Board up the lies, lock away the memories

“I mean, I’ve gotta be honest here, I never really got over him.”

Arya looked at me,

“Jules, I’m your best friend, and you never thought to tell me that?”

I sighed, running my hand through my hair.

“I just, Matty and I, we were so… complicated. I didn’t think you’d want to hear anything else about him.”

She huffed, blowing her brown bangs out of her eyes,

“Well my dear, you thought wrong. You know you can talk to me, about anything, and besides, you know I’ll tell you if you’re being stupid.”

I smiled, Arya Carver, my one and only friend, but also the most important person in my life. Even though sometimes (all the time) I was a little jealous of her, her blue eyes out dazzled my brown ones. Her hair falling perfectly around her face while my frizzy red hair was so hard to manage that it was almost always up in a bun. She outshone me, but I still loved her to death.

She’d stuck by me through some of the worst times in my life. When I thought that I had no one, when I felt alone and ashamed. She was right there next to me, picking me up and helping me move forward.

Linking her arm through mine, she pulled me out of the library where we had been browsing and practically shoved me into her car. She drove me everywhere, we hardly ever spent a day without seeing each other.

“Were going to our tea spot, I want all the deets that you never shared.”

I laughed,

“How did I know you would do this?”

She winked at me, not taking her eyes off of the bustling streets of Denham Springs, Louisiana. Our, “tea spot,” was Cane’s chicken, a fast food place that only sold chicken products. Call it weird if you want to, but you probably aren’t a local to Louisiana. She drove quickly, surely. We knew how to get there by heart. We’d lived here our whole lives, basically everyone in town knew us.

We reached our destination shortly. Arya pulled into a parking spot and hopped out of the car, I followed behind her, not quite as enthusiastic. Almost instantly, we were greeted by the staff members,

“Eyyy, welcome back!”

I smiled,

“Hey Harden, you on night shift tonight?”

His blue eyes sparkled, his grin revealing his dimples,

“Yep, Boss even said that I get to man the fryers!”

I laughed, he was so passionate about cooking, it was nice to see someone love the thing that they do. He was a year older than me, nineteen, had chosen to not go to college. Not his thing I guess. I had also chosen to not go to college, but for very different reasons.

Let’s not get into that right now.

Arya pulled me to our table and plopped down,

“So, you wanna tell me why you have totally been lying to me for the past year?”

I sighed and rubbed my temples,

“It wasn’t lying, exactly. I just wasn’t ready to talk about it.”

She rolled her eyes,

“Look Babes, I’m sorry to say this, but it’s been over a year, you’ve gotta get over him, you can’t keep letting him ruin your life.”

I let my head bang into the table,

“Everyone keeps telling me to just get over him, it doesn’t work like that. I’m trying, I really am, I just...”

I groaned and the soft thunk of the wood was all you could hear as I let my head drop yet again. This was a normal routine, or a fairly normal routine. Matty was my ex, as much as it pained me to admit it. We had been together for four years and one day I found out he had been cheating on me the entire time.

I was supposed to go to college with him. I dropped out when we broke up.

It’d been so long since I’d seen Matty, I still remembered how my heart fluttered when I saw him smile. How his brown hair flopped over his eyes, green, like emerald. The feeling of my heart aching for him when we were apart. The weight of his arms around me, the warmth of his embrace. It all just made me miss him more, and wish that things were different.

Time was supposed to fix things. The weeks and months that I lived without him were meant to take the broken pieces of my heart and somehow mend them back together. The year that separated him and me was supposed to ease the pain and cleanse my mind of all things Matty. Time didn’t make me forget about him, of course it didn’t.

Arya didn’t understand, how could she? She wasn’t exactly a relationship kind of person. She’d been single her whole life. She tried to put herself in my shoes, but she could never fully get it, not enough to know how to help anyways.

She tilted her head at me,

“Hey, you ok?”

I looked up at her, my chin still resting on table.

“Does it look like I’m ok?”

“Well no, but sometimes you just have a resting, “I hate everyone face.”

I chuckled, as she ordered her meal, chicken fingers.

"I've never seen a girl love her chicken so much."

I dragged my head back up. The reality of my life hit me like a ton of bricks, his sweet voice echoing in my ears and flooding my brain with memories. I stood quickly,

“I’m going home.”

Giving me a look of sympathy, she nodded.

“Ok, call me when you’re calm again.”

I gave her a salute and walked away. Feeling my weight drop down to my feet. I stopped at her car and smiled, she’d left it unlocked, again. I pulled the trunk open and grabbed my longboard, glad that I had worn my Vans today. I checked myself before I pushed off. Ripped jeans, and a cropped flannel. Well, it wasn’t what I would normally wear when I went skating, but it would do. I set the board down, the loud slamming of the wheels hitting the road filling my ears. I set my right foot on the back of the board and pushed off.

The wind rushed through my hair, blowing the stray hairs behind me. I slid expertly down the road, weaving in and out, avoiding bumps. My gut tightened when my left foot made contact with the asphalt.

“Juliana slow down!”

I chuckled,

“Why can’t you just catch up slow poke?”

He stumbled to make his skateboard move faster. He’d learned how to skate a full year before I had, yet I had picked it up in an instant. Leaving him struggling to keep up with me. Finally, he slid next to me, kicking shakily,

“Love, I’m supposed to be able to show off to you in this department. My girlfriend shouldn’t be showing me up!”

I laughed, running circles around him, literally. He turned bright red in frustration and embarrassment. I giggled and rode next to him,

“You know you love me.”

He smiled,

“I can’t disagree.”

He grabbed my hand, letting go quickly when we almost crashed. We laughed loudly, the biggest smiles plastered on our faces.

I realized that I was crying and looked up, shaking myself out of my own memories that entrapped me. I looked up just in time to see a truck barrelling directly towards me. I had leaned to the left slightly and gone from cruising on the side of the road, to slowly skidding into the opposite lane. I tried in vain to move out of the way, but it was too late. I dove off my board and felt an immense amount of pressure on the back of my head. I heard screaming and felt something wet trickling down my face, then my eyes clamped shut, and everything went dark.

“Shhhh. Shh. Sh. You’re ok Love, I’m here.”

I cried out as another spike of pain shot up my leg, which was covered in blood and dirt. I’d wrecked while we were out skating, tumbling over myself and sliding down the road like cheese on a grater. The sharp rubble cut into my flesh, leaving wounds and burns all over the right side of my body. Matty was carrying me, running to the nearest building to call an ambulance. We were on the outskirts of town, it’d take us too long to get back to his car. I could feel the rocks in my shin, feeling much more like boulders than pebbles. I clung to him, as if holding on to him would make the pain stop.

“Oh my gosh, Jules, are you ok?”

My eyes fluttered open, Arya was standing over me, tears running down her face, her phone clutched to her chest. I tried to sit up and practically passed out the pain was so intense. Arya gently pushed me back down by my shoulders,

“Woah woah woah, don’t try to move, you broke one of your ribs Jules, you won’t be able to move for a while.”

I finally got a chance to look around and realized that I was in a hospital bed, covered in bandages, IV’s sticking into my arm. What seemed like a million monitors on me at once, the repetitive beeping sound ringing through my ears. Only then did I realize just how much pain I was in. My voice was scratchy and strained, it felt like a thousand hot knives were sticking into my throat when I tried to produce sound.

“What, what happened?”

I coughed harshly and rubbed at my throat. She sniffed back more tears, I don’t think I mentioned this before, but Arya was a very emotional person.

“You were hit by a truck, went flying into a ditch. You were on your board in the middle of the road, what were you thinking?”

I closed my eyes,

“Just, messed up I guess.”

She scrunched her eyebrows together,

“But-”

Just then, a nurse bustled in and started taking my blood pressure and poking me with more needles. Arya smiled and left silently. I sighed, I couldn’t talk to her about why I had really wrecked. She would never get it.

I decided to refuse visitors, it was mentally draining to have Arya crying over me and constantly asking me if I was okay. I loved her to death, but right now, I needed to recover, and I just couldn’t emotionally handle her.

It would be three months before they discharged me. I had a broken rib, punctured lung, fractured ankle and broken arm, cuts, bruises, and a concussion. A grade three concussion.

My ankle had healed most of the way, I could stumble along decent enough to get to Arya’s car. As I predicted, she gushed over me the second I got in. I held up my good arm,

“Ariana, I love you but I swear I’m going to strangle you if you don’t stop fussing over me! Chill, I’m ok.”

She huffed and crossed her arms,

“Fine.”

She drove me to my apartment in silence, giving me a questioning look every now and then. Finally, I couldn’t take it,

“What?”

She shook her head, sliding out of the car and coming around to help me out. I raised my eyebrow,

“Arya, what is it?”

She sighed,

“It’s just, I don’t understand how you got in such a bad wreck. Especially on your longboard. You are an amazing skater, I just don’t get how you let that happen.”

I struggled to smile,

“I don’t know, I just lost concentration.”

She didn’t look like she believed me,

“Juliana Hartworth you don’t lose concentration.”

I started to hobble towards my apartment door,

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I don’t think I want to skate anymore.”

A tear slipped out of my eye, trickling down my cheek. I tried to mask my pain, I didn’t want to stop skating, but it only made the pain more unbearable. I couldn’t think of him anymore than I had to already.

“But, you love skating.”

My bottom lip trembled, I faced away from her and rested my hand on the door knob. The hurt showing through my lie.

“It’s just, it’s not my thing anymore, it’s not me.”

I pushed open my door, and let my mind swallow me, the darkness, greeting me again.