Feeling: uncontainable
Listening to: Blue October - Razorblade
Reading/Watching: Pride & Prejudice

My phone rang, and thanks to the personalized ring tones, I knew exactly who it was.

"Hi, Bri."
Her voice was teary. "Katie, I need you."
"What's wrong?"
"My dad is having an affair."
"...I'll be there in ten minutes."

That was Thursday. I left her apartment at 2 a.m., after the phone call from her mom that made everything final and over, after she'd cried herself hoarse and fallen into exhausted sleep.

I don't know what to say. This is not new, anymore. But it's entirely foreign to me. Divorce might happen everyday, but it doesn't happen here. To me. To her. To them.

I feel like the sole dedicated audience member, watching a play from the front row. I am not in the play, but I've been here for every second of it. Her parents used to take us grocery shopping freshman year. Her dad drove me home from the hospital on that awful night that we never talk about anymore. Her mom gives great boy-advice. They came to my sophomore recital, bought me birthday and Christmas presents, and went with us to Chicago last spring. A week of museums and restaurants and being the surrogate daughter of their cute little family... and it no longer exists.

The worst part is that I'm still just surrogate. I am still the audience member. I have no place in this. I can only sit there and watch them all fall apart. I can try and hold my best friend together, but at the end of things I'm hugging her, muffling my own sobs until I get out the door.

I'm sorry for waking you, mon coeur. I wasn't sure what I needed, but it wasn't going to be solved with words, something I only realized once I'd called. The next time you hug me, I'm probably going to cry. Just to warn you.

How stupid am I, to believe there's still any such thing as always-love? Her trust in it is gone. She's so bitter, so cold, and she snaps at me when I try to say something hopeful. It makes me feel young and deluded, for being little Sally Sunbeam all the time and always searching for some perfect ending, searching for some way that can keep me from believing that the world does completely and entirely suck.

Maybe it does. Honestly, how many of you out there have two parents living in the same house right now? It seems like perhaps I'm the last person alive who believes that's normal. And I don't want to relinquish that idea, because facing the reality would hurt too much.

I no longer know what I'm saying, I'm going to bed. My finals are over, the schoolyear is over, the majority of my friends graduated on to bigger and better things tonight, and I am still here, believing in miracles, because I've got nothing better to hold on to.

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