Ray

“Ow…my head…” My speech slightly slurs as I struggle to reorient my mind, which in this moment is seeing stars, and as I struggle to open my eyes and identify the klutz I ran into.

I feel a palm clasping onto my hand, forcibly pulling me back up, holding on as I steady my balance and wait for the pain to fade enough for me to open my eyes. He speaks to me, cordially yet defensively, as if to tame me, “I’m so sorry about that. Here’s your book—”

“Watch where you’re going, you dipshit!” I growl at him, the words leaving my mouth before I have the chance to hold them back. I was not looking to talk to anyone else today. Snatching the journal from his hand, I let out a grunt, before storming off, putting my earbuds back on as I continued my way back home. Or so I thought.

“You’re Ray, right?” His voice, though this time far softer, is instantly recognisable even from a distance. How did he not register in my mind when I first heard it? “Jax…? What are you doing here?”

“I just wrapped up something with Kit’s mom.” He sizes me up for a moment. “You look pale, Ray.”

“What were you doing there…?” I ask, eyeing him incredulously. You know what? I don’t think I wanna know. “I’m fine”, I blurt out. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“I don’t think you are, Ray. I’ve seen a lot from my time in the club, and just looking at you I can tell what’s on your mind. There’s no hiding from it. Trust me, all of us can tell. You’re absent from school more often than not, and when you do show your face, you’re all covered up—”

“It’s cold.” I interject, coldly and matter-of-factly. I can feel an accumulation of fury in my fists. Why am I still here entertaining him, instead of walking off like I should? People don’t like him, and I can see why. He’s a creep.

He doesn’t seem to get the hint. How oblivious can he get? “Sure. Maybe. And your eyes are all red and puffy, like you’ve been crying yourself to sleep. And—”

“So you’ve been spying on me, huh?” I retort, confrontationally and aggressively, walking up to stare down at him. By now, my hands are balled up into little fists. He returns a shrug, accompanied with an invisible half-smile. How is he so brazen as to say all that with a straight face? How does he play what he’s doing off like it’s not a big deal? “I’m just looking out for a fellow classmate.”

At that moment, I don’t know what it was, that set me off like a fuse. Was it him looking so smug and sleazy and unfazed by what he’s saying? Was it his brutal transparency, his willingness to speak his mind upfront, that made every word of his an attack on my conscience? All I know is that something, whatever that was, sent me past the point of no return. And out comes a string of invective. “Oh yeah?! What do you know? You don’t know what it means to grieve. You don’t know what it feels like to be ashamed of your own guts. You don’t know what it feels to regret what you never did. All you know is to stalk and spy on people you don’t even know. You don’t know what you’re saying, so leave me alone!”

The floodgates open and my eyes start to shed a river of tears.

Regardless of what I just said, I don’t actually despise him with a burning passion. I just…couldn’t help it. He just kept barrelling everything onto me. I was hoping he’d get off my case, but…

I can’t face him. But more than that…I can’t face myself.

There’s only one way out of this.

I close my eyes and dash straight past him, knocking him to the ground. I catch a glance of him sitting on the sidewalk, looking desperately in my general direction. I don’t care. I sprint headlong into the thick, dense forest. I don’t think of where I’m headed, so long as I’m running, so long as I shake him off my tail somehow.

As I zip through the trees and foliage of the forest, I look back intermittently, fighting back the tears trickling down my cheeks. Darn it, he’s hot on my trail. As I sprint further into the forest, the soil is more damp and uneven, and piles of leaf litter become more common. I hear him calling out to me as he tries to follow my trail. “Ray! Please, come back!” But I can’t stop running. I don’t want to face him, or myself…

What are you even doing anymore?

I’m running. And I shall keep running.

Is it even worth it anymore?

I don’t know how else to live with myself.

Have you considered stopping, for just a moment, to take a breather?

I’ve been running for so long that I’ve forgotten how to stop.

Do you remember why you started…?

…

Do you still want to run…?

…I don’t find it fun anymore. If anything, it’s exhausting.

“Ray? Where are you?”

The sky is now a pale azure. And I’m getting breathless. God, I really am out of shape. Impulse eggs me on to keep running, but the darkness is encroaching. The sun has almost set. There is nowhere else to run.

I duck behind a nondescript tree for cover, leaning back on it, huffing and puffing to get all the air out of my system. Hopefully he’s far enough away that he won’t have seen me.

It feels nice. Being able to finally take a breather. Being able to rest, if only for just a bit…

I don’t think I feel like running anymore.

“Ray.” Jax runs up to me, huffing and puffing. “Thank goodness.” Then, he collapses at the other side of the tree. As night fast approaches, the two of us stay silent, uttering not a word to each other. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say to the guy I just lambasted and ran away from. Does he even want to be here?

It’s so awkward. The silence is almost suffocating. Why isn’t he saying anything? Whatever he has to say, it’s better than…this.

My eyes pan over to the journal beside me. I hear Dr Denver’s voice go off in my head. “I know it’s corny, but trust me. It works wonders.” A lightbulb goes off in my head. Since I don’t yet have the heart to speak to Jax upfront, maybe I can try getting to him by writing in this journal. Thank goodness Dr Denver gave me a pen to work with.

I start scribbling down everything I can muster, translating my thoughts as best I can to clumsy words on paper. It’s crude and messy and far from elegant, but it gets the job done.

Jax

I hear the rustling of paper and the shuffling of pages. I glance over at Ray, to catch him deep in his thoughts, scribbling down everything he can muster, as well as sometimes striking through entire chunks of text. He seems unbothered by the fact that the sun has almost set, and his only sources of light now are the moon and his phone’s torchlight. He’s completely tuned out of his surroundings. Whatever he’s doing, it seems pretty important to him.

He closes up the book and tosses it over to me. It lands right on one of my fingers. Ouch. As I pick it up, I catch Ray looking down at the grass below him, secretly giggling to himself for a moment. Haha. Very funny, Ray. Then, he sighs to himself, staring back out into the distance, seemingly in a contemplative mood.

Curiously, I flip the book open. Amidst a sea of barely legible scribbles and strikethroughs, this is what I get:

Hey, Jax. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have reacted that way towards you. It was the only way I could release…something from my system. I feel so darned sick to my stomach, and I haven’t figured out how to verbalise what it is I have cluttering the crevices of my mind. Hopefully, writing makes it easier for me.

I think I owe you an explanation on what exactly it is I said. I think I bore the emotional brunt of Kit’s death harder than I initially caught on to. It’s…complicated. Especially so when I’ve known him basically my entire life. It left a hole in me I didn’t know he’d filled. And now…I feel so empty inside. I still haven’t yet come to terms on what a life without him looks like or will look like for me.

Sometimes there’s an aching guilt in me when I think of all the other possibilities. Like, what if the projectile had gone just a little more to the left? What if I had been just a little more to the right? Is there a world in which he could have survived? I don’t know…why did I survive and he didn’t?

I don’t want to think of these things anymore. They’re in my mind every day, but how do I get rid of them? Running works…sometimes. But it’s so taxing on my mind. It’s like a drug that you take not to get high, but to stall the crash for as long as you can manage. I don’t want to run from this anymore. But how do I stop?

This is the closest I’ve been to tears in a good long while. I think what he really needs right now is some love. A lot of it.

Against my better judgement, I walk right up to him, reach my arms out and lock him into a warm embrace.