Grey

I’d wanted Grey to tell me about her family, but I never anticipated it happening the way it did. She was a mess, and I was barely able to hold her together. I felt completely useless. I didn’t know what to say to make it better, or what I should do to fix her. I was so lost.

I let her cry into my chest, held her tight, and prayed things would get better. She didn’t try to talk or even begin to explain herself, but I was ready to listen when she did. Her sobs died down and then she was silent, curled into my side, her arms locked around me, as mine were around her.

“Grey,” I whispered, “it’s okay.”

“I’m sorry you had to see me like this,” she said. I shook my head and laughed lightly. She looked up at me in confusion.

“You don’t have to apologize for being human, Grey,” I said. She smiled slightly at me before resting her head on my chest once more.

“Thanks for staying with me.”

“If I had it my way, I’d never leave.” She looked up at me through her eyelashes and smiled her sad smile, like she did sometimes. I guess all I’d wanted was reassurance – someone to tell me that everything was going to be okay. That we were going to be okay. At one point, Grey had seemed so flawless to me, so perfect – so completely unbreakable. Seeing her crumble right in front of me… it made me feel vulnerable, too. Seeing her that way made me think that maybe the strong relationship I thought we had was just as fragile as she was, underneath it all.

Maybe we were close to breaking point, when we’d both yell at each other and say things we didn’t mean and lose ourselves along the way. Maybe things just wouldn’t work out, and I’d go back to being completely lost, while she rebuilt herself and became someone better without me.

These thoughts scared me half to death, because a part of me knew they were true, that that was just the way things were and how things happened and how life was. Because things didn’t work out and people gave up all the time, despite all the posters and greeting cards telling us not to. That was what people did. They gave up.

“Grey,” I murmured.

“Yeah?”

“Are we okay?” I asked tentatively.

“Of course we are,” she replied. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

I bit down on my bottom lip to stop myself from speaking my mind. Maybe it was there that I made my first mistake. Grey and I told each other everything. We never kept any secrets. But she had been the one who had said she was afraid she was like her Dad, and then changed the subject so quickly when I tried to get her to talk about him. She was the one that had just brushed it off like it was nothing, when whatever had happened with him or to him was obviously slowly eating away at her.

It hurt me that she felt she couldn’t share that with me. If she was going to keep secrets, then so was I. It seems so childish now, thinking about it. If I had just told her what I thought, told her I was terrified, maybe I would have been given the reassurance that I had been searching for. Maybe things wouldn’t have happened just as I knew they would. Maybe we would still be together now.

It’s killed me inside every day since she left, the what if’s never stop. What if I hadn’t said that, done that, felt that? What if?

I guess I'll never know.