Cleave

A year is a long time to miss someone. It’s a long time to wonder if they’re ever going to call you. It’s a long time to wonder if they’re ever going to come back into your life, and if they do, in what capacity.

A lot can happen in a year. You can fall in and out of love. You can live through a broken heart and come out the other side. You can see the world. You can make a family. You can break a family. You can change your whole life around if you wanted to.

I didn’t want to change my whole life, but my life was changed for me. Five days ago, my mother told me to pack my bags. I’d already done it. I was waiting for this day. I knew it was coming. She always said that as soon as I was a legal adult, I’d be out of her house. It was the first time she had remembered my birthday in years.

I went to Drew’s. He already had his spare room made up for me. He’d moved into his own place a few months before and he was happy to have a roommate, as long as I helped pay the rent and bills. I needed to get a job for that, but I was willing enough.

I probably would have gone to live with Max if he had had a spare room, but with him being so busy working and studying, I thought I’d end up being more of a nuisance rather than his live-in boyfriend. He wouldn’t want a high schooler living in his one-bedroom apartment anyway, regardless of if he was dating me or not.

I met Max at the hospital after my “episode”, as we call it.

When Micah left without telling me and without saying goodbye, I was a mess. I lost all control of my mind and body and thought that the only possible solution to be able to numb the pain I was feeling was alcohol. A lot of alcohol. The night Micah left, I drank my way through nearly two full bottles of hard liquor and passed out sitting against one of the couches in my living room. My best friend Drew found me in that position about two hours or so after I left his house. He had told me to leave a door unlocked so he could come and check up on me. I guess he knew I was going to do something stupid.

He told me at the hospital that when he found me, he thought I was dead. My breathing was slow; way too slow, and my skin was tinged blue as if I was freezing cold. He’d picked me up and tried to carry me out to his car to take me to the hospital when the sudden movement woke me up and I started vomiting. He put me down to let me try and vomit out all the alcohol but I started choking and couldn’t breathe, so Drew had to call an ambulance.

I remember being so confused. Everything was a blur for a while, but little bits and pieces have stayed stuck in my memory. I remember being put into the ambulance and I can vaguely remember people talking, though I have no clue what they were saying. I kept fading in and out of consciousness for a while until I was pulled completely under.

The next thing I remember is a lot of white and a small, sharp pain in my arm, inflicted by a very attractive man wearing a white coat. They’d put in a drip because I was dehydrated.

The guy was talking to me, but I was still very confused and probably very drunk, and I couldn’t understand any of what he said. I don’t think I could have answered anything he said to me even if I could understand, because there was a tube down my throat. It was extremely uncomfortable and I struggled a little bit to try and take it out but the hospital staff weren’t having any of it and they kept me very closely monitored until I fell back to sleep.

Waking up the next morning, I felt like shit, as you would probably expect. I still had the drip in my arm, but the tube that was down my throat was gone, thankfully. Drew was sitting next to me in the visitors’ chair. When he saw me awake, he showed me a tired smile. He must have been at the hospital all night with me.

“You scared the shit out of me, dude,” he said, his tone laced with anger.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked. My throat was killing me after having that tube shoved in it. I tried to sit up a bit and felt a slight tugging sensation at my crotch area. “Why the fuck is there something tugging on my dick?”
Drew chuckled. “They’ve got a catheter on you.”
“You fucking kidding me? I can use a fucking toilet, for God’s sake!”

I started to drag myself out of the bed to find someone to take it out of me, when the good looking doctor walked into the room and spotted me.
“Whoa, hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
“If I need to piss, I’m not doing it using a fucking catheter,” I said angrily.

The doctor lightly pushed me so that I was mostly back in the same position I woke up in and despite my attempt to stay upright, I wasn’t able to. “Um, yeah, you are, actually. You’re going to have a lack of coordination for a while, Angel, and I’m not letting you up till the rest of the alcohol is out of your system. Besides, you’re not going to feel the need to. It’s just going to happen.”
“This is bullshit,” I huffed, crossing my arms across my chest. The doc smiled. Damn.

I couldn’t help being attracted to him, despite how terrible I was feeling about the situation that put me in the hospital in the first place. I still put up a fight when he tried to get me to agree to a date though.

I stayed in the hospital about 5 days with alcohol poisoning, and Max, the hot doctor, spent a lot of time with me. I found out he wasn’t a qualified doctor yet, but was actually studying at college and was on work placement, so he was able to come visit me more often than he would have been able to if he actually worked there.

I told him about why I drank so much I ended up in hospital. That was how he found out I was interested in guys. I found that he was really easy to talk to, and before I knew it, he knew about my entire history with Micah. Max knew how in love with Micah I was and how broken hearted I was when he left, but still, when I left the hospital, he slipped me his phone number and asked me to call him.

I didn’t. As attractive as Max was, I just wasn’t interested.

That didn’t stop him though. He found my phone number in my file and called me instead about a week and a half after I left hospital.

It took him around a month of almost constant begging for me to agree to meet with him in a casual setting and three more months before I agreed to a proper date. After a few dates, I started to realise that I enjoyed Max’s company and I finally started to let myself like him in a romantic way. He’s been my official boyfriend for just over four months now.

I like him. I really do. But there’s something that’s making me hold back from loving him.

Hope.

Hope is like a drug, and I cling to it. I hope to see Micah every time I go to school. I hope that when the phone rings, I hear his voice on the other end. I hope that he misses me as much as I miss him. And I hope that he will come back and everything will go back to how it was before he left.

But hope can be fatal, and I keep trying to block it out and concentrate on my relationship with Max. I think he notices sometimes. He sees me looking around when we take walks together, and he knows it’s not the scenery I’m looking at. But he handles it. He grips my hand tighter and pulls me in for a kiss and it reminds me that I can’t let hope take me. I have to accept the fact that Micah chose to leave me behind. I have to remember that Max is with me, right in that moment, holding my hand and Micah is not. Max is the one that saved me. Micah is the one that broke me.