Grey

Grey and I became inseperable. I’d get up super-early, just so I could meet her at her favourite coffee shop each morning before her classes started. She always looked surprised to see me, her emerald eyes bright with excitement. I couldn’t understand why she always looked so happy, until she didn’t. I don’t want to talk about that just yet, because every time I think of Grey, I can see her smile, her bright eyes, her soft hair, her dimples, and the bounce in her step.

Her image is always there, stuck right behind my eyelids. I don’t know if it’s a permanent condition or if I’ll always feel the way I do now. I don’t know if I want it to be. I told myself for a long time after she left that I wanted to forget her, but it just hurt more when I tried. I guess you could say I’ve given up on forgetting her because it hurts too much to try, and I think quite a big part of me doesn’t want to.

I knew Grey better than anybody. She used to say that I knew her better than she knew herself. I knew everything there was to know about Grey. She told me her dreams, her deepest fears, her biggest inspirations, what made her happy and the things that made her cry. I knew all her favourite movies and all her favourite bands. I sang the words to all her favourite songs as she sat in the front seat of my battered car on those long, summer drives. I knew that she only ate ice-cream when it was raining and that she didn’t like Christmas. I knew that winter was her favourite season and September was her favourite month.

I knew all her favourite things because she was my favourite person.

But there was always one thing I didn’t know about Grey, not until the very end. I never thought she’d be the one to just give up on us. I always thought I’d be the one to mess things up because it was so obvious to me that we shouldn’t work together. She was so perfect in every single way, and much too good for me. Rory was always saying that she was out of my league, and I’d known that he was right. But at the time, she was with me, and she smiled because of me, and that was all I had ever wanted.

I thought I would get scared that we were too perfect together, that things were going too well, that something had to go wrong because it was just the universe’s way of doing things. I forgot these petty things when I was with Grey, never once thought that things would ever go wrong because she was so right.

But things did go wrong, and there's no going back. I've pictured her countless times, played out the scene in my head, trying to imagine what would happen if I were to go back in time to do things different.

But I can't go back, and there's no second chances, and now I know what people mean when they say that they regret things. I used to say that I didn't regret anything, because in that moment, it was exactly what I wanted. And Grey was what I wanted. What I still want. But I can't get her back. And I think that's what hurts the most.