Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

I am full of longing. Longing for all of the things that I left behind, and for the things I haven't yet reached.

I was in grade ten. I slowly walk through the narrow hallway of Forks High School.

As I walked, I passed a girl who looked to be more of a supermodel than a student, her long blonde hair flowing halfway down her back, the sound of her heels clacking against the floor. I knew her. Her name is Rosalie Cullen. I used to be in love with her brother. He told me once that she would be my sister-in-law.

I knew I should be upset at the thought of him breaking my heart, but, surprisingly, I didn't.

I guess I just didn't feel anything anymore.

Age eight.

I have never known unhappiness lasting more than one hour. I am at the park climbing up the branches of a fir tree; pulling myself up to the sky. Surrounded by equally happy and naïve friends, laughter and girly shrieks harmonize in the air. The world is perfect. For the time being.

Somebody look this little girl in the eye and tell her what is about to happen. Somebody tell her to stop, that everything is about to fall apart. Tell her that she is going to die.

And, hey, maybe if you fucking cared for once you would have noticed the scabs and then scars on my arms. Everyone else noticed. Once, upon strenuous questioning, I concocted some whacked up story about how I was climbing up my house, slipped, and fell down. They all bought it though; perhaps because I am not the type of girl to ever imagine turning a blade on herself. Is that what you would have thought, too?

"Kayla! Kayla! Snap out of it!"

I blinked twice to see my best friend, Angela, waving her hands in front of my face.

Not my best friend. If only she knew what she would do to me the following year.

"Sorry, I was daydreaming, I guess."

She glanced over at Edward and gave me a worried look.

"Don't look at me like that!"

Angela sighed heavily. "Kay, it was six months ago. When are you going to move on?"

Never, I thought to myself.

"You don't get it, Angela." I looked down at my salad so she wouldn't see my tears. When I looked up I saw Edward at the other table looking at me. His gaze seemed apologetic. I didn't care the least. I stood up, picked up my lunch tray, and left.

I was thinking the other day, was I a bad daughter?

I am well aware that I never did anything overtly rebellious. Quiet and obedient was me. But maybe I was quiet when I should have talked to you. Maybe I was obedient when I should have done what I really wanted. I know that I should have shown some form of love or affection instead of being cold and distant towards you like I was. So, was it my failure that lead to our downfall? Was it even our downfall, or was it only ever yours?

I guess all of this thinking lead me to conclude that I was, indeed, a bad daughter. So now I can put my new judgment of myself up on my shelf of judgments right next to yours, which is that you were the fucking worst mother I could have possibly had.

I myself am surprised that I can still hold so much contempt for you after all of the years spent thinking things over.

He is kissing me like I am the most precious piece of the world that he can cling on to. I don't even need to tell you how loved I feel. And it occurs to me that I will never be able to love Edward as much as he loves me. How can I ever give him what he has given to me?

I pull back suddenly.

"What?" asks Edward.

"I don't know," I say, itching my eye. "I'm sorry." I look away. I feel like absolute shit. A pile of undeservedly loved shit.

"For what? What's this? Are you not in love with me?" he jokes.

God, am I in love with him? I can't leave Edward. Why? Because he loves me. You have to let others love you! But that's wrong! You never let your mom love you, you never let your dad love you, and you destroyed them both. Fuck off.

"I..have to go," I spit out.

"But, Kayla, we're doing great. Don't leave."

But even great isn't good anymore.

Walk away now. Tap, tap, tap. My shoes click on the floor. Tick, tick, tick. Time is moving too slowly, or quickly; I can't tell.

"I guess I just never go near the kitchen after school," I told her.

"Why are you so depressed?" asked Angela. The directness of her inquisition took me by surprise.

"I don't know," came my anticipated reply. Really, there were so many reasons I could list out – watching my mother cry every day and wondering if it was my fault, having you desert an already crumbling family, that awful suicide, and all of the ensuing damage to everything in the world I knew. But I had this idea that people didn't become like me for concrete reasons like that, but because it was built into them. Like a gene. A depression gene.

"Can I help?" offered Angela.

"I had a therapist. I guess you could say she made me feel happy sometimes, but never better about myself."

Everybody talks about what a great platonic relationship Edward and I shared.

"Dude, I can't believe you didn't fuck her once all summer," his buddy, Mike, commented.

In truth, that was not us at all. I always semiconsciously 'liked' him and I knew that he was attracted to me as well. If you really want the complete story, we did fuck that summer. Twice.

Entering the basement, I cling to Jess, feeling utterly uneasy. The music is loud. My head is spinning.

"Jess…" My voice is wavering.

When I feel heavy metal.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was ten, I came home from school. Whether this event transpired before or after I had fallen down the rabbit hole, I am still unclear. Perhaps it was during my descent, a tumultuous fall that never seemed to end.

For someone who pays painful attention to everything, my memories and recollections have become, for the most part, unpredictably disjointed and abstract. But that day still remains, after all of these years, permanently imprinted with precision onto everything I am.

Walking up the stony steps and letting myself into the house, I allowed my mind to wander around the possibilities of how I could spend my afternoon. A lovely afternoon of solitude. Was it odd, I contemplated, that I liked to be alone? That I liked to play, let my imagination flow, and essentially exist within the safe walls of seclusion?

As I had done every day after school, I progressed to the kitchen to eat a snack. It was there that I saw you. You were sprawled out on the floor. Was this really you? Was this what you had become? Was this the end result?

You were pretty, though you never quite illustrated beauty. I would see you smile and become confused because I couldn't decipher whether or not you were really happy. But there were moments, I recalled, that I felt you truly loved me. Of course, times also occurred when I thought that you bitterly resented me. This was the picture my mind drew of my you.

In reality, you were pale, gaunt, bloody, undoubtedly dead on the floor, your arms completely slit open. You looked like if I touched you, you would be cold.

I could feel the slow drainage of my thoughts. All emotions that I should have felt evaporated into the silent air, disappearing without a trace. Devoid of a single feeling inhabiting my body, I knelt down at your side and cupped my breakable, little hands around your face, which appeared even more so.

You were so cold.

It was January. We were both in ninth grade, though I knew you were seventeen. You told me about you being a vampire in October.

After school, you drove us to your house. You swept me up in to your arms before my feet could touch the ground. You ran, holding me, in to the trees, where I saw a picnic set up.

"Edward…" I started. "What's all this about?"

You smiled a crooked smile but didn't say anything you sat me down on the blanket and pulled out some food.

"Bon appetit!"

I ate. You watched me eat. After I finished, you leaned over and kissed me, so passionately that it knocked the breath right out of me.

We lay down on the blanket and kissed and kissed until we decided that we were ready.

That was our first time.

Ignoring the bus as it pulled to a stop, I hurried right past and continued forth, towards home at a reckless pace. Why was it that I still hadn't had a breakdown directly in concurrence with my mother's suicide but a less-than-feeble attemp t by a near stranger had driven me into this state?

Upon arriving at my house, I cried. I cried and cried. The uncertainty as to whom or what I was crying for made me cry more. As the earth continued to revolve, I curled up into a tight ball against the front door and shook and gasped for air, subsisting on the brink of a precipice where time did not have its usual effect.

However, following the standard pattern, the sky grew dark as the day ended and then began emitting light as the next inevitably came round. I awoke in my bed, still wearing the clothing of yesterday. It was afternoon already. I could tell by the intensity 

of the sunlight creeping into my room and covering me like a blanket. I stared into space for a while before dragging my indisposed self to the bathroom. I stripped off my stale clothing and stepped into the shower, letting the burning hot water envelope me.

I wanted to feel clean; I wanted to feel as if the tainted surface of my skin was being washed away. The need to be purified overtook me as I started to scrub violently. As I scoured away at my body, the scabs on my wrists began to appear useless, like a pestilence that had to be exterminated. I picked them off angrily, causing the blood to seep through the wounds once again. Suddenly, the flood of tears that I had come to know over the last twenty or so hours charged past my eyes. At that moment, the pounding water was not that emitted by the shower head but of the downpour of my tears. Why, oh why, had I succeeded so brilliantly in being a failure?

All of the toxic thoughts that I had ever forced upon myself returned to me, piercing as ever. But for the first time in my life, I tried to push them away. I didn't struggle against them because I was ready to fight them, but just because I couldn't handle them anymore. The knowledge was now within me that I did feel sad about losing my mother, not indifferent as I had convinced myself so effectively. And the realization that I didn't want to be alone made me lonelier than was conceivable. But these actualizations somehow carried a small shred of hope.

And something happened there. Something happened as my screaming tears, my defeated blood, and the cleansing water coalesced at the bottom of the tub, vanishing down the drain.

I said my goodbyes on Saturday. Some of them were nothing but formalities; others really mattered.

And now, I see Angela. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me?

Does she see a girl who is by many considered beautiful?

My whole life, I was disappointed because I thought that I had seen every side, every angle of you. But that is not possible until I let you see all of me. And a year ago I would have resigned myself to the fact that it is too late, but it is never too late. Not when I still have the rest of my life to live. And I think that you and I are going to be okay.

"Kayla?" Edward's soft, velvet voice whispered in to my ear.

"Yes, Edward?"

"I love you. So much."

I smiled. "I love you more."

"Impossible."

We kissed. He rolled on top of me and said in to my neck, "Kayla, I am going to marry you one day."

I frowned and pushed him, trying to roll free of his body on top of mine. He got the message, and released me.

"Edward, I can't stay human, you know."

He frowned. "Why not?"

"We won't be able to get married. You're forever seventeen. I'll age."

He kissed the tip of my nose.

"It doesn't matter to me. I love you."

Happy thoughts, happy moments. Of these my life is filled. My first memory is of my approximately four-year-old self finger painting at preschool – the beautiful reds, blues, and greens splattered across the paper (and the table, too). Trivial, but happy in the purest form.

However, asides from happiness, there exists an unbounded amount of other emotions, many of which I was much more susceptible to. Sadness. Anger. Uncertainty. Hopelessness.

English 9 Honours. As I had quickly discovered the previous year, to my disappointment, English Honours was not a class of students who demonstrated remarkable aptitude for the language, but those who wanted to be in the class. Very few of them were actually good at English, whatever that meant.

We sat in pods of four. My group consisted of Mike (one of those borderline jocks), Jasper (introvert), Eric (hopeless misfit), and myself (what was I, anyway?). I was delighted to find that these three people were smart, such a rarity. Sure, a fair amount of students received excellent marks, but only a small fraction of those students were truly smart as opposed to hard-working. I came to think of my English group as my intellectual peers. We were the academically gifted who were overachieving and under-working at the same time. Outside of class, we seldom offered each other anything more than a wave or quick "hello", but in class we talked about everything, each of us equally able conversationists.

After a dull short story unit, we were relieved to be studying poetry. Poetry was guaranteed to be amusing to some degree. Being the cynical teenagers we were, we'd snigger as we read lines that must have sounded good to the poet at the time. As we discussed the ballads, sonnets, and free verses in our textbooks, we managed to make every sorry thing sound stupid. By the time we were told to write our own poems, we had unearthed the secret: Write down cryptic amalgamations of words that sound like they could possibly mean something but are indecipherable. Oh, and it also helps to slap on a title that has nothing to do with the poem itself.

Jasper wrote things that came across as horribly dark, mysterious emo child rantings in the extreme. Mike got into the habit of using words abundant in syllables. I 

used many synonyms for "beauty" and "torment", concocting poems that sounded much too deep. Eric's poems were completely bizarre. We went on like this throughout the unit and received top marks.

One day, Mike wrote a haiku, following his usual technique. The finished result was this:

hypocritical

men bending self-made rules of

nonconformity

He titled it "Springboard". Go figure.

"Hey, maybe this poem actually has a meaning," I suggested during the mandatory peer edits. Three faces stared at me. A poem with actual meaning! Blasphemous!

I elaborated, "Hypocritical men bending self-made rules of nonconformity. It totally makes sense. I mean, nowadays, everyone tries so hard to be different and unique, to nonconform. It's almost what's expected. People act like they're trying not to fit in so they can fit in."

"Yes! That is so what I thought when I wrote it!" proclaimed Mike.

"So, men make a rule of sorts to not conform, and the hypocrisy is that this itself is conformity?" offered Jasper.

I nodded.

"It's so true though," commented Eric. "Everyone tries so hard to be different and it makes us even more similar in that we are doing the same thing – trying to be different."

"I know. I feel like some people who act like they don't care what other people think are doing just that – acting," said Jasper.

My stomach lurched a bit. This was me in a nutshell. All of the flamboyant outfits, all of the prancing around school acting like I didn't give a shit about others' opinions. It was just me trying to find a home in this mess. I suddenly felt guilty and regretted starting this whole discussion.

Luckily, no one ever accused me of the acting that I had been so blatantly doing.

A cry for help? More like an ear-splitting scream. But no one heard it.

"How much do you love me?"

Great! Take my love and measure it. Why was it that everything in my life had to be measured? My intelligence, my achievements, my social status, my size, and now the one thing I believed to be real, the one thing that was innumerable, beyond gauging – my love.

He must have sensed my sudden withdrawal.

I saw the potency of my words wash across his face.

"Oh, dear me! A dazzling display! The Divine Devon!"

I'll never forget his hyperbolic used of alliteration. I had taken my time to look my finest, primping and preparing as I had never done in my life, but surely I wasn't divine, as he had put it. Nor could I have been dazzling. And, "I'm not a display," I whispered into his lips as I kissed him passionately nonetheless.

"Of course, you're not," he mumbled back.

The veracity in his tone made me beyond guilty for deceiving him. I speak an unashamed lie and he genuinely recognizes it as the truth.

"Talking is easy," I said to him. "You can say anything you want."

"But can you?"

"Yeah."

"Then how come you can say that you hate me but you can't say that you love me?"

"I could say it."

"Then say it."

"I love you."

"That was a lie."

"Yes, but I also lied when I said I hated you."

He studied me inquisitively for a moment before saying that he had to go. I thought that he would kiss me but he just got up and left. Impossible as it was to just watch him abandon me, what could I have possible said? Everything bad that had occurred I had brought on myself. I realized that the more I tried to make myself perfect, the more the things that actually mattered – the things outside of me – became anything but.

So I watched him walk away. Just like I had watched me destroy myself. Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes became hours. Laying there as if murdered on the ground, I pondered: who was I? The girl who had been destroyed? Or the girl who had done the destroying?

I looked up at my dad. "Daddy, is Mommy dying?"

I clung to his hand as we walked quickly down the hospital corridor. Dad stopped and looked gently down at my face. "We're all dying," he finally said. Even to my eight-year-old self, it was clear that he chose his words carefully.

W e a r e a l l d y i n g.

For some reason, that really stuck with me. It's an awfully pessimistic perspective, but the truth is that we live our whole lives to work towards our inevitable deaths. People die for different reasons and under different circumstances, but they all 

die. Mortality is the common ground we share as humans. By the time I turned ten, five people close to me had passed away so, naturally, I thought a lot about death.

In the end, it's kind of a glass-half-empty-or-half-full thing. You can believe that you are put on this earth to eventually die. Or you can believe that you are put on this earth to live for whatever time you are given.

You love me now, but will you still think that I am wonderful when I am terrible?

"You're beautiful," he tells me.

He thinks I'm beautiful! Poor, poor misguided sheep.

"Why are you so fixated on your flaws?"

"It's all I have. I feel like I'm just an ugly mess drawn out of fault lines or something."

"You're beautiful," he whispered into my mouth. And my eyes flooded with warm tears because, although I still thought of myself as vile and abhorrent, for the first time, I believed that he thought that I was beautiful. I accepted that someone loved me. And I loved him back best I could.

It wasn't my first time, but it was special.

"What a perfect distopia we live in! Everything's perfect! Everything's so fucking perfect and it's so obvious that everything's wrong!"

Following my break-up with Edward, I was suddenly inspired to find someone new. On the rebound? Most definitely.

I kid. I wanted to prove to him that I didn't need him.

I promptly arranged to meet with the pretty boy who basically came onto me at the party last weekend.

Our conversation might as well have been

Me: Hello

Him: Hi.

Me: Are you retarded?

Him: Yes.

Me: Goodbye.

Him: Yes.

The rapid decline of intelligence will be the downfall of humanity. We'll kill ourselves long before we run out of resources – and we'll be too stupid to stop it.

When I was nine, I decided that I would be perfect. Of course, I realized, a large fraction of girls wished to be flawless. But I was serious. Being perfect was the sole thing that could make everything perfect, if there was any logic to that at all.

At the time, perfection, to me, was absolute. Goodness had varying degrees and levels and was subjectively defined, but perfection, in my mind, superlatively stood by itself atop the world and all existence. It was something that was fixed; something that would be instantly recognizable by any witness of it.

So, what was perfection? Was it anorexia? Drugs? Good grades? Late, drunken nights?

I eventually came to the conclusion that perfection was a moving target. And I told myself over and over that it was moving at a frequency where I would never be able to reach it, but I decided that I would throw my life away trying.

I spent the afternoon wandering around with Angela, who was completely wasted.

"Why weren't you at English today?" I asked. A cloud materialized in front of me as I respired.

Angela shrugged calmly. "Were you worried?" This did not sound like her. Angela was usually full with life, but this question did not sound arrogant but emotionless.

I examined her expression. "Yes, I was worried."

She laughed dismissingly. "I'm not going anywhere, you know. Never changing; always the same."

I didn't know what to say in reply to that. Under the exposing sun and surrounded by unpolluted air, Angela looked very pretty. Though it was inexplicable why, her wasted exterior was beautiful. Not radiant or gorgeous, but just plainly beautiful. Why was it that beauty and peace so rarely coincided? Or beauty and happiness, for that matter?

"It's easier to be bad than to be not good enough."

I snapped out of my reverie. It's easier to be bad than to be not good enough.

As we walked through the path amongst the dried out blackberry bushes and towering fir trees, both of us completely empty inside save for our thoughts, I wondered what exactly it was about what she said that rung so true in my head.