I'm sorry but I fell in love tonight.
I didn't mean to fall in love tonight.
You're looking like you fell in love tonight.
Could we pretend that we're in love?
~Is There Somewhere by Halsey
Seven Years Later. . .
Dylan
"You ready, man?" asks Tyler.
"Is that a question?" I joke.
"Lucky sonuvabitch," he mumbles.
"No, but really, I'm gonna miss you, man," I tell him, scratching my beard that I've allowed to grow in through the past month.
"Gonna miss you too," he says, dapping me up.
Tyler is one of the guys in my cell who's been here since the day I arrived. We've become really close throughout the years, and he's still got three more months. We originally hated each other so much that he tackled me over a breakfast table one morning in yesr two. A few weeks later, the older guy in our cell, Eric, was being a dick to Tyler and I said something. Ever since then, Tyler and I have been inseparable, and I'm not too happy about leaving him.
But I've completed my seven years.
I'm free.
"Time to go," an officer says to me, opening the cell door.
"See you on the other side," I wink at Tyler and fake a salute. Eric glares at me and the new guy, Misery or something, flips me off.
Man, I'm gonna miss these guys.
I'm walked through the halls, carrying my bag full of nothing down the hallway. I changed about an hour ago out of the orange jumpsuit and into a gray shirt and black jeans that has been supplied.
I'm out through the exit within minutes, and the gates open for me.
I feel the excitement course through me.
Seven years.
It's a sunny day in late March. We didn't get much snow this year, and the streets of New York buzz with the new Spring day.
I have a tracker on my foot that I will wear for five weeks.
But I can go anywhere I want.
The warm sun beats down on my skin, and I close my eyes before I begin to run down the street. I could run for hours now. Holed up inside of a cell for the past seven years has made me ache to have this feeling once again. Freedom.
My feet slapping the ground, my heart pounding, I run past all the streets I've encountered over the years. Some bring back bad memories. Everything will. But now, my heart is pumping blood and my bones are moving, and nothing can ruin this moment. I am twenty-four. I still have my life ahead of me. My future may be ruined by these years forever, but that's something to worry about later.
I run past Manhattan High. Where are Evan and Ashley and Miles? Lily and Mackenzie? What's become of them? I guess I'll never know. Brian stopped coming about five years ago when he decided to switch colleges and move to LA. I haven't seen him since.
I see the bar Lola and I went to: T.F.O. I wonder if Jeremy's still there, but that's an adventure for another day.
I see the storage building I had spent most of those six months in, and I climb it. Breathe in the view. Get down.
And there's that cafe we went to a lot, the place where I realized that she was the one I wanted to be with. She was the one who made me feel like I wasn't someone I wasn't, some figment of my imagination.
When she made me feel real.
I bend down to tie one of my shoes, my black Vans, with my breathing catching up to me and a few happy tears running down my cheeks.
And then I see.
Lola
I haven't been able to leave my home in Manhattan. Kameron left about three years ago, when he finally met a girl that he loved with all his heart. They got married rather quickly, and he went to New Hampshire with her. I've continued living with Dad, helping him pay off the rent by working at the cafe down the street, the one Dylan and I went to all the time. Where he told me what I meant to him.
It's the day after everything happened seven years ago. The memory still burns fresh in my mind, as if it happened yesterday. But I've tried to stop thinking of it since.
Keith and I lost contact last year when he moved to Maine with his fiancé. We tried to keep talking, but our lives caught up to us—well, his life caught up with him, anyways.
I never got a college education. I just work full time at the cafe, except on Sundays when I go to church with Emeric. He started forcing me to go when I was around twenty, as I didn't seem to be getting much better through my dark stages. It's been difficult, and I waver, but I think there might be a chance that there's a God up there.
It's just me and Emeric now. I learned that he and his wife had gotten a divorce, the one who's wedding we had gone to see that day of the accident. He talked of my mom often. How they fell in love, the way he saw every detail on her face, how he'd stand for hours just watching her paint. I can have the memories now without them tearing me apart. I can handle the past, and it's alright.
I begin to clear off a table in the far corner near the window, and, with a painful jolt of my heart, know that this was Dylan and I's table.
And I see.
*~*~*
There once was a girl who loved the winter, because it was so pretty. It burns through her memories now like ice set on fire, and she wakes up shaking almost every night, begging a God she may or may not believe in to take her into that beautiful white place He had taken her to when her soul broke over a new horizon one cold night on a set of train tracks. The girl used to not be able to smile. Everything had been ripped away from her. She was sarcastic but caring, stubborn and opinionated, cold, but had the warmest heart of anyone. She has the word "Dead" carved into her skin, a memory and scar that she can never remove.
And there was this boy who made her feel everything all at once, who took her heart and changed it. He made her smile. Laughed at her sarcasm. Brought her back to life.
Dylan
I remember running to her that night. Her hand on my cheek telling me everything was okay. The coldness of her hand and the warmth of her heart. I haven't forgotten. I've thought of her everyday for the past seven years.
She told me she loved me. She kissed my forehead and cleaned up the blood around me and wiped away my tears. She made me feel everything all at once, even if just for a short period of time. She recited Romeo & Juliet with me and told me she needed me. I believed in us. I believe in us.
And for a choking moment, I see her. I look up from my shoes for a split second and see in the window us sitting together at our table. Drinking coffee. I'm tired and my eyes are red, but they dance with the feeling of her.
And then it all slips away, but she's still there. Cleaning off the table.
I slowly stand up.
Lola
I look up.
And I see him.
Dylan
And she is so beautiful.
Her eyes green.
Her hair black like a raven.
Lola
He stands there, a few light tears on his face.
Dylan
I go inside and I'm standing across the room from her.
She is there.
She is real.
Lola
I go over to him and press my hands against his wet cheeks, silently looking at him.
The brown eyes I had fallen in love with that night on the roof.
The warm lips I had kissed.
Dylan
She wipes away my tears, her hands cold against my face.
I touch the back of her hair and see her eyes.
Lola
He is here.
He is real.
He is not the man everyone says he was. He is not the rumor of every whispering mouth. He is the sun and the snow and the sky all in one.
"What do you see?" he says to me quietly. "When you look at me, what do you see."
I stare at him, and I smile.
I see you.
YOU ARE READING
alright ↠ dylan o'brien
Fanfiction(CURRENTLY EDITING) All I knew was that I wanted to touch him. I wanted to feel his skin against mine and his breath in my ear and his voice throughout every living thing in me, yet I knew it could never be enough. She lacked hope. ...
