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My own life meant little to me today.
Any future that made me like him—that made me immortal, too.
“Do you think I’ll ever get better at this?” I wondered, mostly to myself. “That my heart might someday stop trying to jump out of my chest whenever you touch me?” “I really hope not,” he said,
“You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault,”
“Heaven forbid that I should do anything I don’t want to do,”
Almost as if something worse was coming tomorrow.
Okay, I thought again, what’s the worst I can live through?
You can have my soul. I don’t want it without you—it’s yours already!”
I could not do anything else. I had to keep moving. If I stopped looking for him, it was over. Love, life, meaning . . . over.
A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold.
The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under. I did not resurface.
“It’s been months. No calls, no letters, no contact. You can’t keep waiting for him.”
Losing track of time was the most I asked from life.
I was only human.
Between pain and nothing, I’d chosen nothing.
They were probably nice guys. Safe. I lost interest.
It was a crippling thing, this sensation that a huge hole had been punched through my chest, excising my most vital organs and leaving ragged, unhealed gashes around the edges that continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time.
“Sometimes you’re a little strange, Bella. Do you know that?”
I was terrified. I tried to tell myself that the fear was pointless. I’d already lived through the worst thing possible.
Did you know, you’re sort of beautiful?”
“So what’s the problem?” “The problem,” I said, “is that it means something different to me than it does to you.”
Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew—knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest—was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I would crawl away if I had to.
I missed him horribly.
“I thought we were friends.” “We were.” There was a slight emphasis on the past tense.
Not as bad, I agreed, then added, but bad enough.
Love didn’t work that way, I decided.
Would that have kept me away from him?
The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made.
And now there’s nothing he can ever do to put it right again.
This was an easier death than others I’d faced.
