It's 6am and you can't breathe for crying. You thought everything you had built up, everything you had worked for since escaping your old life, you thought it had mattered but you realise, it doesn't. Things don't matter and people don't mean what they say. Sometimes, people who love you, leave you. Sometimes they get drunk with prostitutes in the back of their car and drive into lorries and god damn them, they leave you. And fuck, it never won't hurt.
You want to love Tony. You want him to be the one. It's not even that you don't love the man because you could, you do. But he isn't quite enough. Nobody ever is. But the sex is hot and he fills a hole and he makes you laugh which you think you'd forgotten how to. So you make do, not ever realising that just because you are alive it doesn't mean you are living.
He says he loves her, but you don't believe him. Would you believe him if he told you he loved you instead? Probably not. You don't believe in love anymore but the way his name runs through your blood like an ache and how his smile makes you remember it's okay to be alive makes you want to believe in something. His fingerprints are surely etched onto your skin by now and you love how he calls your name in a way you know he never calls hers.
You swear you didn't know it was possible to feel this way. Fuck, nothing can numb the pain these days. You drink and you drink but there's a hole and you cannot fill it. It had always been him, even if you had never truly had him. You know he craved you like you did him and you can only wish that was enough. He is dead and so is any piece of you that was worth keeping. You're terrified because you're sure the best days of your life are over, buried with him.
You lose everybody, you should have known this would end in tragedy but his jacket and his lingering cigarette smell and the way his gentle heartbeat could lull you to a sense of safety made you fall anyway. Damn, you swore you wouldn't put yourself through this again but love seems to be your most elaborate form of self harm. And you do love him. And that's how you know it will end badly, eventually. Because you love him, and remember, you don't believe in love.
No one knows what to say to you and you think that's the worst part. The pitiful looks from those that believe you, the disgusted ones from those that don't. You barley register them because all you can see his his face and your door and then darkness. You think darkness is all you will ever see again. He has taken so much and also, he has taken your home. A place with a thousand haunted ghosts that will forever be tainted. Now you do not see Paul when you walk through the door and you don't hear Liam either. You just see your rapist and oh, my darling, I know that's what hurts the most.
She was something you could never quite place a finger on. Warm and gentle and always so embracing. She took you under her wing and you will never forgive yourself. You poisoned her. You let her in, let her be the only other true friend you have and now she is gone too. It's like you seep with pain. It oozes from you and whoever dares touch you becomes infected. God, you wish you'd been in that car when Paul died. You wish he'd taken you with him.
You'd almost been counting down til this moment. The minute when it would all crash down at your feet. Granted it happened quicker than you expected but you're sure it lasted longer than most would have guessed. What hurts is that you'd let yourself be happy. You had finally rid your demons if only temporarily but that was okay because for those moments, it was wonderful. He was that bridge. The shelter when the rain is pouring and you cross under it in the car and everything is calm for a minute but then you keep going, always moving forward and the bridge goes and the rain is harder than before. Louder, heavier. Your heart is getting harder to carry with every second and you can't let him back in to hold it anymore.
Out of all the deaths you have faced, your daughter's is the hardest. Mostly because you didn't want her at first and you spend sleepless nights and drunken days agonising over how you could have been spending all those times loving her as much as you did in the end. And you truly did, as scared as you were. You loved her like you had loved nobody before. Like when you were five and the teacher at school felt sorry for you on your birthday, when your mother forgot again. The doll in that beautiful dress she handed you, the one all the little girls in your class had, it made you so happy but before that, you hadn't even realised how much you had wanted one. The day you came home to find your baby brother standing over the fragments of her, your heart crumbled. The moment they told you, years later, there was nothing they could do, your heart crumbled.
You were starting to feel normal again, if you had ever known what normal was. Now, you were a murderer and again, you lived to tell the tale. You hated that, you hated how you always survived because the pain was so agonising and you had to live through it. Guilt drowns you, like it has done most of your life and you wish, you wish you could swap places with one of them. With Paul or Liam, with Kal or Maddie or Hayley or your baby or your best friends love of her life, her Dean. You'd bring any of them back, all of them if you could. You'd trade in a heartbeat to just stop your heart beat.
You were scared at first, to smile again. You were scared to let Nick hear you laugh after he told you how it was his favourite sound. Scared to say I love you back even though you felt it. Everything ends in disaster but maybe, you've had your fair share. He's kind and loyal and you had to give it a go, to see if you could be something. And you were. You are. You two are quite something. And my love, it's magnificent.
Your story doesn't end yet but for once, you're happy about that. Don't get me wrong, you're frightened. You don't believe there can truly be a happily ever after for they belong in fairy stories for children and you never did get a bedtime story as a little girl. But you're willing to hold his hand and kiss his lips and let him be your prince charming, at least for now. Because wherever it ends up, the ride with him seems to be worth it.