Page 255 of Breathe Like Hell

I never wanted that to happen.

Every day that passed was another day farther away from the time he’d been alive. Time kept putting more and more space between us, and it was making me sick. I felt nauseous thinking about it.

Christmas would pass this year without him, and it would be so difficult. It would be impossible.

But somehow, it was even more impossible to think about the second year without him.

The third year.

The fact that this misery was going to continue forever.

I couldn’t wait for him to come back, wait for this to be fixed. There was no point at which relief would finally wash over me, and everything would be okay. All I could do was learn to cope with his death better, learn to grow around his absence.

But I didn’t want to fucking cope.

I wanted him to be alive again.

I didn’t want to try figuring out how to live in a world where I’d chosen the exact path that led to losing him. It’d been my fault.

My fault for fighting, my fault for getting out of the truck, my fault for walking too close to the road.

This was all because of me.

I turned over and laid down on my back, trying to breathe deeply. My hands and face were numb. Tears trickled down the sides of my temples into my hair as I stared at the gray clouds. A dark-winged bird flew above, high in the sky, wings caught on the wind. Maybe I’ll stay here until the grass grows over my body and I sink into the dirt, until the worms try to eat me but only find my golden blood and immortal angel flesh.

I didn’t know how long I laid there like that. One car drove past me but did not slow down.

At some point, I was able to force myself to my feet, force myself to start walking. Now, I was numb again. It only took a few more minutes to get back to my trailer, which was when I realized I didn’t have a single picture of myself on my graduation day.

I sat on the steps of my trailer and opened the selfie camera on my phone, then held my diploma up next to my tear stained face, mascara and eyeliner tracked all down my cheeks, my nose and eyes red from crying, snot on my upper lip.

I couldn’t force myself to smile, but I took the picture anyway. Just to have it. To prove that this day actually happened and that I now had a degree in chemical engineering.

To whoever fucking cares, I graduated.

But nobody cared.

Micah was the only person who’d ever cared about me like that.

Inside, I crawled under my bed to grab the box of Micah’s things I’d stolen from his house and his office over the past months. I had all his degrees and now his dissertation. I laid them all out around me on the thin carpet, all three of his and all one of mine. I held his dissertation in my arms, pressed to my chest. Every word in here had been written by him. More quiet tears slid down my face.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do now.

It was over.

I graduated.

I had no jobs lined up.

I had nothing.

Micah couldn’t even be a reference for me anymore because he was gone.

All the work we’d done together in his lab seemed to be for nothing because there wasn’t any real record of it. The distillation column still stood in his lab, gathering dust now. I was sure that if anyone walked past the doorway, it didn’t register in their mind. They didn’t even remember there was a room there.

With tears in my eyes, I took out the small photo printer Mason got me for my birthday and printed out the picture of myself with my diploma, then slapped it into my journal. A few tears landed on the page, leaving wet spots behind. I uncapped my blue pen and scrawled a short caption below the photo.

Second worst day