My heart is beating rapidly, threatening to burst out my chest. I pick up the phone, and enter the number slowly. My fingers are trembling so much they can barely find the right keys, as I type in the number. I have the phone book next me, though heaven knows I don’t need it. The waves of time haven’t quite yet washed your number off my heart, right where you last signed it. Two weeks ago. The worst day of my life. First ring. Second ring. Except not really, because every day since then has been worse. Third ring. I’m sweating. Fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“ Um, hi,”
“Who is this?”
“Uhh.. Sara.
There’s a pause. It’s just long enough to be uncomfortable. I can almost hear my heart breaking once again, the old cracks unsealing themselves.
“Sara Robinson, your best friend. Remember? Your best friend…forever. I… I was the one who held your hand in the hospital, you know, the day after you tried to..leave.” “Oh,”
“I was the one who.. who…,”
“I’m so sorry, but I don’t remember”
“But how could you forget” I whisper through the tears “you promised to love me when there was nobody else in the world who would.”
Silence, except this time it wasn’t uncomfortable. Not yet.
“I have something else to tell you. Promise not to be mad,” she tries to say something, but I just keep talking.
“You see, I know you were in love with him. Believe me when I say I knew that. But sometimes knowledge just isn’t enough to stop ourselves from doing things that hurt people we love. So anyway, without you, I was so lost. Try and imagine the loneliest place in the world. Except, it isn’t really because my heart was even lonelier. So even though you were so in love with him, even though we had come so close to losing you forever, I told him I loved him. It was so complicated,” I pause, and swallow thickly. I can’t get the last part out.
“Sara,” she says, jolting me back to reality “I don’t remember any of this”. A fresh wave of tears push their way out. How could she not remember? She was here only a month ago. Even shorter than that, two weeks of torment, of not sleeping, of a lonely heart begging for the sweet kiss of death. Two weeks since he committed suicide. Since I cost us both the only person we had ever loved more than each other.
“He committed suicide!” I can hear my voice rising with hysteria. I need to scream some sense into her. She needs to remember, to hate me, anything. I just can’t be alone anymore.
“HE IS GONE! Huntington Beach is quieter than it’s ever been, I’ve ruined both of our lives. The silence is driving me crazy, the loneliness is slowly suffocating me. How can you be calm?! Scream at me, tell me you hate me, or love me anyway. I can’t be alone anymore!”
“Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach. Wait, you said Sara Robinson right?”
“Yes” I slur through my tears.
“Sara, that was twenty years ago. I went to high school in Huntington Beach twenty years ago.”
Literary Musings 