbye, Judas.
I lock the screen and stare at it.
My heart slams so hard it rattles my ribs. Something tightens in my chest until my breath turns sharp. I want to shout. I want to hit something. Because even when she is here, even when I can see her, it feels like I already lost the only person who ever understood me. The only person who ever saw me behind the helmet.
To the world, I am just a mute monster with different-colored eyes. A story people invent for themselves. A version of me that never existed.
She sees past all of it. She seesme. She sees everything I am not, everything I pretend to be, and somehow she learned how to love every crack in me. Every weakness I try to hide.
She ruined me.
Not for the worse. She ruined the version of me that was already broken. She stitched something back together, piece by piece, and I still left.
She is my favorite person, and I made the wrong choice. That makes me human. It also makes me hate myself, because I can feel it happening. I am losing the only person who accepts me, while everyone else tries to turn me into something else.
I hear her shout something at Catherine. I see Catherine step out of the house and walk to her car in the driveway. Soon after the engine starts, the car pulls away.
When she is gone, I move onto the balcony and cross over to her bedroom.
I slip into the bathroom and press myself against the door.
Fuck.
My balaclava is still in the room.
It’s too late to grab it.
Carmen steps inside and shrugs out of her sweater, letting it fall to the floor. She moves through the room, naked. She unties her hair, and it spills down her shoulders, sliding over her back until it brushes the curve of her hips.
She walks toward the bathroom.
