Invincible

Everything is one big blur when I look back on it. A big blur that I tried desperately to block out of my head, doing everything that I possibly could do to make it disappear. The swelling feeling that I would get in my chest when the memories surfaced once in a blue moon, and the tears that would sting at my eyes when I saw her face in my mind, and the way that my breath would hitch in the back of my throat when I remembered that it was just another day in the present, and she was stuck forever in the past.

It had all started when I first met her during freshman year of high school. That was the beginning of the end, in every single literal and metaphorical sense. We’d been put into assigned seats, and mine was beside hers in our homeroom. Somehow, we started talking and before we knew it, talking in class turned to walking with each other in the halls, and that only progressed to sitting with each other at lunch and eventually, going to see movies or going to a party together.

It wasn’t a rushed friendship, it was something that just happened.

I felt completely comfortable with her. She was the girl who I could be just friends with, and it didn’t turn into anything sexual at all. It was purely a friendship; I told her my secrets and she told me about her past regrets. I knew every detail of her by heart, and she could finish my sentences. We had the perfect set-up. Our parents approved of our friendship, and they liked us well enough. Our friends all joined into one, big group and everyone got along.

Honestly, when I think back to those days -- to the glory days of my entire life -- it seems like something out of a cliché movie. Everything was so perfect that it had to fall apart eventually. Because with everything good, comes something bad.

My seventeen year old self didn’t know that. He didn’t even think about it because at that time, everything had been great and perfect and there wasn’t anything to complain about. My seventeen year old self never even thought that there would be something wrong all along; a silent enemy that pounced when we had turned our heads away.

Sometime between being fourteen years old and nineteen years old, I fell in love with my best friend.

It had started when I kissed her one night, after we ate pizza and rented a movie to watch. I didn’t plan it or anything, but it just sort of happened. It was the way that her gorgeous blue eyes stared at me, and how her blonde hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun, and the way that the light from the TV flickered across her face. I leaned down and kissed her, and she had let me. I didn’t shove my tongue down her throat, and I didn’t touch her boob or anything.

It was just one innocent kiss that somehow changed everything.

I fell in love with Parker Ann Lowe, and I couldn’t help it. It had been seventeen then, and it wasn’t like she had been the first girl that I’d been with and I hadn’t been the first boy she had been with. This wasn’t new, the whole relationship thing, but when it was with her, it felt new.

The way that she was so gentle, and I was so rough evened out. She didn’t want to be too physical, and well, I was a teenage boy filled with raging hormones from her kisses that trailed off and left me hanging. Too say the least, we both got what we wanted and didn’t want in the relationship.

While our romantic relationship blossomed, so did the unknown enemy inside of her.

Nobody had any idea that it would happen to her. It was silent, merciless, and cruel the way that it snuck up on her -- on all of us, really. She didn’t have a chance, and that was the worst part of it all, I think.

“I have cancer, Brian.”

The words had hung heavy in the air between us. Her fingers were soft against mine, and the way her eyes looked anywhere but at me, and the words -- oh God those words stung so bad. My mouth hadn’t been able to form coherent words after she’d dropped that bomb on me unexpectedly. The atmosphere around us changed; everything changed after she said those words. And suddenly, it all made sense -- her dizzy spells, her terrible headaches that no amount of painkillers could fix, her sudden clumsiness, the way that her muscles just stopped working and she couldn’t even open a jar of pickles, and the way that she would black out and her vision would go away for a few minutes -- I just didn’t want to believe it.

I couldn’t believe it.

I was nineteen years old, and the idea of my best friend having cancer and dying from cancer was so unrealistic and surreal. There was nothing that I could do to fix her, or take care of her, and I blamed myself more than anyone else when she fell and got hurt, because I hadn’t been there to help her or catch her. I was nineteen years old, and my best friend was dying slowly and there was not one single thing that I could do for her.

She was nineteen years old and she wasn’t expected to live to twenty.

The seizure had been the absolute worst.

“I love you, Brian,” she had whispered, her nose just inches from mine as we laid on my bed together. We weren’t touching, and we weren’t making out. We just laid there, looking into each other’s eyes and wishing, more than anything, that the cancer was just a lie. “I’ll love you until the day that I die.”

“Don’t say that,” I had told her, my eyes narrowing. I didn’t like to talk about her untimely death that was in store for her just around the corner, and I hated when she brought it up. “I don’t want to hear about that, Parker.”

A small, timid smile breached her lips then, and she rolled off of my bed. “It’s not so bad,” she had said. “I won’t have to hurt anymore, you know. I’ll just… be.”

“Stop.” I shut my eyes and shook my head as I finally sat up on my bed. When I had opened my eyes again, she had a strange look on her face, and she had been watching me. “I don’t want to hear anything else about that, okay? You aren’t going to die.”

“I know you’re upset, Brian,” she’d tried to comfort me, “but it’s going to happen eventually.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to talk about it!” I growled, running my hands through my hair as I got up and paced around. “Look, Parker. I know it’s going to happen and that it’s inevitable, okay? I’m not stupid. But I fucking hate talking about it, because I would rather talk about something more productive while we still have time. I hate thinkin about it, too, and lately, it’s all that I can think about. Why do we have to talk about it every single day?”

She looked taken aback, and then, hurt. Not from my words, but from the truth that we held in them. She had been hurting too, physically, and she was terrified of dying, even if she hadn’t ever admitted to it. But she felt worse that she would be leaving me behind to fend for myself, and she knew that I was hurt, too.

Before she could say something else, she’d dropped to the floor in my bedroom. The sound of her hitting the floor was loud and it echoed in the small space, and before I could even register what had happened, her eyes rolled into the back of her head and her body started to convulse and horrible grunt, screaming noises erupted from between her slightly parted lips.

After the seizure, she had to stay at the hospital.

There wasn’t a happy ending to Parker and I. We broke up when she had to stay in the hospital, and things went back to just friends. It wasn’t that I had wanted to break up, but she hadn’t wanted to die with us still together. She’d said that she didn’t want to hold me back from falling in love with someone.

She apologized for not being able to make me fall in love with her.

She died just a week shy of her twentieth birthday, seven weeks after she’d been diagnosed with the brain cancer.

And then, everything changed and spiraled downhill -- I never went back uphill.