My brain exploded onto a word doc. Unedited, raw, and unfinished.

She couldn’t have told you when it happened. It was a lot of moments bubbling over into one, the one where she realized she’d felt disconnected with him for a long time. She always felt too damaged, too vulnerable, like the things she told him about her family were so lost on him that he believed she had to have made it all up. It was one too many repetitions of “But your mom seems fine when I’m over,” and too many raised eyebrows when there was no call for it. Too many times that all she wanted was to lean on his shoulder, and found it cold.

And so, in the scheme of things, it didn’t matter that she had bandaged this boy’s self-inflicted wounds, or that she had held him while he cried, frightened of his own father. Water under the bridge. Just like that.

And maybe that was it. Maybe if she broke down more often, if her grief was louder, he would have known what to do. But ever since she could remember, her suffering had been quiet. She was all too familiar with the feeling of a storm raging behind your eyes, but had no idea what she should do with herself once it broke through onto her face. So she never let it happen until there was a door closed firmly between her and everything. And that, just maybe, was his cause for doubt. Surely, no one could endure so much dry-eyed.

He’d heard her cry. Once. Over the phone on her birthday, after her mom had one of her fits of fury and declared that dinner was ruined. But it wasn’t the same. He hadn’t seen how her shoulders shook, or how when her hands weren’t swiping furiously at her eyes, they were tangled in her hair like the roots were anchoring her. She could have just driven to his house. He’d done the same thing in her situation. But she wasn’t sure that would have saved them. One display of pathetic humanity in five years of friendship wasn’t much.

The most bothersome part, though, was how easily she accepted that this was just another part of her life blown by. Another era, lost to the wind. Just like that.