eight

                                        

                                              
FEBRUARY
THE SKY WAS WHITE, the air was thick and damp, muted grey clouds were swelling in the distance, rising like froth on the ocean's lip, and Hadley was sitting in his car.
Detention had ended some time ago, but it felt like a dormant lifetime had passed him by since then and he was heavy with the turmoil of time that never ceased, leaving him further and further behind. He was beginning to feel like a person that could only survive in the past.
He hadn't left the school parking lot. He hadn't even turned the car on. There was a wide, blank space between him and home that he couldn't remember how to fill. Haze filled his head and obscured his thoughts in a thick fog every time he tried to mentally guide himself to his driveway, and time did nothing to push him forward even though, at the edge of his sight, he could see the minutes changing on the car clock.
Not that it made a difference. Every minute was the same as the one that had come before it and there was no point to any of them. The sky remained white, the air remained damp, the clouds continued to swell and the rain was still waiting to fall. He could hear a faint, low buzz coming from the air inside the car or the inside of his head, though he could not tell which, and otherwise there was total, muffling silence. The whole world was one still moment, going nowhere.
That morning, he had woken up earlier than he had wanted to and stared at the ceiling for a long time before he was able to get himself out of bed, and he passed the day in a trance, unable to recall any of it. There was nothing that separated it from any other day— especially not since Elodie had gone— other than the way he felt. 
Vague and numb and half-alive, but what struck him earlier that afternoon was that he was not just removed, but that he was sad. He wondered how long it had been festering before he had noticed it. Had it been there before Elodie or had it only been there since she'd left?
Once he realised it was there, it seemed like inseparable part of him and he wondered if he had always been that way, but that didn't seem right. There was a vague memory, a shape taking place, in the dismal sunlight, the white light glinting like a knife, of someone he had been before, of the person he had been before despair took root and grew itself into an organ.
He thought about reaching his hands inside his chest and pulling himself apart from the inside out, like unravelling a bundle of knotted strings and crossed wires. He thought about plunging his hand inside his chest and squeezing his heart until he was doubled over with the pain of it, but he worried that if he unfastened all the strings and wires, if he left his beating heart exposed then the absence of feeling would only grow stronger. He worried that there was nothing left inside himself worth pulling at so instead he sat, waiting for his sadness to burn a hole right through him.
His heart, which had felt stiff and still for as long as he could remember, suddenly felt tender, as though it was trembling inside of him, and he almost wanted to cry, but he could not remember how. Instead, he stayed in his parked car, ignoring the minutes changing on the clock because what difference did it make if they passed or not?
It was becoming clearer to him that one of the hardest things about loneliness was trying to figure out when it started, to pinpoint the second when everything started to fall away. He'd like to think that everything became that way after Elodie, that the numbness and the loneliness started immediately afterwards the way a machine completes one automated process after another, but he knew it couldn't really work like that. He knew that loneliness was not a sudden, crashing feeling, even if the realisation of it was, and that he supposed he had been that way even when she was still around. It occurred to him that he might've been that way before he even started dating her. Maybe he had always been sad. He couldn't remember. The problem with sadness was that it always felt like the start and the end of everything, tainting and blurring and mutilating.