and see at the end of the day, richard knew them all for less than a year. it wasn't even an entire year.
presumably the school year at hampden starts in september and ends in june, and it wasn't even over when henry died. richard had 10 months with them, max. and that's not even considering that the school was closed for like two months in the winter, and you have to factor in some buffer space since they weren't even friends right away and there was still some time before finals when henry died. it was truthfully maybe like 8 months. and that may still be an overestimate.
by the time he's 28, it's maybe 2% of his entire life. and he's not even a little bit over it.
and that's not because it was horrible, but because it wasn't.
he was 19 years old just getting out of his abusive dad's house for the first time. he'd spent his entire life trapped and unsafe and powerless, and hampden was his first taste of freedom. the greek class was the first time in his life that he truly felt like he had friends. the first time he truly felt like he had a family. that was his first time being happy!! in his entire life. of course he was going to do everything in his power to hang on to it. and he was so young and impressionable and damaged by things he hadn't even begun to understand.
the story is very obviously a tragedy, but sometimes i wonder if most people understand what it is that makes it a tragedy. it's not that there was never any hope or love or happiness. it's that there were all those things and they were destroyed.
that's why he's not over it. he misses them. he still loves them.
and he was never able to find anything else that made him happy in the same way.
and he tried. that's the thing about richard. he always tried to make his life better. he was trying from the first moment when he broke into his dad's car and stole his tax documents to fill out his financial aid forms. he's trying years later. he's the only one who graduates, he was even getting a phd, he'd clearly found ways to keep himself afloat financially. but he wasn't happy. not at all. because he was so lonely.
and he tried in that regard too. you can tell he tried with sophie because he was willing to move to california just to make her happy. that was his mistake, actually. that he kept sacrificing to make other people happy. i'd bet you my life savings that he never even told her how much he hated california, how much he associated it with his trauma. i doubt he told her about his trauma at all. she never knew what he was thinking because he never opened up to her. she was scared by the way he looked when he first woke up in the morning because she didn't have a clue why he was so haunted.
a lot of it he wouldn't have been able to tell her, but some of it he could have. he could have told her about his childhood abuse, at least. he never tells anyone, except extremely minor things to henry and then only because he kinda had to. he almost never even thinks about it himself. he's barely begun to understand what happened to him much less process it and he still carries around so much guilt and insecurity he almost drowns in it sometimes.
even though he doesn't really understand what he needs to do, though, he does try. he clearly tried with sophie. he tries for his friends too. there's a lot to be said for the fact that both he and camilla drop everything and travel across the country when they find out francis attempted suicide. they hadn't even seen him in years.
and he tries to reconnect with them. he tries to tell francis not to marry someone he doesn't love just for his grandfather's money and to just get a job and take care of himself. francis just won't budge on the topic. he chooses to be miserable out of fear.
and his problem with camilla is he's always so all or nothing. he's either barely capable of forming words around her or he's doing incredibly impulsive things. he should have tried to reconnect with her as a friend, to start with something small instead of abruptly asking her to marry him when he hadn't even seen her in years. he was always overwhelmed by how he felt about her. and in that moment, by how badly he didn't want her to leave.
and he's still dreaming about henry even though he's been dead for 8 years. a man he knew for maybe 8 months.
it's the only story he'll ever be able to tell.
i have shed actual tears about him.
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