A/N: So I just got a job and I've been writing more than ever. This murmuring one-shot lives in the same world as "His Strange Weather" but the latter one-shot isn't a prerequisite to reading this one. Now, if I could write the full-length story this derives from… Enjoy.

Additionally

"You must have really loved him."

"I'm sorry he left you like that."

"Losing him must have been really hard."

Loving, leaving, and losing are all in the same game. They all go together, hand in hand in hand. I wasn't used to any of those feelings, though, all because I wasn't used to feeling at all. I guess that's not normal, but as I stand during this horribly ironic, ugly sunny day, watching his casket get lowered six feet into the ground, I guess nothing is normal. How can a world without Paul Lahote's presence ever possibly be normal?

I've never really been conditioned to experience emotions, though. It just never fell into its place, so I never thought it had a place in my life at all. But with Paul Lahote—and just Paul Lahote, nobody else—I felt it. I felt everything, sometimes in little bits and pieces, but other times, all at once. He was capable of making me feel that, and he still is. In the week and a couple days that followed his death, I've walked through life almost like I normally would, but with accessible emotions. Additional emotions that weren't—and still aren't—a burden. They're a little too much sometimes, but never an affliction. Paul was never an affliction to me—not even once.

I wish I could speak at his funeral, but since the accident, I've found myself mostly silent on the outside, but buzzing with words on the inside. Words that should have been uttered before the accident, but words, nonetheless. Only Paul could leave me speechless.

Since birth, Paul always wanted to make an impact. It's incredibly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and downright ironic all at once. His dreams, hopes, and ambitions were larger than what society had dealt him. He held out for aces and kings while he kept getting twos and sevens in the world's horribly shuffled deck. Sometimes I wanted to bring him back down to Earth, but that was everyone else's job with him, so it never had to be mine.

Loving Paul wasn't difficult, though. If anything, it's the easiest thing I've ever done. Basketball, high school, a little bit of college… all easy. Paul fell right into all of that. Loving him was so easy—even though it's harder now—because he made himself so easy to love. It was in his smile, for sure, but even more in his soul and intentions.

I've never seen a person so loving and so patient with love. Romantic relationships came and went for him, but I know he was never regretful. Paul was special in that way.

And he knew and understood the other types of love, too. And it made all the difference.

His ability to love is why he kept Jacob Black and I in his life, but let himself accept the fact Jacob and I, along with his mortality mate Bella Swan, could all coexist in his world. That's why he was kind to everyone, forgiving of everything, and saw the best in the world—or he at least wanted to.

He reminded himself of the beauty in the world, all the time. Some people are optimistic in the way they remind themselves that the sun is always rising somewhere. Paul was different. His dad beat him when the moon was up, but by the next sunrise, Paul was always convinced that life was still beautiful. Paul Lahote made himself so easy to love because he was open to it, all the time. And in heaven right now, I know he's still open to love, and especially easy to love. He once told me, on one of his periodic spiels about life, that to go to heaven, you have to be who you are and hope that who you are is good enough. And he's there.

Leaving him—and him leaving me—made me feel indifferent. I've always been wildly passionate or immensely uncaring when it comes to most aspects of life, and aspects of Paul met both results. I never truly wanted to leave him (I actually wanted to lock him up inside my heart all day, everyday), but when I did leave him, I felt nothing—it's what I'm used to. That was when it hit me; things were wrong. Paul was—and is—special to me, and not in an additional, added-on way, but an immediate one. For me to feel indifferent about leaving somebody with his kind of magnitude… I hated it. Paul wasn't ordinary, or the usual. Leaving him bastardized the layers and layers of feelings I've ever had for him, and it kills me to admit it.

Paul leaving me was different, yet indifferent. I was indifferent to him leaving me because I knew he simply wasn't committed. As much as he loved to love people and places, he was never fully committed to just one aspect of life, ever, so in return, I couldn't be committed to loneliness.

I always knew he'd be back—that was his thing: always coming back. Paul could have married California and all its coolness and glamour, but he'd still come back to me. He wasn't totally committed to me, though, once he discovered that more than one type of love exists and he was perfectly capable of having more. He was committed to neither California nor home, all because he knew that love doesn't take commitment; love takes attention.

So then I couldn't feel angry; I couldn't feel unwanted. I wasn't love on the side for Paul, but love added on to the eye—the focal point—of his love of life and everything in it. I was an additional love, but, hell, was I loved. With anyone else—Jacob, my parents, or anyone in between—I would have been angry, but not with Paul, because even if just a portion of the amount of love he held belonged to me, I would be loved more than anybody else could ever love me, even with their entire heart, soul, body, and mind. So with the fact that I was loved at all times, him leaving allowed me to fall back onto what I knew, and expect him to come home whenever he was waking up from his dreams.

Leaving always led to coming right back for both Paul and I, but losing him was overwhelmingly painful. When I lost Paul, I had just started feeling. I especially felt loving, as well as loved. I had been loved by my father, but he had only loved my abilities. Jacob had loved my rock-hard stability, but he doesn't love me at all now, so that wasn't real love in the first place. But Paul loved all of me, even when he wasn't around the show it, even when his love was additionally given to Bella Swan. Even then. He loved me, passive-aggression and all.

When I lost Paul, I couldn't feel used or shared. That rare, petty pain of being loved additionally which sometimes hit me late, late at night when I knew that Paul was in Bella Swan's bed instead of mine, where he belonged, didn't come close to the agonizing pain of losing the source of love itself. Being lost was the only thing Paul was ever fully committed to, and that part hurt the most. It hurt like hell, like Satan punishing me himself. Paul's death was a terrible, unlikely, wrong accident, but I knew what his state of mind was like before it was silenced: loving. He was loving life, loving his achievements, and, additionally, loving me.

By now, everybody has left, except Jacob, Paul's mother, and I. Paul's far, far in the ground, and nobody wants to see the rest of the ordeal. In fact, Bella Swan could have been here with us, but the series of events that happened to her took that chance away. Tears—only for Paul and absolutely nothing else, because only he has that kind of power on me—fall down on my face, and they burn. The bright sun contributes to the burning, and I hate it. The sun never came out in his prime; the fact that it comes out at his downfall is unfair. I hate it all.

Nothing can ever compare to losing Paul. He lost more than anybody here, but is still in a better state than I am, because he never lost who he was. And when Paul left, the part of me that I liked the most went with him, because only he had the key to it. But that was just Paul; he could never lose his sense of self. He could lose everything but himself. His soul was always committed to thriving, yet his body couldn't. Maybe that was what kept him balanced. His soul kept him solid, but his body staying solid was entirely additional.

Sometimes I hope he's stable and unwavering in heaven; other times I hope he's not because then his soul would be different. And somewhere inside me, I know he'd dislike that. I'm sure of it. He wouldn't hate it, though; he could never hate anything. He always had room for additional things to be added to his interests, but hatred wasn't one of them. Hatred never added on to anything with him, and I'm positive of it.

Jacob nudges me gently. "It's over," he says. "Let's go."

Paul's not over. He's not over.

The sun dries my tears to nothing, like my accessible emotions never opened up in the first place, and that's when I know that it's definitely over.

"It's over," I repeat. "Let's go."

fin.