Your hands wavered slightly and you felt like your head was spinning, as if you had the world's worst case of vertigo. Light-headed, you sank to the floor, hands cradling the picture frame in your lap. You thought you'd gotten rid of all his pictures, packed them up and stored them away where you'd never have to look at them again. You stared down at the picture, your body alternately hot and cold, your nipples pebbled and harsh against your shirt.
Yamamoto's smiling face stared blindly up at you, his arm around a happier you, curling your smiling, happy self into him. A drop of water splatted against the glass covering the picture, landing over Yamamoto's face and distorting it, making it blurry. You hadn't even realized you were crying until you noticed those drops kept coming and it was only with a dim realization that you recognized that they were coming from you, leaking out of eyes that you would've thought would be cried out by now.
You'd always had your problems. You were shy and awkward, nervous around others. You'd been a 'lone wolf', the weird loner throughout most of your life though it wasn't by choice. You would have given anything to be like all the other pretty, popular girls you saw, happy and cheerful and flirtatious, the girls who had all sorts of friends and whom guys always fell for, the kind of girls who never had tangles in their tongues or growling beasts of social fear and rejection looming in their stomachs at the very thought of a conversation with someone. Yes, you'd grown used to that creeping spider of loneliness from early on, you had whole fucking colonies of those bastards creeping and crawling all over you.
But he'd changed that, hadn't he? Yamamoto Takeshi…your Takeshi. He'd never seemed to mind your silence or your awkwardness. He'd seemed to go the extra mile to get to know you, he who always had a cheery smile and who never seemed to be lonely or awkward. You'd never understand why he'd bothered to first befriend you and later date you. But he had and for that you felt like you owed him your life. Because he'd given you a life. He'd been your first friend and he'd helped you meet other people, introduced you to his friends and helped you slowly feel comfortable around them.
The both of you had been high-school sweethearts and then college sweethearts. Whenever his friends (and your friends too, your mind whispered to you, they were your friends too) joked about the two of you being an old married couple, he'd always tell them that when you got married (never if, always when, always), they'd get an invitation. You'd been aware, just as all the other girlfriends had, that Yamamoto and his friends had their secrets. You knew that sometimes he'd leave for a little while (work, work he said) and when he came back, he'd be bruised and scratched, sometimes worse. One time, he'd come back with half-healed scars and a broken arm. He'd never tell you where he went or what it was he did. He told you he'd tell you one day but he never got to. You still didn't know.
Because one day he just didn't come back. One day, it was Sasagawa Ryohei knocking on your door, Ryohei who was a good friend of both of yours, standing there staring at the floor when you opened the door, eyes and voice choked with tears, telling you that Yamamoto, your god-damn Yamamoto, was dead. The rain that had washed all those spiders away, which had rinsed away your loneliness and drowned it in his warm smile and kind ways, was never coming back to you.
You set the picture down on the floor, getting to your feet in a kind of haze. Ryohei, the sunny, happy Ryohei had taken your rain from you, leaving your life a barren and dry place. And god, how those spiders came back. Caught in your thoughts, always caught in your own inner world now, you barely even noticed as your feet led you into the bathroom, as your hand opened the medicine cabinet and took down the prescription bottle half-full of pills. Your fingers slipped into the bottle, neatly labeled with the tag bearing your name, the date, the word Valium and the dosing instructions and drew out two pills. You held them on your open palm for a second, staring at them with a sort of drugged stupor. Another Valium to make another day okay, you thought as you popped both pills into your mouth.
It was in a drugged, light-headed stupor that you kept pulling Valiums out of the bottle, two at a time, like little husbands and wives in your mind. Four, six, eight, ten, sixteen. The count was twenty before the bottle was empty. At the count of twelve, you'd been mildly aware of someone banging on your door. You'd been completely uninterested in seeing who it was though. At the sixteen count, you had been mildly aware of the sound of someone breaking your door in. At the eighteen count, you'd been aware of Ryohei's voice calling for you. He'd come into the bathroom as you swallowed the twenty count, two little soldiers ending your life soon hopefully.
Now Ryohei might be stupid at points and he might be a bit dense but he wasn't a complete moron. It didn't take him too long to figure out the situation, a empty pill bottle in your hand and you, unsteady already as your hearing faded and popped in and out, glaring at him. He'd tried to take the bottle away, yelling, asking questions that didn't make any sense to your already-shutting down brain.
Don't touch me! I hate you! I fucking hate you! It's your fault! It's your fucking fault he's dead! I hate you!
You were barely aware that you were shouting at him just as loud, if not louder than he was at you, your tone one of pure hatred and disgust. You were barely aware of how you were clawing at him and twisting and hitting as he tried to grab you. Why wouldn't he just leave? He caught a hold of your wrist and tried to calm you down as you kept attacking him. Your body slackened all of a sudden, all the fight going out of you as your stomach began to churn and your limbs seemed to numb and float away little by little. You blacked out soon after.
When you next woke, you were in excruciating pain, thick tubes force-feeding you chalky liquid as the doctors pumped your stomach. He'd taken you to a hospital. You weren't even allowed to die…was this his penance for taking Yamamoto? If so, it was a fucking awful one.
And the itsy bitsy spider climbs up the spout again, your mind chanted like a prayer.