You Do Care

There is a rushing sound in my ears. I can’t feel my fingers; they aren’t a part of my body anymore. I’m falling apart, I can feel it, I’m breaking up into lots of little pieces and I will never be whole again.

“Are you listening to me, Finn? Look at me mate,”

The wind is whirl pooling around me, throwing the outside of me into as much turmoil as the inside. How did I get here? Where did the wind come from?

I feel hands grab my shoulders, but are they my shoulders? They don’t feel like my shoulders, they’re too heavy and they don’t move right. Is this even my body? Surely it’s hurting too much for it to be my body.

I look down at my chest to try and find what is wrong with it, what’s making it hurt so bad. But there isn’t anything there, it must be inside of me. I claw at my chest; I try to dig out whatever’s in there that is making me hurt so much. But it just leaves angry, red lines all over my chest.

It still hurts.

“Finn, Finn, mate, come on, stop that,” I feel someone grab my wrists and hold them away from my body. “Finn, look at me, come on,”

I slowly tilt my head upwards towards the person in front of me. I know that I know him, but I don’t remember him. I know that if I remember him it will hurt me; I know that he will remind me of something that will hurt even more than how I’m hurting now. “Why am I here?”

“You ran here, mate, don’t you remember? I had to chase after you,” the man is looking at me with panicked eyes. I look around at this cliff side we are on, the grass is up to me knees and the wind is rippling waves through it.

I look at the man and I can feel what I’ve been trying so, so hard to forget trickling back through that locked door at the back of my head. Little, little things that feel like tiny stab wounds in my chest.

Then suddenly, as I look into the man’s blue, blue eyes, the door is flung back and everything, everything, comes rushing back. It’s like I’m watching a scratched DVD and all of the scenes are jerking about, flying onto the next one before it’s finished:

I’m in this same field with a girl, her name is Stephanie, her hair is whipping around her face, almost hiding her smile; now I’m cuddling up next to her on the sofa watching a cheesy movie; and now I’m twirling her around and around the dance floor, that blue dress I bought for her fanning around her.

But now I’m rocking her in my arms as she cries uncontrollably; and now I’m sitting beside her hospital bed, her wrists bandaged; and now I’m knocking hesitantly on her bedroom door and now I’m slowly, slowly opening the door with a slight creak into her room and now I see that terrible, terrible sight all over again, but before I can even scream the movie flings me forward again; now, I’m lying on the floor, looking up at the soles of her feet swaying slightly above me, the little chair she kicked over lying next to me.

My knees buckle from underneath me.

I remember now.

“Finn? Finn, I’m here, I’m here for you, it’s okay,”

I try to keep my body from stirring. If I don’t move then everything will stop and everything will be okay, everything will be okay.

“Finn, come on, you’re scaring me, man.”

My head isn’t big enough for all the things inside it; I can feel them all trying to burst out through my skull. Why did she have to do it? Why wasn’t I enough for her? Why wasn’t anything enough for her?

I stand up slowly and I walk away so my back is to the man. I turn so I’m standing opposite the sea and the wind is rushing at my face and then, then, I start to scream. And I am screaming to her, and I am screaming so loud that it will pierce through to wherever she is so that she’ll know what she’s done. And she’ll know what a terrible thing she did, she’ll know that I’ll never forgive her.

“FINN! STOP! STOP IT, FINN!”

But I won’t stop, I won’t stop until everyone’s heard, and everyone knows what she did, the terrible, terrible thing she did.

“FINN! FINN STOP!” The man grabs my shoulders and spins me round to face him, “Finn, I know. I know how much you must be hurting!” the man cries desperately to me, “I know how much you cared about her! It’ll be okay! Just stop, come home.”

He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know about all the late nights of whispering to each other under the covers, he doesn’t know about the gummy rings we’d buy each other every Saturday, he doesn’t know about how she promised she would never leave me.

And now she’s gone.

She left me! She left me all alone; she left without thinking about the empty space she’d leave behind, the vacuum that would suck all the happiness into it.

If this is what caring feels like then I don’t want to care anymore, I don’t want to care, I don’t think I’m able to care.

“Finn?”

I must have stopped screaming.

My throat is dry.

“Finn, it’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.” The man’s voice is shaky, I think I have unnerved him, “Look, I know how you felt about her, I know how much you cared abou–“

“I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE ABOUT HER!”

The wind is whipping around me, my hair flying into tangled locks as the man just looks at me, his eyes breaking up into tiny fragments of sorrow.

“Yes you do.” He tells me so softly I can barely hear him over the wind.

“I don’t care.”

I feel empty; everything that was ever inside me has left me. I am all alone.

He still doesn’t move, his hair flies everywhere and his clothes billow around him but he doesn't move, “You do care, you care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”

I can’t breathe.

Neither of us says anything for what could have been a second or could have been a life time. We just listen to the wind and to our heartbeats.

I take a deep shuddering breath as I try to explain to him what is happening to me.
“I don’t think... I don’t think I have enough left of me to care this much. Everything about me is falling apart.”

“I know you are, I know.” And then he looks at me again, and behind his eyes is the most sorrow and the most wisdom I have ever seen, and when he speaks again after a few moment his voice is heavy with the magnitude of his words, “But that’s okay, because so is everyone else.”