Part 2

The room was cold. She quickly closed the door and ran towards the thermostat to see that it was a comfortable 78 degrees in the room, but the room was still too cold. The bed was cold. It was not her bed. Everything in the room was cold. The dresser was not her annoying dresser, where the hinges were held together by duct tape and where when you pulled out the draws, you had to be careful, if not the thing would go back into its slot. No, it was not her tiny dresser with the paint chipping off on the side, the dresser where she hid his Metallica shirt and a few of his black wife-beaters. Those unimportant things were not in this cold room, nope, they were home. It had been a week since she left the desert alien infested town and the adrenaline rush was gone. This was not how she pictured it to be, it was supposed to be a dream come true, but why was she sitting in her hotel room, alone and counting the days when she could be back home? She was home sick, yeah - that was it, nothing more. It had nothing to do with him or how things ended, how broken he looked.

She slowly walked towards the bed, only stopping to gently place her guitar down. Without hesitation, she flopped down, enveloping herself in fluffy yellow comforters. Reaching over the side of the bed, into her bag, she pulled out a leather-bounded book. She bought it for him a long time ago at one of the Indian Reservations near Roswell. It was in dark mahogany with hand-stitched detail along the edges. Opening the book and she ran her hand through the paper. It was thinner than regular paper and a lot grainer, very similar to charcoal paper. She chuckled at the thought of how she even knew what charcoal paper was- him. She remembered the first time she looked inside that book and was speechless at what scattered throughout the pages. He never took his art seriously. He was never really good at portraits or figure drawing, but somehow he found the motivation to draw the subject with great detail and beauty. The pictures weren’t in any order; they were randomly thrown in various pages. She loved every single one of the drawings in the book. She never saw such passion in any of this other works as she saw the way he drew her.

Throughout the book she saw her own handwriting filling the once empty pages with poems and lyrics. She only meant to borrow the book, but after writing in it she couldn’t part with it. And although the book held so much she wanted to say to him, to make him understand what was eating inside her, but she might have lost the opportunity to give it back to him, forever. Thumbing through the pages, she recalled how she felt as she wrote every entry; they were very personal to her, and something so private she couldn’t share with anyone, not even with him. He affected her. He filled an unnamed emptiness that she never knew existed. The emptiness that was now filled with happiness and heartache. Laying her head down, she reached the last page, the last time she wrote in it.

She never meant it to end that way and she never knew it could hurt this much. It was not that she wasn’t happy to be here, in the big city, being busy, but it was during times like these, when there was no one around that it got to her. There was too much time to think, being alone and having it suffocating her every thought. What she really wanted was enjoy the moment, but it was so hard when she was so hurt. She hurt because she hurt him. It had just ended wrong. Everything was wrong. She wanted to tell him, and wanted him to know that he was the world to her, but there was this little child in her that had these dreams. She would give up the world for him, in a heartbeat, but she didn’t want regrets. She didn’t want to look back and have that inevitable question of “what if”. She knew she was very depended on him, he was her world, all of them were, but she needed to prove to herself that she could do this on her own. For herself and only herself. It was a selfish act, she knew it was, but she needed to prove to herself that she was good... good enough for him and all that he had given up for her.

Tears escaped her eyes. The emotions soaked through the pages, merging pictures and lyrics together, one. Without looking at the lyrics, her mind played the song, lulling her to sleep.