Missing you

tw: death

The train is late. As usual. 

What luck, I am late too. And today,  those are five vital minutes for me to get right on time: I had stayed talking with my friends too much today, and I had forgotten I should come back home.

The train arrives and starts to brake lazily. The locomotive always stops too far forward, just a few steps away from the end of the platform. 

And now I’m in the middle, in between two doors. I choose the first wagon, usually among the most silent ones: everybody else usually chooses the middle.

I need a quiet seat where I can stay alone, without any strangers around me: they usually either invade my personal space, or disrespect the sacred silence that should dominate the wagon.

The seats just behind the driver’s compartment aren’t empty. There’s a girl on the left, and Clarissa on a seat on the right side. 

Clarissa?

I freeze and look at her. No, she is not the person sitting there. That girl lifts her brown eyes, and I see hers. She is confused, I’m frozen. And I continue to just see her, only her,  in front of me. 

The jeans she always wore, covering those long and skinny legs, in that same dark grey shade.

I look for her in the body of that random girl. And I find it. 

No, no. As I look at her face, it has something… not right. And the hair, no, it's too curly. No, no, it can’t be. But it looks like it.

And I look at them, at Clarissa and the girl at the same time: I see her and she looks at me, extremely confused. 

I can just mindlessly think, trying to make sense of everything I’m seeing.

The person in front of me is like a recipe with a missing ingredient. Like I prepared brownies without baking soda: the colour may be right, the taste too, but the consistency is totally messed up, and so it ruins everything. Just because I forgot to add a little powder that looks exactly like flour. 

But even a little teaspoon can change the whole recipe. In this case, it makes the dough rise. 

In my case, it makes Clarissa who she is.

And I can see the effect of this missing baking soda: that’s an anonymous face, I abruptly have a nobody in front of me.

But I have all our past in front of my eyes. I see every moment we spent together, looking at each other in the eyes, hearing her laugh, watching that smile I had never seen on anybody else’s face. 

And everything else, which sight can’t comprehend. 

Our endless chats in the depths of the night, laying in our bedrooms, which were always too far away. Those nights, as we fought together against the need to sleep, against the weight of our eyelids. And our minds shut down, along with the noises and the responsibilities of the rest of the world. If souls ever existed, I swear, those were the ones typing, those endless nights.

I have always been the kind of person who would treat every friendship as if I were a therapist. For me, knowing a person means letting them unravel their pain. Knowing one’s achievements, one’s moments of joy, that’s always easy. And, no doubt, talking about it makes people happy. 

But you know a friendship is successful when you are so trustworthy in your friend’s eyes, that they feel comfortable talking to you about everything they have been dealing with, or that they haven’t even told themselves. 

Friendship?

This word makes my heart sink.

I had stopped questioning it a long time ago, when there was no need anymore. But, apparently, today I have to brutally come back to it.

Friendship is an overused word. People use it to refer to the ones they met, whom they may have some kind of relationship with, without bothering to find a more suitable name. Colleagues, friends of friends, and so on.

And apparently, Clarissa too.

She wasn’t a friend of mine. But, like many other people, I referred to her as such.

I still have no idea how to define her to this day. It doesn’t matter, anyways.

I think Clarissa was never my friend. She has always been something different, something my mind could not explain. And I, too, fell into the trap of calling her a friend, like the others. Obviously, she was special to me. But, in some parts of my mind, I trivialized it in some way. Or, at least, I underestimated what life had prepared in front of us. I hadn’t neglected her, at least directly, but I still feel there was something more I could have done.

I wish I had told her how her smile lit my days. I wish I had told her how beautiful her laugh was, every time it slipped out of her mouth.

And instantly, my life flashes in front of my eyes, and I see every time I could have called her, could have texted her, but thought I was being annoying, that I was being too much.

And now, I always feel like I’m not enough. That without her, without that missing ingredient, I could never be complete again.

I lost a piece of myself, as she stopped texting me. 

But it’s not her fault. It’s a drunk driver’s one.

She loved driving her motorbike alone late in the evening. But that night, something went wrong. They told me about that accident just once, and I forgot what they said to me. I was never interested. Everything my mind could picture were the photo on her grave and a lot of empty and lonely, lonely days. 

Every time I visit her at the cemetery, she still looks at the world with that smile. My soul, which could nothing but rejoice just at the idea of her laugh, is now dry. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, I looked at her crying of profound pain.

And that stranger is still in front of me. Just two seconds passed, and I’m still standing on the train, some seats on my right side, some on my left. I turn and see two empty spots just a few steps away, no one sitting around them. No strangers near me; no memories, maybe.

I walk in the other direction and cosy up in a seat as much as I can. That’s hard, with all the thoughts that start filling my head. I catch myself staring at that mysterious girl from time to time during the journey.

But it only hurts. She is not her, she is not what I need. She is just a ghost, she is there to show everything I miss.

An ingredient. Clarissa. A piece of myself.