I.
You're seven when you first see her, sitting at her desk in your little first grade classroom. She's pretty, you think, for a girl. She has red hair and green eyes and she's wearing a purple barrette in her hair. It makes her look a little silly, while she also is wearing a pink dress and green shoes that don't match at all.
Your mother tells you that she probably dressed herself.
You don't really care and walk up to her anyway.
When she smiles at you, you notice a gap in the front, but you smile back nevertheless. You sit next to her and talk and laugh for what seems like forever and before you know it she's your very best friend.
II.
You're thirteen and in seventh grade when her hair catches the sunlight in just the right way and you realize you fell in love her. You don't know how or when or why, but you just know. It's the flutter in your chest when she looks at you, and the joy of just being near her, and the chocking sadness when you're apart.
She doesn't realize it and you think that she probably never will.
She doesn't.
III.
When you're fifteen you're on stage with your friends and she's the only one in the crowd. You play on the guitar, barely concealing a wince when you hear your lead singer howling into the microphone but you know you don't really succeed.
You can tell because she laughs and you suddenly think how cute her laugh is and the guitar falls from your hands when your fingers loosened. You stumble to try and get it and you do, you do, but everyone is laughing.
She's the only one trying to hide it and she rushes up to help you get back on your feet with urgent questions of "What happened, Simon?" and "Are you okay?" and it's a painful reminder of how hard you fell for her and how she hasn't noticed.
You say you're fine and it was just a blackout moment.
IV.
When you're sixteen you're in a club and she claims to have seen a murder. You saw nothing, but you're not willing to tell her she's crazy, so you try to just hint at the possibility subtly.
It doesn't work and she's so convinced.
By the next day you've worked up the courage to tell her how you feel but she is too distracted. Just before you say it, she takes off, leaving you with a lukewarm coffee and an aching heart, though she knows only of the coffee.
Later she goes home and is attacked and you find out her mom was kidnapped and nobody is willing to help her but a few supernatural kids that committed the murder she witnessed. You think you might go crazy.
V.
You're still sixteen, and it turns out she wasn't crazy at all. The superhuman kids really do exist, along with a bunch of other creatures, and it turns out that she's not human at all but just like them- a Shadowhunter. And she's fallen for the boy with the gold hair that you just can't help but despise.
There's another girl, nothing like her, but she still captures your attention. She has dark hair and dark eyes, about your height, and you can't help but think she's beautiful. And she knows she beautiful, using it to her advantage at every turn.
You're on your way to some warlock's apartment and you watch her the whole way there. It takes the opening of the warlock's door to startle you out of your staring. The warlock is clearly insane, you think, dressing like a lunatic who is in love with glitter.
To get away from them, you go and find a drink that turns you into a rat and you wind up biting someone because you can't help but want nobody but your best friend near you.
VI.
A few weeks later you have the most traumatizing experience in your entire life. And, by the end of the ordeal, you know your life will be very, very long and there is no hope of ever getting her to fall in love you now. The thought would have killed you if you weren't already dead.
Stuck forever and ever and ever at the awkward age of sixteen, while everyone else ages and dies around you but that goddamned warlock- you can't image a worse fate. But the fate is yours, though, and you will realize just how truly awful it is later.
VII.
There was a time where you bore a mark on your forehead that prevented you from being killed. And boy, did people, Downworlders and Nephilim alike, want you dead. Because you are first Daylighter, the first vampire to be able to walk in the sunlight without a fear of being burned to death. And people hate you for it, when it wasn't even your fault.
VIII.
You participate in a war, first, against her crazy-ass father, then against her even crazier- ass brother. You hate both men, even though they are so deeply entwined with her life.
Before that, though, both the beautiful dark-girl girl and a lovely werewolf girl have crushes on you, and for the first time in your life, you don't know exactly what you want to do. You like them both, immensely, and may even love the former, but those issues have to wait because of the aforementioned crazy-ass men.
Your mother also kicks you out of your house and it's the first time that you truly despise your Jewish origins and religion…or any sort of religion, really, aside from the Shadowhunter's. You never really see your mother again.
IX.
Eventually you fall in love with the dark haired girl and it's only when she's nearly forty years old that you realize that you have to break up. She knows it too and both of you hate it, but at that point you say goodbye to her and your best friend and that golden boy she fell in love with and married. You leave New York behind and receive news of the dark-haired girl's death four months later.
After that, you head to Europe, thinking that you can never really go back to your home country without thinking of her.
X.
Turns out, though, that you go back anyway around two hundred years later, to finally say the goodbyes you should have said centuries before. You see the warlock again, and the dark-haired girl's bother, who had been turned to a vampire and then later a Daylighter when he just couldn't handle being far from the goddamned warlock for very long. You're pleased to see they're still together, but don't stay with them long, finding both of them to be holders of memories of your best friend and the people you came to think of family tainted by time and grief.
When you visit their graves you are unprepared for the waves of despair and grief that soon overcome you, the emotions so strong they render you helpless and immobile to do anything but kneel and cry as you rest you head on the cold, dark stones you never want to see again.
XI.
It takes some more time- another seventy years- but you eventually find it within you to stay in New York without breaking down. The memories are not as tainted as they used to be, and they bring you a sick sort of comfort, and you manage to stay in New York for another century.
One day, you hear that the warlock and the Shadowhunter-turned-vampire both were killed in an accident. It is a shock, and for a while you just are in a sort of numb state, confused as to where exactly you've been all these years. You can't say that you knew either men very well, but they were a constant in your life since you were sixteen and now they're gone and you finally, finally realize, waking up a morning a while later, that you are finally, truly, utterly alone.
And it takes your breath away far easily than the beauty of your best friend or the werewolf or even the dark-haired girl ever could. With that thought, you scramble desperately for their faces, but realize with dread that you can barely remember them. What shade of green were her eyes? What shadow of black was her hair? You can't remember.
XII.
A few hours later you're standing in your bathroom with the glass shards of the mirror in the sink behind you, one of the larger pieces in your right hand as you wait for the tub to fill with water. The same temperature of warmth as that coffee from the shop where you almost told your best friend you loved her.
When the tub is full, you strip down to nothing and step into the water. In a fit of nostalgia, you slide your glasses on your face and sink into the water until it reaches your chin. It's warm, and will become warmer, you know, with your blood.
The glass cutting your skin is something you can hardly feel. But you see the blood pouring steadily from your wrists and turning the water from a clearish blue to red. It looks like something from a movie, almost, because in your wildest dream you hadn't ever really contemplated suicide. But here you are. Your eyes slip closed and you head lolls to the side, the glasses breaking on impact.