Chapter 61 #2
I slammed into the door, and it burst open, my invisibility flickering and weakening until eventually it just stopped. I stood in the middle of his office, which was now empty. What did they do with his things? Throw them away?
I wished I’d taken everything when I’d taken his degrees.
Nobody even questioned me then, and I could’ve kept going until they did question me, at which point I could lie to them and use my aspect to ensure they believed me.
Mason sometimes implied that I wasn’t being an angel correctly, but he wasn’t teaching me well.
I didn’t exactly give a fuck about my morals anymore. Why should I?
Standing in his empty office made the lump in my throat grow, tears pricking at the backs of my eyes.
Like he never existed.
I could hardly stand to spend another second in the barren office, so I dashed out and headed straight for the stairs, racing down flight after flight until I burst out on the first floor, heart racing and hands shaky.
The idea that his dissertation was probably still in the library populated in my brain, so I speed walked to the Archway next.
I frantically scanned the aisle with the past student dissertations, praying his would still be here. Eventually, I found it and snatched it off the shelf, then hid it in my robes and left the building. Nobody would care that I didn’t check it out, because nobody cared about Micah’s dissertation.
Nobody cared about him at all.
Since the buses were no longer running through campus, I had to walk quite a distance to get off campus to a normal bus stop for the city.
I kept Micah’s dissertation and my diploma under my arm with my graduation cap, trying to ignore the sting in my eyes, the lump in my throat, the hatred in my veins.
I’d become such an angry, hateful person. A horrible person.
I despised almost everyone.
In one of my lectures, I’d overheard a girl talking to her friend about her breakup. She was very sad, almost to the point of tears. Long distance wasn’t working, or something. I wanted to fucking strangle her.
THAT DOESN’T MATTER.
WHO CARES?
I DON’T FEEL SORRY THAT YOU AND YOUR BOYFRIEND brOKE UP BECAUSE MINE IS DEAD.
GET THE FUCK OVER IT.
She hadn’t even been talking to me, and I still could barely contain myself.
To me, every other problem was stupid.
I had zero empathy.
I kicked a rock down the sidewalk in front of me, and every time it skittered to the side, or I didn’t kick it perfectly, I became angrier.
My heart was beating really hard. I kicked it again, watching it bounce into the grass.
Then I stomped over and grabbed it, throwing it straight down onto the sidewalk as hard as I could.
A piece of the rock chipped off, but I didn’t feel better at all.
I continued walking, leaving campus behind, wishing I could shatter the entire Earth with my rage.
My heart was about to explode out of my chest, my pulse getting uneven and shaky.
I focused my eyes on the sidewalk, walking and walking and walking.
If I only thought about moving my legs, maybe I could breathe again.
Eventually, I reached a bus stop along a route that would take me closer to my trailer, and I waited there.
I grabbed the metal pole the sign was on top of and squeezed it, pressing my fingers against the small circles cut into the metal until their edges hurt my skin. The bus pulled up, and I climbed on, dropping myself into a window seat.
My leg wouldn’t stop bouncing for the entire bus ride, and I kept biting my tongue so I wouldn’t cry. It felt like my chest was being crushed by a heavy weight.
Once we got to my stop, I practically ran off the bus. I didn’t even thank the driver. I needed to be home before my grief swallowed every piece of me, before it grabbed my ankle and yanked me down beneath its waves, fast and hard.
I walked as quickly as I could along the crumbling streets, almost breaking into a jog as my eyes stung and my nose ran. Everything was bubbling up inside of me, threatening to spill over any second, overwhelming me until my head was spinning.
I just need to make it home.
Hold it together until then.
I was running now, boots thudding on the pavement, graduation gown billowing in the wind, hair tangling behind me, hand still gripping Micah’s dissertation and my diploma and my graduation cap.
But I wasn’t going to make it. I tried to run faster, my vision blurring with my tears, but I was breaking apart at the seams.
Finally, a sob burst out of my chest, my entire body shutting down.
I fell to my knees in the gravel, sobbing until I couldn’t breathe, my fingers pressed to sharp rocks, tears and snot pouring down my face.
I couldn’t catch my breath, no matter how hard I tried.
Every time I inhaled, it hurt more and more and more.
I coughed and choked and cried on my hands and knees on the side of the road, feeling like the entire world had been ripped out from under me.
Like I was in complete freefall, and I was realizing all over again that he was gone.
I couldn’t believe that he’d died.
Micah was dead.
It took my breath away and my head was spinning because how the fuck was that real? How had I been going through my life all these months with him gone? How had so much time passed already? None of it felt real.
I screamed and sobbed as the world crumbled around me.
And I couldn’t fathom how I would ever be okay.
He wasn’t on vacation. He wasn’t busy grading reports. He wasn’t just not speaking to me.
He was gone and I was never going to see him again.
Ever.
The weight of immortality pushed down on me, crushing my lungs, bending and breaking my ribs until they punctured my heart.
My heart which had stayed soft through my transformation.
When everything else became strong and able to heal quickly and able to function well, my heart remained needy and fragile and sad.
I thought about his kitchen table and how I would never see him sitting there again, already working on his laptop when I came down for breakfast, or doing the same thing late at night. How the fuck was that possible?
Why did time keep passing? How?
I wished it would just fucking stop forever.
Someday in the future it would be five years since he’d died. Ten.
I never wanted that to happen.
Every day that passed was another day farther away from the time he’d been alive. Time kept putting more and more space between us, and it was making me sick. I felt nauseous thinking about it.
Christmas would pass this year without him, and it would be so difficult. It would be impossible.
But somehow, it was even more impossible to think about the second year without him.
The third year.
The fact that this misery was going to continue forever.
I couldn’t wait for him to come back, wait for this to be fixed. There was no point at which relief would finally wash over me, and everything would be okay. All I could do was learn to cope with his death better, learn to grow around his absence.
But I didn’t want to fucking cope.
I wanted him to be alive again.
I didn’t want to try figuring out how to live in a world where I’d chosen the exact path that led to losing him. It’d been my fault.
My fault for fighting, my fault for getting out of the truck, my fault for walking too close to the road.
This was all because of me.
I turned over and laid down on my back, trying to breathe deeply.
My hands and face were numb. Tears trickled down the sides of my temples into my hair as I stared at the gray clouds.
A dark-winged bird flew above, high in the sky, wings caught on the wind.
Maybe I’ll stay here until the grass grows over my body and I sink into the dirt, until the worms try to eat me but only find my golden blood and immortal angel flesh.
I didn’t know how long I laid there like that. One car drove past me but did not slow down.
At some point, I was able to force myself to my feet, force myself to start walking. Now, I was numb again. It only took a few more minutes to get back to my trailer, which was when I realized I didn’t have a single picture of myself on my graduation day.
I sat on the steps of my trailer and opened the selfie camera on my phone, then held my diploma up next to my tear stained face, mascara and eyeliner tracked all down my cheeks, my nose and eyes red from crying, snot on my upper lip.
I couldn’t force myself to smile, but I took the picture anyway. Just to have it. To prove that this day actually happened and that I now had a degree in chemical engineering.
To whoever fucking cares, I graduated.
But nobody cared.
Micah was the only person who’d ever cared about me like that.
Inside, I crawled under my bed to grab the box of Micah’s things I’d stolen from his house and his office over the past months.
I had all his degrees and now his dissertation.
I laid them all out around me on the thin carpet, all three of his and all one of mine.
I held his dissertation in my arms, pressed to my chest. Every word in here had been written by him. More quiet tears slid down my face.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do now.
It was over.
I graduated.
I had no jobs lined up.
I had nothing.
Micah couldn’t even be a reference for me anymore because he was gone.
All the work we’d done together in his lab seemed to be for nothing because there wasn’t any real record of it.
The distillation column still stood in his lab, gathering dust now.
I was sure that if anyone walked past the doorway, it didn’t register in their mind.
They didn’t even remember there was a room there.
With tears in my eyes, I took out the small photo printer Mason got me for my birthday and printed out the picture of myself with my diploma, then slapped it into my journal.
A few tears landed on the page, leaving wet spots behind.
I uncapped my blue pen and scrawled a short caption below the photo.
Second worst day