3,000 Mile Heartbreak by Sawyer Hawkins
3,000 Mile Heartbreak
by Sawyer Hawkins
It was 90 degrees, and I was melting.
Melting out of my own skin and wishing that the memories would melt along with the hollow shell left behind. But there they were, holding on relentlessly, suffocating me slowly, and waiting for me to cave. Those memories took a six-foot-three form with shaggy blond hair and pools of icy blue eyes worth drowning in. Every time I closed my eyes, I sank further into their depths, remembering every time I’d trusted them. Trusted him.
It was June, and the sun was assaulting my skin. I’d regretted letting him drag me to California since the day we’d stepped out into the dry heat. My friends’ voices had echoed in my head, their hasty warnings bouncing around in my skull until I got another headache. But his voice had dominated theirs, eliminated their worries, and I had believed him. Every single word.
We’ll prove them wrong, he’d said. We’ll be happy.
But his happiness had manifested into something that I’d never expected—my own dreams being pushed into the flames of a California wildfire so his could escape unscathed to live another day. And there I stood among the billowing mixture of orange and yellow, a powerful heat surrounding me and smoke engulfing my vision, realizing that he had successfully trapped me with no air, no water, and no way out.
Feeling like it was an eternity, I stood there watching my world burn around me—knowing that he could save it if he just smothered the flames. Carried me out. Instead, he chose to live while I withered away slowly, and deep down, I knew that it was my own fault. Because I’d had a choice before I’d left, and I had chosen to settle for somebody who wouldn’t share his oxygen.
Now it’s negative ten, and I’m freezing as the New York northeastern buries me.
I’m freezing out the six-three form that haunts my dreams every time I fall asleep, wishing that my damaged leathered skin would shatter before it thawed so I wouldn’t have to think about all the times he touched me with a purpose and lied to me with a plan.
But it doesn’t work, and every time I look in the mirror, I see his proud ghost smiling at the damage he inflicted, as if he sees the internal scars covering my heart.
It’s January now, and the blizzard consumes me until I’m buried under the weight of the heavy wet snow, until his image disappears among the feathered flakes. I tell myself that it’s better this way, but the way my heart hammers in my chest tells me a different story.
I miss you , I tell his memory. I love you.
How could I not, when he was the first?
First kiss.
First love.
First everything.
It seems only fair he’s the first to break me.
I wish I didn’t let him.
* * *
Every day passes in a blur, like my life is stuck in fast-forward. January rolls by, and I’m too blinded by flurries and whiteouts to reabsorb the beauty of the central New York weather I left behind for the future I was promised. February passes, no Valentine, only chills of old memories that pebble my pale skin the way his lips used to. March comes, and the potential for warmer weather turns into a tease as a new storm rolls in with nothing but blankets of suffocation and crushed dreams.
And for once, I think, I miss California.
Not him. Not the way he’d wake me with his head between my thighs or his fingers tweaking the button of nerves that’d cause me to beg him for more. More of him. More of his body. More of anything he’d give me.
No.
I miss the sunshine and the warmth and the anger and the sadness, because at least I felt something other than emptiness back then.
April. Spring flowers blossom, and color consumes the once-dead ground. Everything that was once too white, too pure, is shifting so life slowly creeps back in. Yet I stand outside, letting the crisp air nip my face as the wind battles the sun, holding onto winter like the empty and depressed state of the season is the only thing that gets me.
“You’ve been standing out here for twenty minutes,” Olivia scolds me, wrapping her coat tightly around her. From the corner of my eye, I see my best friend’s disapproving expression, lips twitching into a frown as she studies me.
That’s what my friends do these days—study me like I’m under a microscope, picking me apart until they figure out what the diagnosis is.
Can’t be a broken heart, Milly would say. Not if it wasn’t really love.
But what is love? Surely there’s more than one kind—like the type between family and friends. There’s more than just what I felt for him. The kind that left faint flutters in my stomach when I was a teenager with a silly crush. Or the tingles that prickled through my limbs whenever I was around his older brother Ben. None of that meant anything, though. At least, that’s what I told myself, even when I realized that my life was a domino effect.
My childhood best friend introduced me to Ben. And Ben introduced me to his brother.
Maybe the flutters I felt for Ben were simply a feeling of gratitude toward what he’d done. It explained why they were gone now. If they were real, wouldn’t they have stayed? Pestered me like all the residual feelings I have for his brother? It wasn’t always tingles and sparks, but there were just as many good as bad.
I’m startled when strong arms wrap around my waist from behind me, but ease into the hold when a soft kiss is peppered on my cheek. “Happy birthday, baby,” he says against my skin.
Snapping from the drawn-out memory, I say, “It’s getting warmer.”
“It’s not warm enough to stand out here, though,” Olivia tells me.
She stares at me while I study the flowers popping up in the garden, wanting to reach out and touch them—feel their texture and absorb their colors. My foot itches to step over the hopeful petals, crushing them like he crushed me, and the pettiness of the moment weighs on my chest. Would that make me feel better?
“I like it,” I find myself admitting, the secret whisked away by the breeze.
“Because it’s the opposite of what Jake likes?” she questions. The sting of his name sends shivers down my spine, the air becoming ten times colder until I think my skin may shatter. Just like I wanted before—anything to escape the memories he plagued me with when I finally found the courage to leave.
He left you , the wind whispers into my ear. It eggs me on, taunts me, wants me to break.
Olivia walks up behind me, her shoes crunching against the firm grass, and places her hand on my shoulder. It’s a soft gesture—one of friendship, a promise that she’s still here despite the distance I put between us. She didn’t like Jake, and all my attempts to get her to see that he wasn’t all bad had failed. She saw him for what he was—emotionally damaging. Abusive. Short tempered. I tried to defend him to no avail, and now I see how pointless the endeavor was, because she was right all along.
He’s a good person, I’d say over and over.
I was trying to convince myself as much as her.
Shrugging off her hand, I reply, “Don’t say his name.”
“You need to move on.”
He won’t let me, I answer silently.
He won’t. Or I won’t?
Instead, I close my eyes. The blame teeters between him and me, and my ability to walk the fine line between love and hate dissipates as time passes. One day I blame him, the next I miss him. And I can’t help but wonder, does he miss me too?
Opening my eyes, I look back down at the flower. I stepped on it without even realizing, the once-perfect petals now nothing but crumpled tatters on the ground. Letting out a heavy breath, I find myself looking over my shoulder, eyes locking with Olivia’s.
“I know,” I admit, offering her the tiniest smile. Moving on would mean accepting that I played his game for so long—let him win. He controlled me like a pawn, and I let him. I let him take me to California for a job I didn’t want him to have, cry on my shoulder when I just wanted to cry on his, and yell at me when I didn’t do exactly what he said. We were toxic, and maybe the radiation from our relationship was what seeped so deep into my bones that I still feel it.
She nods once. “Come inside. I’ve got hot chocolate we can make.”
My mouth waters over the invitation, so I let her pull me inside. When I look back at the defeated flower, I see the form of a shattered heart, and I realize mine is no longer beating inside of my chest.
* * *
Perched on the windowsill and watching the rain drizzle down the dirty glass, I count the empty seconds as they tick by. Two, three, four, five. My ears home in on the mixture of birds chirping and traffic passing by, the soft sounds of summer taking over. It’s been a year since I left my home, my friends and family, to follow him. Yet his reflection still looks back at me through every surface it can.
“Summer?” Milly calls from the doorway. My head shifts to look at her pinched expression, her words shaky. With what? Nerves? Uncertainty?
Before she can say anything else, a familiar figure steps out from behind her. My lungs constrict, and I’m suffocating at the sight of familiar blue eyes as they draw me in. It takes too long before I’m able to breathe again, and when oxygen finally floods my body, I realize his hair isn’t blond. It’s brown.
“Summer,” Ben greets, eyes swarming with worry over my sullen expression. Pressing my lips into a firm line, I take him in. He’s taller than his brother by at least a few inches. His hair is longer, darker, and less made up. Unlike him , Ben doesn’t fill it with gel until it barely moves in the wind, and Ben’s style is much more laidback than the expensive designer clothes his brother insisted on wearing.
Slowly, I find myself standing. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s about—”
“Don’t,” I warn, cutting him off. “Don’t say his name.”
My friends think I’m being dramatic, but saying his name out loud slices through me.
Ben’s tongue swipes across his bottom lip, his teeth drawing it in as he nods in understanding. He’s the sensible one—maybe it was the three years he had on his brother. Older and wiser and all that.
Milly looks between us, eyes raking skeptically over Ben. “So, he’s…?”
She doesn’t need to finish the question to know the answer. All she has to do is look at his eyes. I used to want to drown in the color when I stared at his brother, to break through the ice they so often portrayed when he looked at me. But Ben’s eyes are warm, inviting. They remind me of summers on the beach with my family, back when the only thing that could break my heart was the possibility of NSYNC breaking up.
“I know he’s not your favorite person,” Ben begins, “but I knew you’d want to know.”
Milly tries interjecting, like she knows what’s coming. But Ben’s determination, something that he shares with his brother, overpowers her weak attempts to dispel the conversation.
“He passed away.”
I stare at him, eyes unblinking. If my heart was still in my chest, if his brother hadn’t ripped it out long ago, it might have stopped. Cracked. Stilled. Something . Instead, I’m frozen where I stand, eyes drying when they should be wetting over the news.
Voice cracked, I ask, “When?”
Ben’s eyes slip to Milly’s, and she pales. “About ten months ago.”
My brain goes into overdrive to process that, but there’s nothing to grasp onto to absorb that kind of blow. I no longer breathe; my limbs go numb under me. I feel myself swaying, until two strong hands catch me as I topple toward the floor.
Voices call out my name, but I’m too far gone.
All I can think is, he’s been dead this whole time.
And based on Milly’s face, she knew.
* * *
The grave is covered in grass, the stone practically new. My fingers trace the letters of his name, the back of my head burning from the people watching me. They’re waiting for me to black out, to break down. For a year, I cried myself to sleep almost every night—felt numb of emotion and feeling toward everything. Since I found out a week ago, I haven’t shed one tear.
I wonder if it’s because I’ve got nothing left inside of me—no sadness, no heartbreak. I’ve been mourning our breakup since the day it happened. Maybe, just maybe, it’s finally over.
A hand settles on my shoulder, and the strong assault of aftershave to my nose tells me it’s Ben. My eyes land on his as he kneels next to me before slowly refocusing on his brother’s grave.
Jake’s grave.
“This whole time,” I whisper, shaking my head. “How didn’t I know?”
Ben puts his arm around my shoulder, tugging me into his side in a firm hug. “I tried calling you, but your friends answered. They said you shouldn’t know. Not until you’d moved on.”
I absorb the warmth he offers, leaning my head against his shoulder. Deep down, maybe I knew. It could have been the reason why I felt so empty—my soul telling me what my friends didn’t.
And my friends…I wasn’t ready to forgive them. They only wanted to save me from more heartbreak, but they knew how much Jake meant to me. Even when he didn’t deserve my love, he had all of it.
“You stopped living when he did,” Ben adds, sadness threaded into his words. He shifts so I sink into him, his chin resting on the top of my head. “But you’re still alive, Summer.”
I close my eyes, soaking in the moment. He doesn’t feel like Jake. He somehow feels better.
“He wasn’t buried in California,” I blurt, as if that’s all I’m able to fathom in the moment.
There’s a pregnant pause. “He never belonged there. It was never his home.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat. I never belonged there either.
I want to ask him how Jake died but decide that I don’t need to know. It won’t change the fact he’s gone and never coming back, or what he did to me. And Ben doesn’t need the reminder—to relive news that I couldn’t begin to comprehend getting.
“I thought I was broken,” I tell him, like it matters. Maybe it does. “I don’t know why.”
Maybe the reason I held onto the heartbreak was because I thought there was a chance Jake could show up with the ability to break me all over again. My vulnerability swept me off my feet and dragged me nearly 3,000 miles. It’s ironic: the place Jake went to live out his dreams is the place he perished, and while he’s buried here in New York, my heart is six feet under somewhere in the California heat.
“I don’t think we always understand why we love as hard as we do, or break so easily,” he comforts, brushing my hair back. “But what we strive for is the ability to put the pieces back together when the time is right.”
Blinking, I inquire, “What if the pieces aren’t put back right, and I’m flawed forever?”
What if I can’t move on? Forgive my friends?
Sincerity washes over his tone as he answers, “Then you’re human, just like the rest of us.”
Silence engulfs us as we stare at the grave, and in the distance, I hear the faint thump of a heartbeat. It’s weak, but there, sending vibrations into the ground with every beat. Absorbing the foreign feeling, I let it consume me as Ben holds me tighter.