Polite Ghosts Fading Quickly (Listening to: Half Asleep, School of Seven Bells)

The last three days have been an odd slew of lovely, contented sighs and tense pain.

On Saturday, I spent a large part of the day with The Expelled Boy. It's been over a year since I started liking him, and it's done: Almost forcibly spreading thinner 'til it dissolves completely.

Sunday, I blew off all my homework and just felt amazing all day. I slept in. Somehow I seemed to be lighter than air, giddy but in an entirely new way. Not in the love I felt for someone else, (The Expelled Boy, Art School Boy), but for the lack of that love. Being alone, and loving that feeling of independence, of self-reliance so much. I know that what begins as an unguarded train of thought, slowly can become an addiction to the slumber of disconnection and the resonance of memory that no longer has a shape but keeps you numb through the hours 'til gone is another day.

Monday started beautifully. I had this vibrating energy inside me and I was so much happier than I had been. Advanced Acting started after lunch. We sat in our own spots on the stage. Mike says to picture someone we love, the person we love the most of all.
I remember this exercise from last year. And I do not imagine the same person.
Last year I picked the girl I now know as Old Best Friend. Our friendship the way we knew it then has also almost forcibly spread thinner 'til it dissolved completely.
This year I imagine Laura, my little sister. When we were younger, when I was six and she was four, I would dream that she had died, that the overgrown rock garden in the corner of our yard where no one goes anymore had become a pond, a deep, dark lake of green scum and shadowy fish and that she had fallen from the balcony into its depths. I used to dream that I climbed down the chain hanging from the roof gutter that directed rain water, to try and carry her out of the lake. She would drown. The sky was always stormy. I would scream and cry in these dreams, and then our friends would peer out of the shadows of our dark house and giggle, laugh and say that they were happy she was dead. They would sing and dance and I would scream and bawl and wake up drenched in sweat.
Mike says picture this person I love most, and I imagine her. Now, he says, this person is dying. What do their eyes look like? What does their hair look like? You can comfort them. Where are you?
Just like that, I am crying.
Now, Mike says, they have one minute. When I call your name, you have one minute to say everything you want to say to them.

He calls my name first.

I need you to know that I love you more than anyone. I love you so much, so much, and I need you to stay with me. I know that life for you has been so much harder than it has been for me and I wanted to take that from you and protect you from that. I never could. I wish it was me. I wish I could die and not you, I do.
Fifteen seconds, Mike says.
I love you. You're going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
Ten seconds.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Five.
I love you, I love you I love you I love youIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouLAURA.
And she's gone, Mike says.

Another name is called, but I keep crying, silently shaking and shivering and holding my empty hand tight around what I have convinced myself is her limp one. Those dark waters have swallowed her up again and there is nothing I can do.
As I walk from the theater to the bathroom, a senior from the class, Batman Boy, pats me on the back and says: Alice Cooper is a good look for you. And it's true, my cheeks are streaked with black mascara. I wipe it away.
The rest of the day my shoulders feel tense against my neck and I feel dragged through Hell. I take notes in Calculus for once. I can't laugh or make faces behind the teacher's back today.
That headache you get from crying hasn't faded yet.