Story Notes:
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The world ends and you’re okay. It splits in two. Like some thwarted teenage heart, it crumbles overdramatically to pieces. The ground you’re standing on falls out from beneath you but you’re still standing. The oceans drain themselves until their floors are just dust but you feel no thirst. The sky turns dark, an impossible blackness, but you keep your head down and let it pass.
You breathe in and out in the morning like you did before. Things rebuild themselves, you tell yourself as you slowly come to consciousness. Rebuild. You repeat the word over and over.
Before the world ended, before all the crumbling and the shaking, before you were standing in front of her and you stopped breathing for once and just spoke. Before, you were certain you would never be able to rebuild if you found yourself hearing her confirm all the things you were the most terrified of. You were absolutely sure you wouldn’t be okay.
You can still hold yourself upright just like always. Though there were a few days in the beginning when you were convinced that you just couldn’t so you didn’t even try. But you can and you did, your knees shaky at first, but soon strong as ever.
You’re surprised at this revelation. Startled by the fact that after a mere three or four days you were not only eating actual meals again, but you even caught yourself laughing, at Mark’s bad jokes, at some asinine commercial on TV. It left you feeling unsettled and you stood for a while, scrutinizing your reflection in the bathroom mirror, thinking you clearly weren’t yourself anymore.
You were, you are.
This isn’t to say that a significant piece of you isn’t missing now, that you don’t feel utterly heartbroken and sick because of everything that had happened. You weren’t left completely unscarred and you certainly aren’t over her in any sense of the word. You’re still convinced that might never happen. This isn’t to say you aren’t still incessantly haunted by the thought of her mouth, her hands, her.
You were simply okay.
So you leave and even then you’re okay. A new state, a new office, a new apartment. You stand in the middle of an empty living room and you let out a breath because you can still do that even miles away from her.
A month goes by. Two months, three months. You only think of her when a phone rings or when you hear the quiet sound of stifled laughter or when you see auburn curls at the back of some other girl’s head or when you turn to catch her eye and she isn’t there. You still forget sometimes that she isn’t there.
But you’re still okay for the most part.
And by the fourth month, when you start smiling again at other girls without that tightness in your chest, you start to think you can live with okay. You’ve rebuilt from the world ending and you can get by on being just okay.
Then you’re back there again, right where you started, and she’s throwing her arms around your neck and in that moment with your face in her hair and her body flush against your own, you realize you aren’t okay and maybe you never really were okay. Because that moment, her laughter against your neck and your hands on her hips. That’s when you feel, without question, okay.
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