Clara León

“You have a life stretching out in front of you with a million possibilities,” Gat says. “It—it grates on me when you ask for sympathy, that’s all.”
Gat, my Gat.
He is right. He is.
But he also doesn’t understand.
“I know no one’s beating me,” I say, feeling defensive all of a sudden. “I know I have plenty of money and a good education. Food on the table. I’m not dying of cancer. Lots of people have it much worse than I. And I do know I was lucky to go to Europe. I shouldn’t complain about it or be ungrateful.”
“Okay, then.”
“But listen. You have no idea what it feels like to have headaches like this. No idea. It hurts,” I say—and I realize tears are running down my face, though I’m not sobbing. “It makes it hard to be alive, some days. A lot of times I wish I were dead, I truly do, just to make the pain stop.”
“You do not,” he says harshly. “You do not wish you were dead. Don’t say that.”
“I just want the pain to be over,” I say. “On the days the pills don’t work. I want it to end and I would do anything—really, anything—if I knew for sure it would end the pain.”
There is a silence. He walks down to the bottom edge of the roof, facing away from me. “What do you do then? When it’s like that?”
“Nothing. I lie there and wait, and remind myself over and over that it doesn’t last forever. That there will be another day and after that, yet another day. One of those days, I’ll get up and eat breakfast and feel okay.”
“Another day.”
“Yes.”
Now he turns and bounds up the roof in a couple steps. Suddenly his arms are around me, and we are clinging to each other.
He is shivering slightly and he kisses my neck with cold lips. We stay like that, enfolded in each other’s arms, for a minute or two and it feels like the universe is reorganizing itself, and I know any anger we felt has disappeared.
Gat kisses me on the lips, and touches my cheek.
I love him.
I have always loved him.
We stay up there on the roof for a very, very long time. Forever.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars