Video game music. Loud, pulsing nonsensical noises at ear-deafening decibels. That’s all I could stand listening to while Marsh drove us away. A lull in the music gave me time to think, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. I wasn’t ready to do much of anything.

I had pushed myself up against the passenger side window as far from Marsh as I could get. Had she reached out to touch me, to give my shoulder a reassuring squeeze or my knee a sympathetic pat, I would have broken. I would have cracked and crumbled and smashed my fists into her dash, blindly swinging at whatever stood in my way.

I wasn’t good at being sad.

Depression, I could do. Anger, frustration, numbness, joy, and everything in between was easy, but sadness wrecked me more than anything else. I wasn’t built to deal with heartbreak.

As a songwriter, I loved my emotions. I toyed with them, throwing myself into crazy situations for inspiration. When I was irritated, I would scrawl my feelings onto paper in violent, spiteful strokes; when I was happy, in large, loopy letters.

When I was sad, my pen would dot the same spot a thousand times over. I would sit at my desk, my head in my hands, and watch my tears leave dark splotches across the top of the page.

Sometimes I was lucky and I’d get so upset with my inability to write that frustration would overtake my sadness, and I’d go on and on about how annoying it is to be alive.

If I could just have gotten angry, if I could have spat in their faces and called it a day, if I could have just fucking written something, anything, I could have gotten over it, but the words wouldn’t form. I was paralyzed, stuck against the window of my best friend’s truck like the headless hula dancer on her dash.

My jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt, my thumb running circles around the camera lens on the back of my phone, rubbing it raw, and my breath came in uneven bursts, but I refused to cry. If I cried, I wouldn’t have been able to stop. The last time I cried I broke a toe from kicking the wall too hard, and I didn’t think Marsh would appreciate me further destroying her poor dash ornaments.

As soon as she parked, I was out of the vehicle, blindly running up the stairs to Marsh’s parents place. I didn’t register that we weren’t at our apartment until I reached the door. Although my music was much too loud for me to hear myself, I’m sure I let out the most pathetic, helpless whimper of confusion when my key didn’t work in the lock.

The breath it took for Marsh to catch up to me felt like an eternity. A soft hand brushed my back in warning--or maybe comfort--before she reached around me to ring the doorbell. I don’t remember who opened the door. I doubt I greeted them anyway. I just remember Marsh slipping her hand through my clenched fingers and leading me to her old room.

No one argued when I hooked my phone up to the speakers and blasted music, although Marsh did turn it down a notch.

Her room hadn’t changed since we were high schoolers; there was still graffitti done in sharpie on her walls, stacks and stacks of comic books, and more band posters than wall space. I was almost completely certain that if I opened her closet it would be half filled with my old clothing.

I still remember the day she marched up the stairs in the middle of the night and begged her mom for a bigger bed because she was tired of making me sleep on the floor. That was the night I found out just how much I meant to Marsh.

Sometimes I really wondered what I would do without her