I try not to remember it. I don’t think anybody does. When it’s all said and done, when the truth comes out and the curtain falls, when everything turns black and white, I guess it can be said that it was my fault. My fault for trusting my life in the hands of a stranger who I never really knew. Why do we give away the things we love so much to the first ones who bother trying? My heart, coughing in spasms, lay in your hands. I asked you to bring me back to life, but I should have known something was wrong when I started seeing red everywhere—on your arms, on your hands, on your fingertips. I should have known something was wrong when my chest squeezed and I hurt. I should have known then that something was wrong, that you weren’t helping my heart and you didn’t know what you were doing and it felt like I was a little dinghy in the midst of an awful thunderstorm, ready to capsize at any give moment. Maybe I couldn’t tell the difference between awful and awe-filled, because I stayed there and did nothing. I should have known something was wrong when I had trouble breathing when I was around you, each breath coming out like a cry for help. I should have known something was wrong when I would freeze in place when I saw you. I should have known from how you would play at my heartstrings, a melody that everyone knows, but likes to pretend the ending will change for them. Love is a bloodsport.

Sometimes people die in the pursuit of greatness; sometimes they die simply because Cupid’s arrow turned out to be much stronger than they thought. I watched from a distance as you dropped my heart on the pavement to hold someone else’s hand. I wonder if she knew you had blood on your hands? Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t mind because she’s used to blood on her hands.

Sometimes it’s so easy to do nothing, to stare at a blank wall with a blank expression and a blank mind. It’s easier to numb things out until you can’t feel anything anymore. That’s an actual science field, you know. It’s called cryogenics. When something is about to die, doctors take it and freeze it, and cover it with so much ice, that the body falls into a temporary halt. They pile ice on top of ice to numb the patient, until they’re there but not really there. When they think that they have the proper medication to bring the patient back to life, they unfreeze the patient and restart their system. It’ll be like they took a long, long nap. Like Sleeping Beauty except there’s not always a prince in real life. Maybe that’s why some people are so cold. Maybe they’re covered in layers and layers of ice and we just can’t see it. Maybe they’re still stuck in storage, waiting for someone to come along and say, “I can cure you! It’ll feel like you’ve never been hurt. You just have to trust me on this.”

Maybe it was because we were barely teenagers. Fifteen is too old to sit around doing nothing without getting nagged, but too young to do anything fun. Still, we pretend we’re grown up, ready to take on the world even when it is so obvious we aren’t. We have to start living life soon or boom! We’re thirty-five, unhappily married with pestering children, a stressful job, and still paying off college loans. Maybe it’s naive to think that way, that the only way to mature is to rush into things unprepared. Then again, maybe it’s naive to think that one day we’ll find the perfect time with the perfect people at the perfect place to do the perfect things. I guess that’s what we thought when we did it. We knew it wasn’t right; that we weren’t the right people and it wasn’t the right place at the right time. I don’t know what you were thinking. I don’t know if I was thinking. We wanted to be young; free even. How wrong we were.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night sweating all over with the pumping adrenaline of 
that night. Do you remember the rush and then the instant horror? How fast joy poisons itself, and how much faster poison takes joy.

I’m scared. I’m scared of anything outside of the door, any monster lurking beneath my bed or creature waiting for me in my closet. I’m afraid of the real world, with its fluorescent light bulbs and shiny credit cards and the smell of leather and wood polish. I’m afraid of hairspray and runaways and crowds and getting lost. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still human. Surely my skin has sunken in, pale and tight. My eyes must have a permanently startled expression; my hands always shaking. My body must have bent in on itself, trying to hide everything it aches to forget. But whenever I pass by a mirror, I see the same thing. The same skin, the same eyes, the same body. It makes me wonder, did I imagine it all? Or do I not notice anything before? But that question is wishful thinking. I notice everything, the little crease marks like a worn piece of paper, the dark smudges like spilled ink. Does anyone else see something different from the mirror? It seems not. The world continues to rise and fall, people living and loving and lying, all without pausing to notice the absence of one less live-er, lover, liar.
We were wrong and they were right. We were too young, too stupid to realize that the world was not ours to change but ours to lift its burdens on our shoulders. We were just teenagers. We thought we could save everybody, stop the pain. If only we knew. If only we knew.