Chapter Text
Neil,
If you would wake up among glass, glitter and drunken revellers, you would see how everything is shiny and broken. Then you would leave quietly through the front door because it is three am and you don’t know where you left your friends.
The streets are empty, and the streetlights are laughing at you.
And in the moment, you could be everything.
You should go home, but you don’t because that feels too difficult. The next day, they will ask you where you went. And you will cobble together some shallow lie because you’ve long since given up on having a perfect soul.
They will resent you and hate you but forgive you and forget you because that is what normal people do.
What does last night look like from your stage?
“For Neil,” Charlie says, raising a glass.
There is nothing to say about Neil, except he was too young and not enough, who disappeared into the snow sometime ago.
There is nothing to say, except that he seemed forever.
Charlie is entitled to a deeper grief, his eyes rimmed red.
He is tough and he is strong, but he’s broken because you did more damage than you intended to do but I can’t blame you because that’s just how things are.
I can see him now.
He is holding his head in his hands, and he is crying.
‘He was my brother.’
He says that over and over.
And you are not here to see him hold onto his grief because it’s the last of you left to him.
But all of that is a lifetime away and none of that matters right now, because you just want to be alone and bide your time. The curtain falls before the act is over because there are no answers, not for this.
And you might just escape this town tomorrow, but not now.
Not yet.
Todd.