I was just a girl. Just a girl who had an adventure— who had fun— who had to come back home when it was all over.

I don't know what I am now. Not anymore.

Well, I'm still a girl, anyway. That much is clear… at least, clear to me. But I don't know if even that little simple fact is salvageable. I don't even have a guess. The thing is, no one very well knows what to make of me, and I don't even know what to make of myself, either. So that's okay, I suppose. That's equal.

I always did value everything being equal. I'd like to think that I still do. But when I was hit in the face by reality, I was hit hard. I'm still trying to recover; still trying to blink enough tears away from my eyes to be able to see a world that's ceased spinning when I open them.

It's so much harder than I ever could have imagined.

It's starting to look like this vertigo might never wear off.

Nothing will ever be the same. That much is apparent, readily so, and maybe that's a gift in itself, knowing that. Because it's the only possible thing I have to hold on, the only rock I can clutch and cleave to in the aftermath of this spitting storm. You never really stop to think about how a hurricane isn't the worst part, not by far. In fact, a hurricane is nothing compared to what lurks ahead.

A hurricane might as well be a sunny day in the park when you realize that now, you're going to have to rebuild.

It brings me comfort to look at where I am, how I am, who I am now. A strange comfort; twisted, perverse. Not a warm, blanketing sense that everything will be okay. Rather, it's white hot, a coating of smog that works its way into my every orifice and whispers into my very soul "Everything will not be okay, but everything will still be", and giggles un-readably until it wafts away. Because that's the place things like these always stay; too far away to give off any comfort but close enough to remind you always that there's still a threat.

I don't know what I want, but I don't think that I want everything to be.

I think I would rather let the world crash to the ground around me again, if only this time I could go down with.

In a way, it seems so obvious that nothing will ever be the same, because nothing is ever the same. Even when the Earth is turning so steadily that you can't even feel it in the ground beneath you and your head is cool and clear and you're happy. Everything always changes, and the beauty—the evil beauty—of the fact is, it just changes so slowly, so subtly, that you never even realize what's been happening before your very eyes until you're forced to.

You never know how good you have it, everyone always warns, waving their fingers. But they always forget something, something that I never could.

You never know how good you have it but you never know how bad you could have it, either.

I can't look at anyone anymore. I can't look at them and I can't even see them. The only thing left for me is me, and that's the worst consequence of all.

Am I all alone now, or am I only just realizing it? What a question. What a question.

Maybe, though, maybe it doesn't even matter. Maybe I don't need to squint at the tiny details, or spend my time fretting about intricacies and trivialities. Maybe the littlest touches really aren't the ones that matter. Maybe conventional wisdom is wrong—wouldn't be the first time. Wouldn't be the first time its failed me.

Wouldn't be the last, either.

It's a sick miracle how you can put up your walls and stop anyone from ever getting in to help you, but no matter how much effort you put into it, you can never stop them from hurting you.

It's amazing how the human being, one of a species so famed for its own resourcefulness and resilience, can be wired so perfectly for carefully orchestrating its own demise.

I look down at my leg. I'm reevaluating everything now; I might as well add my own body parts to the ever-growing list.

The ever-growing list of things that I can't trust, things that might hate me and hurt me. Right now I've whittled that list down to just about everything in the world.

And I've written each entry in ink. No point in leaving open a path to go back and change something when I already know it to be right. No, I'm correct, and because of that, I'm also alone.

In a way, even with the scorching headache and the blurry vision and the muffled voices that won't quiet down but won't get louder when I ask, either, I've drawn my own sense of clarity from my own demise.

Look at me look at all the positives here.

My life is fundamentally over but at least I've discovered the perfect way to go through with it.

Everything in the world is so goddamned ironic, I can't take it anymore. And I can't believe I ever could.

And I can't deny that I ever snapped.

And I can't even talk to my own mother because of that.

And that makes me burn inside.

And that makes me burn outside.

And again, it's ironic.

Again, it's all connected.

Again, it's a loop, a goddamned loop, a cycle, and a cycle that never ends.

The thing about cycles, too, is that they don't begin, either.

They go on forever and they have been going on forever.

There's absolutely no hope for me at all. There absolutely never has been.

It finally registers with me that as I'm looking down, the little dark spot I'm staring absently at is blood.

"You need to stop."

That was the last thing Devin ever said to me. As far as I'm concerned, it was the last thing he ever said to anybody.

"You need to stop burning everyone else's bridges to build your own. You need to take a step back and a deep breath and a good look and you need to realize that you're not the only one in the world who knows how to survive."

Even now it's seared in my mind, the look in his eyes when he delivered the final blow, the punch line to his tortured, torturing joke that was the life we had forged together.

The pain I saw there. And the happiness.

Above all, the vicious, ferocious will. The will to live, to go on living now and to do so forever.

The way he made it so clear that he would not let anything get in the way of getting what he ultimately wanted, not even me.

Especially not me.

"And it's a good thing too, Stefani. Because if this is what you call surviving, if this is what you live for, then I'm just happy that no one else in the world could ever be twisted enough to end up the same way."
If my life were a movie I would have kissed him then, one more time. One more unforgettable time.

Then I would've whispered "goodbye". Maybe even called him my love. Or my former love. Or even just my friend.

It doesn't matter what I would've done if my life were a movie.

Because my life isn't a movie, and I was frozen as I watched him go. Frozen still, I didn't say anything or do anything to stop him and I didn't say anything or do anything at all.

If my life were a movie I would have cried for my loss in his loss, but my life isn't a movie and I've never cried over him once.

Devin always knew how to go out with a bang. Devin always had style; his own style. Devin always had the perfect thing to say.

Maybe that hasn't changed. Maybe that won't change, too. Maybe Devin will always be smart and slick and sly. Maybe Devin will always be able to get even the coldest blizzards of girls howling for him.

Well, I'll never know how he'll turn out in the end.

And for once, there's a thought that makes me happy.

For once, there's a gaping hole that I feel absolutely no need to fill.

I'm not going to pretend that he didn't use me or that it was unfair or that I didn't use him in exactly the same way.

I'm not going to complain about any of that or any of anything at all.

I'm not going to make the time we had together anything that it wasn't.

I'm not even going to keep telling myself that it was love. Maybe we thought it was, and maybe that was even the most important part. But no matter how stupid we let ourselves become in each other's midst, it wasn't love that was making us like that.

Two obnoxious little kids who thought that they were so cute and so smart because they'd figured out the secret, the key to life that no one else had ever figured out before.

Two obnoxious little kids who had the audacity to acknowledge the fact that happiness was nearly impossible to come by, but they had managed to do it.

Two insufferably arrogant jerks who couldn't even tell the difference between love and hate and mere tolerance.

That in itself wouldn't be a flaw for them. That in itself could be excused, maybe even forgiven. But they had to take it a step further. They always had to. They always had to be bold and brash, different, on the cutting edge. They had to shake their heads slowly and smirk and say that no, they weren't lucky, no, they weren't blessed, they were just naturally superior, that they were in heaven and they completely deserved it.

Both of those statements were wrong. Oh so horribly, laughably wrong.