Ask anyone else and they will tell you it started with her arrival a year ago. In reality, it started before that. It started even before the shooting in the diner, before he bared his soul to me and I fell head over heels in love. It started in 1947, when an alien ship landed in the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, and began a whirlwind of events that would lead to me, here, lying on this floor.
I wonder sometimes if I could have done something different, if there was an act I could have performed, something I could have said that would have changed things. But after a year, my mind still draws a blank. Destiny has this way of ruining your life forever with one snap of her fingers.
That first time, with him, it wasn't perfect; it wasn't something out of a movie or a romance novel. It was painful, and rushed, and awkward. But it made me feel like nothing had ever done before. I felt alive, wanted, whole. My blood was singing through my veins, wanting nothing more than to touch and be touched and to drown in him. Afterwards, we held each other, and I cried.
Now, I have my vicious circle of pain and emptiness and emptiness and pain, knowing that everything I touch will turn to coal, like some kind of twisted Midas touch. The first guy I slept with, after him, was the only time I cried after sex again. He looked at me, confused, and I just shrugged him off and walked home and sat on my bed and cried. Great, wracking sobs, the kind where you can't breathe and you feel like your heart is going to explode. After that, the emptiness became something I got used to, a companion, and eventually, an addiction. Faceless guy after faceless guy, I must have slept with nearly the whole town, and not a single one of them tried to help.
They knew though. I could see it in their faces as they looked at me across the quad at school. But did one of them help me? Did a single one of them turn to me with compassion and ask me why? Not even my supposed best friend, the one who had been my rock through all these years. Instead, wrapped up in a man that was really just a boy who would one day abandon her, like mine did me, she turned away, walked away, into her own vicious spiral of pain.
Funnily enough, the only one that ever expressed any concern at all for me was the one that I would have least expected. Blonde curls that dominated my nightmares soon became less of a thing to be feared, and more a thing to be pitied. She only ever wanted love, the same as me, and so when she saw my downward spiral, she did the one thing that could have saved me, had I wanted to be saved. She took him, and them, and left for Florida for a month, hoping that the time away would give me time to recover.
By then though, I was past the point of no return. It was too little, too late, and the absence of the group only served to highlight the fact that he was gone forever, and I finally gave up. I quit my job, started skipping school, and by the time they returned, I was unrecognisable. A shell of my former self. Destiny will do that to you.
And now? Now, I've decided to do something about it. One last shot at filling the void, if you will. The gun in my hand feels right, feels like it belongs. There's Destiny for you. I lay here on this floor, broken, bleeding, bruised, scarred, torn, shredded, and finally accepting that the final blow will not be dealt by him, or them, or even her, but by me. Destiny won, and I accept Hell with open arms. Here's to Destiny.