Love Story;
Every story must come a full circle.
This is how it begins:
Jacob traces circles on the back of Bella. He is not paying attention to her at all, just mesmerized by Bella's voice, Bella's expression, Bella's hands, Bella's smell. It is not until she manages to trip over thin air does he remember where he is, and like any other time, he never fails to catch her when she falls.
"My Isabella Swan," he muses, and places her gracefully on the ground. Her face is resigned, there will never be a day when she does not fall. And Jacob, he picks up on all these insecurities and doubts without her speaking a single word, and he knows just what to say. "I'd always catch you when you fall, Bella."
Bella smiles up at him, but in her heart she is wondering endlessly. "You won't always be here," she reminds him as they walk down the alley hand in hand. Jacob flashes her the smile that she has been in love with ever since she met him. "Of course I will," he says, and that turns out to be the beginning of a promise.
But, promises fade, and they are often always forgotten. Bella keeps this in mind, but still she can't help but be taken in by this new promise of love.
-----
And this is how it ends:
She's going out to forget they were together
All that time he was taking her for granted
She wants to see if there's more
Than he gave she's looking for
It has been a few months since Jacob made that promise, and things have changed so much that Bella thinks she might not be able to recognize herself. She stares at herself in the mirror, captivated. What is it about her that makes her such a different person now? Was it the dark circles under her eyes? Was it the weight she had lost since? And yet while she muses, she thinks she knows the answer somehow, and feels the answer - a deep, empty void inside of her.
Bella sits down and tries to do her Calculus homework, but she fails to do so. This makes her think of the last time someone left her, but somehow this time it feels different. The last time it was Edward, and although she felt the same void in her, this time it was different somehow. She attributes this to the fact that Jacob had left a bigger hole in her heart, then she feels guilty for comparing.
Edward must know. And in actual fact Edward has known since a long time ago, that Jacob would leave her, but he is there, he is there, with the Volturi now and Bella is still here.
Without even realising it, Bella starts to cry, and her sobs are amplified by the silence of the house. Her father steps into her room silently, but she barely notices him. All she wants to do, she thinks, is get Jacob back.
-----
He calls her up
He's trippin' on the phone
Now he doesn't want her out there and alone
Now he knows she's moving it
Knows she's using it
Now he's loosing it
She don't care
Jacob calls her, late at night. She looks up from her Calculus homework that she has barely done, at the sound of the ringing phone - a distraction her father is grateful for.
"Hello," Bella's voice is cracked from all the crying but she doesn't really care.
"Bella?" The voice coming through the phone line gives Bella's heart such a lurch that she forgets to be surprised. "Jacob!"
"Erm, yeah," his husky voice speaks. "Bella, I just want you to know, that I'm leaving."
For a moment Bella thinks the world might come to a stop, might stop spinning. "Leaving?" she asks numbly. She does not feel anything at all. "Leaving La Push?"
Jacob hesitates. "You," He finally admits. "I just wanted to make it clear. We... we can't go on like this anymore. We've drifted apart in the last couple of months, but I've just stopped feeling."
Bella is barely listening; her entire body has gone numb and all she can hear is the phrase "I'm leaving" and the word "you". She thinks that if she pretends she does not understand, then maybe it would not be true.
"Stopped feeling?" she repeats. "You mean you've stopped loving me?"
She can hear Jacob's hesitation over the phone. She can hear all the things he does not say, There's somebody else, You're wrong for me - and she can do all of this because she loves him, she has always loved him.
"Yes," Jacob manages to say without stuttering. Bella does not bother to ask who the other girl is. Deep down, she already knows.
Bella does not bother to say goodbye, all she wants to do is hang up before Jacob does. After all, how can he hang up if the line's already dead? And so she replaces the telephone silently, because Bella does not want Jacob to leave her before she leaves him again.
And this is what happened in between:
Jacob has always been paranoid, and paranoia and insecurities do not make a good cocktail. One night while Jacob and Bella are kissing, he stops suddenly and looks at her.
"Bella?"
She is confused, he has never stopped in the middle of a kiss before. "Yes?'
Jacob takes a deep breath and plunges on. "Do you ever think of him when you're with me?"
Bella does all her best not to roll her eyes. It is not the first time Jacob has asked this question. "Of course not," she says and leans forward to prove it. "Now can you kiss me again?"
Jacob does as she asks, but this isn't the last time.
-----
Of course, there is no way for Jacob to know that deep down, Bella is far more paranoid, and far more insecure than himself. She watches every move of his when he is not looking, analyzes the girls from his high school that he is close to. But Bella does not admit this to herself, she does not admit that she has become even more paranoid and insecure ever since Edward left her for the Volturi, and never came back.
She waits for him at his house with her homework, and when Jacob comes home she pretends to not notice and wait for the hug that always arrives. But it never does.
Bella looks up and is surprised to see Jacob talking, laughing with another girl who is hanging on his arm.
"Jacob?" She questions. Jacob turns and looks genuinely surprised to see her. "Oh! Bella!" he says, and glances at the girl next to him. Bella has an ominous feeling in her, but she goes up to them anyway and slips her arm into the crook of Jacob's elbow. "Hey, introduction please," She does her best to act like the friendly girlfriend.
The new girl narrows her eyes at Bella's arm but takes her hand off Jacob's arm. "My name is Sharon," she says indifferently. "Jacob invited me to see his car."
And that is the day when Bella thinks everything starts to change. Jacob is no longer the persistent boyfriend he used to be; he no longer frames Bella's face with his big hands and tells her You are my only one; he no longer calls her in the middle of the day just to tell her he loves her. Billy starts to invite her for dinner less often; and when she calls Jacob she can hear all the words he does not mean to say. When she goes hiking in the forest, desperate to follow Jacob's trail that he always lays out for her to follow, she does not find it. When she trips, she no longer finds him waiting there beside her, waiting to catch her. He no longer catches her when she falls.
Bella starts to feel the distance, and she does not know how to battle this distance, for Jacob can be as elusive as Edward when he wants to. She starts to question all the What-ifs, starts to picture Jacob with Sharon, Sharon with her long blond hair, starts to wonder if a mere mortal like her is not good enough for someone like Jacob. When she stumbles into Sam one day, she nods Hi and Sam does the same but in his look is a hint of pity, that Bella does not know everything.
Bella's father starts to notice the empty look in her eyes, the same look she got when Edward Cullen left her, and he does not know what to do when Bella starts crying everyday. Bella thinks that history is repeating, the same thing is happening to her once again, but somehow this time it feels worse. She wonders if it's because she loves Jason more, or was it that Edward had hurt her less.
Epilogue
Every story has an ending. Even the fairytales, even the sad stories. Every story comes a full circle, and this is how Bella's story ends.
She goes to Italy to find the Cullens, and spends a great deal of money and time on it. She knows her father will never allow her to do what she is going to do next, and so she leaves without a single warning - a clean break, like how Edward Cullen had once told her. She thinks that maybe this way, her father will in time forget that he ever had a daughter. Like she had never existed. Like what Edward and Jacob and all the other people had once did to her.
She eventually finds Edward, and he is still the same. He startles at the sight of Bella, Bella in Italy, but then again Alice has probably warned him that she is coming.
Bella does not waste any time. "You know what I want," she says and Edward is silent. Actually, he doesn't know what she is thinking, but he has always known that Alice's visions are true ninety percent of the time. And so he knows.
"Are you sure?" Edward asks. He moves forward, his black eyes intent on her. She nods.
Edward sighs. Once upon a time, he would have fought the very thought - he would have slapped Bella to wake her up, but that was when he loved her. He does not love her anymore, and it is with this thought that Edward bends forward to bite.
-----
When Bella returns, she is no longer Bella, and somehow she thinks it does not matter. There is a thin line between love and hate, and somehow when she returns, she finds it easier to hate the very sight of Jacob. She will not be afraid of him, she will be the only one of her kind who will not be afraid, and she leaps and runs to Sharon's house. She comes out of Sharon's house with her lips smeared with blood, her thirst quenched.
When Bella meets Jacob again, she does not back off. The circumstances may have changed, but she is still Bella, and she still loves Jacob more than anything in the world. "Kill me," she tells Jacob, and Jacob obliges, and Bella dies with tear tracks on her beautiful white cheeks, and this is how Isabella Swan ceased to exist.
This is not a love story. But this is a story, and every story comes a full circle.