Without You

Lana doesn’t know what love is, but she thinks if she had to guess, it’d be his eyes. The way they crinkle around the edges when he smiles, or how they shine when he’s laughing so hard he can’t breathe, or how they hide behind his eyelids when he lies as if the hazel orbs are ashamed for their owner and can’t bear to be seen. If its love you’re asking about she’d say: his eyes.

~///~

Lana can remember the first time she met him like she remembers the back of her hand, easily. She was so young, she thinks nostalgically whenever he runs through her mind. Too young maybe. She didn’t know what love was or why smiles like his were trouble. She never really did grasp how deep she was in until their first date.

There was this moment - in-between the time they sat and the time it took the waiter to bring them their menus - were their eyes met and oh. There was something in his stare that made the bees in her stomach squirm and her heart trip and stumble around like a drunk. She couldn’t bring herself to look away, no matter how unhealthy it seemed to put her heart under that much strain, she made sure their eyes stayed locked.

She didn’t know what he was thinking while she was having a mini-heart attack, but when he smirked at her and she saw his pearly whites flashing through his slightly parted lips, his tongue darting out through the open space, swiping briefly over his bottom lip before it was trapped behind those plump pink orifices again, and just when she thought he was done and she could stop being such a pervert and look away. He. Bit. Down. He fucking bit down! The bees started to implode one after another and her heart forget what to do and just stopped. It was that exact moment the waiter came and broke their eye contact, asking something about wanting to try the special or whatever, she was never happier to see a waiter in her life.

By the time her heart started again, he had already ordered and they were both waiting on her, she had blushed, stuttered out the first thing she saw, and stared intensely hard at the table after handing the waiter her menu. While she was glaring at the table like it killed her cat and he was laughing quietly at how cute she was being; it hit her like a lightning bolt.

Oh, she had thought, …ah, like he does for me, I wanna make his heart skip a beat. It was an innocent enough thought on her part, a rather cute one too, but it was that innocent thought and the determined way she looked up at him, still blushing and bees still fainting - of course, but determined nonetheless, that started it all.

~///~

Lana can’t remember when she died. Figuratively speaking, of course. There was just a day when everything on the inside dried up and the only thing left inside of her was hot air, no heart, no lungs, no nothing, just air. She was just lying in bed one day, flat on her back buried in covers and pillows, breathing and that’s when she noticed.

That she was nothing but air.

She tried to get mad, thought about all the things that made her fist clench and her nails dig into her skin. Tried to think about the things people said to her that made her blink and backtrack and laugh a humorless laugh and mad. But there was nothing. When you’re empty, things like mad, things like feelings seem so far away...too far.

So, she was just lying there. Air and the dull, shallow thump, thump of her heart (was it even still beating?) the only thing inside of her.

She’s laying there and then she just starts to laugh and her bedroom is filled with the sound of juvenile childlike laughter. Nhghahahngahahangahahaha; the sound of laughter fills every inch of the room, staining it in desperation. She smiles wide and grips at her chest and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs. She gulps in large breaths of air and pushes through the pain in her throat and laughs because…because laughter makes people happy and happy is a feeling and she was trying to feel, so way not happy? Shit, she just wants to see if she can feel. Anything was fine. Anything, so even tears were welcome.

Her hands over her heart and she can feel it beating but there was a hollowness to the frantic thump, thump that made her laughter stop. Her eyes start to sting, burn, because she knows, knows, that hollowness means something. Something deep and meaningful like, she’s dead on her feet but her hearts still beating. Doctors everywhere would love her.

So she sits up, pushing away covers and pillows, and thinks. Thinks about his voice. The softness in it that seemed impossible, like a fleeing hallucination of the bird not eating the fish, with how deep it was; the musical flow to his voice that just seemed to make everything he said sound beautiful, as if his every word was a lullaby he had created just for you; but most of all she thinks of the way his voice sounded when he said things like ‘I love you’, ‘you’re beautiful’, ‘amazing, you’re fucking amazing’, she thinks about how flat, empty, hollow, it always sounded. Lana knows if she had to describe what emptiness felt like it’d be: his voice.

~///~

Lana felt like, possibly, perhaps ...maybe, there was this one time were she made his heart, drunk.

The bathwater had long since turned lukewarm, it was a tight fit, his large body taking up most of the space in the small tub, her head idly resting on his chest as she made waves in the water with her hand: in out, in out, in out. They were so close, and it felt so right, and perfect, it was perfect. She hadn’t meant to say it, it was too early, seven mouths of dating compared to what she whispered into his chest wasn’t much, no, not nearly enough. But she said it, and then she felt it. The chest she was laying on had a heart, and that heart stopped and then went into overtime. It was pure bliss. A song she had longed to hear without even knowing she was waiting for it had started to play.

Lana thought they would be alright. That the three little words she had spoken would make them forever and a day. He didn’t need to say anything back because she felt enough love for the both of them and that suited her just fine. But he did say something back. Mirrored her exact words and wrapped his large hands around her small waist and pulled her closer. He even buried his face in her neck and painted the skin that lay there in soft, gentle, sweet, kisses. It was everything she could’ve wanted but there was something wrong.

His voice.

He had never sounded so dead before. The hatful words he yelled at her during arguments held more passion, more affection, more life, then his voice did now.

What happen?

What went wrong?

What did she do wrong?

~///~

Lana’s felt hate. She’s been pushed to that point once or twice like the rest of us and she knows that those swirls of emotions that built up in her chest, running through her mind, heart, soul like a tornado through a city, all that destruction and pain and death it creates, that’s hate. When she goes to describe it, her mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air, she falls short. She frowns and holds her hands up like she can show you, moving them around franticly in front of her like she’s painting a picture in the air and her teeth sink into her lower lip, hard. She pales. She can’t think of anything to say.

So, her heart rate picks up and her hands fall to her sides and bees are flying around in her stomach stinging all the important parts. She can’t put hate into words. So there she is, pale, sweaty, and speechless, fucking speechless. But as she closes her eyes, ready to throw in the towel, his teeth flash through her mind.

The way his teeth flash from underneath the soft muscles when he smirks, and a little haughty laugh will slip through the parted lips. The way his smile stretches too wide, and his lips spread too thin to make up for the wide stretch, and all you can see when he smiles is teeth. The way he bites his lip in the middle of talking for no good reason and you can’t help but look because let’s face it - it looks sexy. Can’t help but stare as he works the soft flesh in-between his sharp teeth, can’t look away, because you don’t know what you’re waiting for but you just know, know, that it has something to do with those teeth. And with those teeth whatever you were fighting about is just gone and then for the rest of day he’s smiling a smile that’s too much teeth because he won an argument you weren’t paying attention to.

Lana sighs, because if she had to describe hate there’s only two words that work: his teeth.

~///~

He was broken and no matter how large he looked, he was small. When Lana first finds this out, when she first sees his eyes, red and puffy and pink, big fat crocodile tears streaming down his face. She doesn’t know what to do. So, because she doesn’t know how to piece back together broken things, she wraps him in her arms and promises not to let go until he’s done crying and whispers how much she loves him because he’s crying and...and maybe it would be nice to hear it, right?

Wrong.

Because after she says those cursed three little words, he screams. Rips himself from her arms and screams some more. She doesn’t quite get it but then she does, because it’s only when he says ‘I love you’ that he sounds emptiest.

So, even if she’s not good at putting together the puzzle pieces, she isn’t stupid enough not to see the puzzle fairy putting the puzzle together for her and explaining why which piece goes where.

So, he hates love and Lana what’s to know why. So she can fix him. So that when he says ‘I love you’ the next time, he actually means it. To this day, Lana regrets asking why.

Some things are just made to stay in the dark.

~///~
Lana’s not as familiar with fear as she’d like to be. Too much time spend locked in her house trying to avoid anything that could give her nightmares like the plague, has left the feeling of not really living in her chest. If you trap yourself in a happy safe bubble that you yourself has made. Then, of course, there’s not much to fear. So Lana, sweet, dear, little Lana, doesn’t know what real fear is, she only has the cheap knock-off of ‘I fear everything and anything’ to go by. So here, in the realm of things that go bump in the night, and the boogie man and his friends, she won’t be much help.

But she’s seen real fear.

The way his hands, tighten and untighten, clench and unclench, around nothingness like the air itself is an enemy he has to get rid of; the way his nails leave bloody half-moons in his palms and those small barley there impressions won’t fade from his skin for days; the way he grips the back of his neck so hard the hands prints seem to become a part of his skin; if she knows of anything or anybody that’s seen real fear it’s: his hands.

~///~

When he stops screaming, and he can be touched again. He clings to Lana, like he was scared if he wasn’t touching her, like the only way to confirm that he was there with her, alive and breathing, existing, heart beating, that he wasn’t disappearing, was by touch. And Lana lets him, squeezing him just as tightly, because even if she didn’t notice, she was scared and needed reassuring this was reality just as much as he did. When his sobs quieted down and his voice was clear, shaky, trembling, broken but clear, he whispered one sentence, only six words. Six words that Lana couldn’t quite understand but six words that simplified everything simply.

His mother tried to kill him.

His fucking mo-th-er tried to kill him!

And right before she did it, she whispered, I love you.

So, maybe that’s why.

Ah,

ooh,

....thaaaat’s why.

~///~

Lana’s felt the feeling called stay. Where everything in you: your mouth, your hands, your heart, your eyes, your tongue - hell, even your toes, is screaming out that one word. She’s felt it, she’s been left, and she’s cried into the bottom of an ice-cream tub one too many times for her liking. She likens stay to: his everything. Because it wasn’t just one thing she was begging not to walk out that door.

Stay.

Why the hell couldn’t he just fucking stay?

Stay, is the rarely known feeling Lana hates the most.

~///~

Lana doesn’t remember exactly when they broke up, she just remembers the feeling of not being enough. Of, not being any good with glue and tape and broken things.