Your’s || Deven
He was the sun. She was a planet caught by his gravity and she could not get out no matter how hard she tried. He was the sun and she was burning. It was easier when they were apart, when they were done. When she could pretend that they had nothing. That it was just some silly, stupid relationship.
She still slept in his shirt, still remembered his hand running through her hair. Remembered how he held her when he told her he was going to move for medical school. She woke up almost expecting him next her when she had bad nights.
She had felt normal for the first time in years, moving to a new city, pretending to be a new person. There was no broken heart for this new woman she had created. She was too focused on her work to be plagued by old memories and what ifs.
She didn’t think it would be so easy for that new character to fall away.
Just her name. “Deven,” Falling from his lips and there she was again. Angry and scared and oh so drawn to him. It had been years, they had been done for years, they were never supposed to see each other again. She was never supposed to feel her heart beat so fast again.
She felt weak, she wasn’t supposed to feel so many emotions for him anymore. He was supposed to be nothing to her. He was supposed to just be a passing memory.
She didn’t cry, she hadn’t cried for years, but she certainly came close to it. With her back against the door and her chest heaving with labored breath, she contemplated moving. Deven didn’t want him here. She moved here to forget about him, because everything in her damn hometown reminded her of him.
Years later and he still pulled her in like nothing ever had before.
She knew it weighed so heavily on her, because she told him to leave. She pushed him out of her life, claiming to be fine. She wouldn’t have stayed with him if he hadn’t left, they both knew that. They both knew that she was imploding and that she needed to recreate everything in her life. And that included him. He did what he could and left. It was the best option.
For the first couple of months, she didn’t miss him. She didn’t think of him, throwing herself so hard into school, never letting a moment go past where she didn’t have something to do. There was far too much going on in her head to think about anything. She was running away from herself as much as she had ran away from him.
She could remember the exact moment where everything she had kept in her head spilled over. She hadn’t come home for Christmas break, she took most of the money that she had saved to visit Berlin, where Arden had wanted to go with her. She stood on top of the hostel’s roof, her bare feet curled over the edge keeping her still. A bitter wind swept past her and she nearly slipped off.
She couldn’t breath. This was the trip she had planned with her brother. The one person, other than Declan, who had ever given a shit about her. The only two people who had ever said that she was going places and one of them was dead and she had basically pushed the other one out of her life.
She remembered spending most of the night kneeling with her chest to her knees, folded over sobbing. She had been so numb when school took her time up that she hadn’t realized how gone she truly was. There was no more Deven, there was just a body going through the motions. She was doing well in school, but she had no friends. She didn’t speak to her roommate, she just existed.
Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed him out, she should have tried. She should have offered to move out with him or attempted a long distance relationship. They probably would have worked. The two of them were so stubborn that they wouldn’t have let it fail.
Deven wished that she had tried, but her world had been crumpling at that point. An earthquake followed by a hurricane and she didn’t have solid footing anymore. She couldn’t be with him because she wasn’t her.
As she’s grown older, she’s realized that she hasn’t been her since they ended. In the purest form of love, he never asked her to be anyone she wasn’t. He let her be mean to him because it made her felt better. He didn’t ask her to lower her voice when she yelled. He held her when her temper was going crazy. She had only been her with him.
She wanted to scream, leaning against that door which separated them again. She wanted to swing it open and throw herself at him. Tell him that she hadn’t meant to make him leave. Tell him that she still loved him. Tell him that she was sorry.
Deven let herself slip to the floor. He wasn’t her’s anymore. He had moved on, he wasn’t stuck waiting for her, like she was with him.
She couldn’t tell him that she loved him, because she was the one who had ended it. Who split them up, who had decided that she didn’t work on the relationship anymore.
He used to be her’s. She was still his.
