Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

Nope.

At least I’m friends with May again, so I have someone to sit with at lunch. At least. Then it hits me in the face that the only reason this is, is because of Alex.

--

I went back to his house again today, but didn’t knock on the door this time. Instead I snuck around the perimeter and peeked through all the open curtains. I’m a creeper. I don’t care. I had to do it.

Everything was more or less the same it’d been last time I went there. Alex’s bed was unmade, his clothes thrown over a chair, papers spread over the desk, books on the shelf. A shaft of light cut the room on a diagonal from the crack between the curtains; it touched the corner of the bed, the lampshade on the bedside table and stopped on the wall next to the light switch. I noticed the little swimming dust flecks that live in a beam of light like tiny frantic single-celled organisms under a microscope slide. The light made the rest of the room dark by contrast. In the opposite corner, his Rene Magritte poster was a collage of gray shadows even though I knew it pictured a train coming out of a fireplace. Without looking for them I knew the other two posters on the walls were an illustrated guide on how to survive in the event of a zombie attack, and a Muse poster. This sight of his room was ghostly somehow, but I guess all abandoned things are. I stood there, mesmerized, until my feet began to fall asleep. I felt like I could’ve stood there forever, like I’d stumbled on a faulty pocket in the space-time continuum and I was ensconced in a moment that would never end.

But the sun did sink in the sky, and as it lowered, the streak of light on his wall slowly lifted into the air like the flight of a soul. It was so beautiful to see. Compared with the otherworldliness of the scene as a whole, I felt like my heart was cracking along its veins, too full and entranced.

This is what I ended up doing instead of going to see the shrink.

--

Sick today but went to school anyway just so I could ditch and go to the house. Well, okay, I guess I mean attempt to salvage my GPA on some finals, and then ditch and go to the house.

In a matter of months I’ve been utterly transformed from an unobtrusive good girl to the obsessive voyeur/nonchalant ditcher with the 2.0 grade-point average. All because of Alex. Love’s a wrecking ball.

I can’t believe it’s only been a semester. How did we become so tumultuous, so absorbed in each other? At the beginning of the year, we didn’t even know each other. I can barely put my finger on the point when everything started to change. Was it the letters left in trees? Maybe it was when we kissed in that shed while trespassing during a rainstorm. None of it seems like my life anymore, they're all like scenes from a movie of someone else’s life.

I went up to his window again. This time the curtains had been opened wide to let in the sun. Some of his clothes had been picked up; put back in the closet or in the wash, I guessed. Suddenly a movement in the hallway caught my eye – that of an approaching shadow, which must have been the old woman. I ducked down under the windowsill and wondered at who she could be. Neighbor, friend, grandparent, aunt, great-aunt? It was still possible she had murdered all of them or were holding them hostage someplace.

Absorbed as I was in these thoughts, I had no time to catch myself before I sneezed. Terrified of being discovered, I bolted from the house and down the sidewalk until I reached the main intersection; there I would at least be out in plain sight if she tried to kill me. Then it hit me that this was the same intersection I’d run to on Halloween trying to find Alex when he’d broken down.

I’m reading a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being (I bought it for the title alone) and there’s a part where he talks about how people’s lives imitate novels or musical compositions, because they all have motifs – symbols or events that recur throughout a lifetime and help define it. I wondered if this intersection was becoming a similar motif. The moment felt very philosophical and I was confident any amount of geriatric assassins couldn’t invade on it, which calmed me down. This led to a moment of perception in which I realized I should really be concerned about my Peeping-Tom tendencies. I vowed not to go to the house tomorrow. Instead I decided I was going to visit Coralie again and see if she knew anything.

But then I thought, Why not now? Mom thought I’d be at rehearsal. My musical-mates thought I’d gone home. So I caught some buses that seemed promising, ended up in the vicinity, and asked my way there.

The green-faced lady actually recognized me from the last time, something I would never have expected from her. Lorraine was there too, though she wore a crewneck sweater instead of the cat cardigan. I wondered if she and the janitor were still an item as she led me up a set of dingy carpeted stairs and down some drably wallpapered corridors to Coralie’s room.

This time she was dressed in an oversized sweater and ripped leggings, feet bare, sitting on the standard-hospital-issue twin bed and biting her nails. To my relief, the room was not padded. It seemed sort of like a dull hotel room instead: bed, table, plastic vase with dusty silk flowers on the table, small boxy TV also on the table, armoire, overhead light, window with unimpressive view onto the yard.

She seemed happy to see me again and I mustered a smile, then told her right out about the disappearance and if she knew something about it. Her face was blank and she stared at the fading floral wallpaper for a long time. I touched her arm to try and comfort her; she found my hand and squeezed it hard. Her eyes filled with tears that tripped on the rims and plummeted down her cheeks and then I wanted to cry too. Then I told her about looking through Alex’s window, trying to summon up every detail from the two incidents, from the beam of rising light to the posters on his wall. Then, because I didn’t want to run out of things to say, I told her about his room, the placement of the furniture and what his clothes were like – in mid-explanation it hit me that she had never seen his room. And I squeezed her hand back and began to sob uncontrollably. Coralie cried even harder and put her head on my shoulder.

“Be my friend, Dani,” she whispered.

“Of course.”

In my heart I knew she didn’t know anything about the matter. Did they keep her in the dark like this on a regular basis? I guess so.

All cried out and still at square one.

I love him, of course. That goes without saying. But I hate him. I’ve never hurt more. Yet I’m lost without him, and all those cheesy figurative sayings, every one of them is true; he’s the reason for my confidence, the fearlessness in my smile. Now the core of me is frozen with fear, not only with what I’ll do without him but for he himself. I’m so scared for him. I don’t know what this means at all. Yet there’s still a hidden sliver of me that thinks he shouldn’t belong in my life if he can leave so easily. If emotions were races, I’d be a fucking melting pot, emphasis on the melting. If emotions were cantaloupe I’d be dead because I’m allergic to cantaloupe.