The same chant replays, like a bad pop song, caught on repeat inside my head.
By the time I walk into my place, I must have said the words in my head over a hundred times, but the ache in my heart still remains. In my head, I know it’s not her, it’s Lily, her baby sister… but my body responds to her, just as it did to Amy.
To my body, there is no difference. My heart yearns for me to be near her, and it’s earth-shattering to my brain. In the ten years since Amy’s death, I’ve been with a handful of women, but none to which my body reacted like it did when I saw Lily today.
Stop this. Make the ache in your chest disappear.
Heading straight for the kitchen, I get out a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler from the cabinet. Generally, I don’t make it a habit to drink on school nights, but I don’t give a fuck right now. I have to stop this before it gets out of control.
My hands shake as I pour myself a glassful before taking it and the bottle to the living room. Settling down onto the couch, I start to sip on the amber liquid, welcoming the burn in my throat and the warmth in my stomach that it brings.
I can’t remember the last time I got drunk. I prefer to keep a clear mind, but it doesn’t matter today. Everything inside my head is fucked now, her presence ruining everything. I down the glass in two gulps and pour myself a second one right away. I can still feel her eyes on me, and my skin burns. Wrong. It’s wrong. I take another gulp.
Briefly, I consider calling Rem over to talk but decide against it. He doesn’t need to see me like this. No one needs to see me like this. I’m a mess, a fucking complete and utter mess. So instead of doing what I preach most and reach out for help, I sit by myself like a loser in my living room and get drunk. The world around me is spinning, maintaining the same speed but everything inside of me has stopped, the air, my heartbeat, it’s all unmoving.
Don’t break. Do. Not. Break. I grip the glass in my hands tighter. Tight enough to shatter it. Tight enough to break me. It’s been years since I wanted to use anger as an outlet to my pain. Years since… the memory pulls me under, the memory rushes in before I can stop it and just like that I’m back there, being the old me.
I slam my bare fists into the walls of my room over and over again. The anger inside me so great, I don’t know any other way to let it out. It’s like a volcano of rage, erupting, spewing from deep inside me.
The rest of my room is already destroyed. I tore it apart when I got home from the hospital. The same hospital where she took her last breath. The doctors said they did all they could… but it wasn’t enough. They did all they could? A cruel smile appears on my lips. If they did all they could, she would be here, right in front of me.
The skin over my knuckles is gone, blood drips from my hands and paints the walls. My hands should hurt, but I don’t feel the pain… not there at least. My body is too overwhelmed with a different kind of pain, a pain a thousand times worse than any physical pain.
She is gone… dead… she left a hole inside me so deep that I know there is nothing to fix it. No one will ever be able to fill that space again.
She left a void that will forever leave me empty and alone.
Drink, after drink, I try to drown the memories I’ve been trying to forget for so many years. Amy, my sweet, Amy. God, how I miss you. I look around this room, and all I can think about every day is how empty it is. How pathetically alone I am because I refuse to move on with my life.
I should be married and starting a family right now, not drowning myself in a bottle of fucking whiskey, all alone.
Loser. You’re a loser, Sebastian Miller.
Raising my glass, I drink like it’s a celebratory event. My thoughts shift and swirl like shit being flushed down a toilet.
“Lily…” I say her name out loud just to see if it burns as badly on the outside as it does on the inside. Nothing. Slamming the glass down on the table, I force my shaking hands away from the whiskey bottle and into my hair. Even as angry, and hurt, and burning with sadness as I am over Lily reappearing in my life, I’m concerned for her. Riddled with worry.
Is she alone? Why is she here? How is she doing? What’s her life been like the last ten years? The questions stack up, higher and higher, threatening to topple over.
Is she suffering like me? Does she hate herself for not being in the car that night, like I hate myself? When she moved away with her grandparents, I never once stopped to check on her, to consider what she might be going through. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I figured she still had someone to hold onto, to make sure she pieced herself back together again. I had no one, at least, not anyone that would really understand.
She didn’t just lose her sister, but her entire family all in one swoop. Where I had lost the love of my life, she lost it all.
Ha. Pathetic. Here I was whining over something as superficial as lost love when the person who should really be hurting was smiling as if the world hadn’t done her wrong. Hadn’t taken everything from her.
Selfish asshole. I was going through my own shit, yes, but she was just a kid. This is dumb, ridiculous. Why the fuck do I even care? The past is the past. It’s not like I can go back and change what I did, or what happened.
Nothing can, because if I could, I would find a way for Amy to be here with me.
Fuck, I need to get out of my head. Stop thinking about her. About all of it. It was easier when I pretended that part of my life never happened. I thought I was over this, over Amy but one look at Lily and the flood gates opened.
Lily was a reminder of everything I had lost, and everything I would never have.
There was no moving on from someone you loved, someone you never got the chance to say goodbye to. All there was, was learning to deal with the absence that they left in your heart.
Nothing will bring Amy back. It’s now a reminder I’ll have to repeat again to myself often.
But Lily… she is still here and as badly as her presence made me feel it also brought me a sliver of excitement, a zing of pleasure so foreign I nearly forgot what it felt like to be even a little joyful. I feel like an even bigger ass thinking about it. I shouldn’t feel this way about anyone, especially not about Amy’s sister.
Betrayal. I know the feeling all too well. It burns through me like a hot knife slicing through butter. Every time I would fuck another woman, look at another woman, it would sneak up on me and sink its razor teeth into my back. It was always there, in the back of my mind, eating away at my subconscious. Gnawing on me.
I was good, but I wasn’t good enough to get Amy back.
I wasn’t good enough to let go of her memory, and now I was thinking about her sister and how much they looked alike. Making a fist, I slammed it against the side of my head over and over again. The fucking thing inside my head had better start working or else…
Finally, the whiskey I all but guzzled down starts to work and my brain slows, a fog settling over my thoughts, and lifting the elephant sitting on my chest just enough for me to suck in a full breath. Everything inside of me screams for me to leave Lily alone to forget about her. To forget about Amy.
Forget, forget, forget.
She’s happy, going to college, finding her way. She has her whole life in front of her, a promising, happy life. If she hasn’t already, she’ll find love and a life worth living for.
Falling back against the couch, I tilt my head back and stare up at the ceiling. I don’t know where the thought comes from, but something inside my head says…