The atmosphere is getting colder.

I remember nostalgia. I remember it creeping into my system every time I would notice how sometimes your gaze would linger. The months that followed after that incident, I noticed. I noticed how your eyes would meet mine amidst the hallway rushes after fourth period — an emotion, too stray to cage in behind the mask you've began to wear, had no choice but to leak through the fissures of your facade.

I remember how I wanted to ask you if you were okay.

I wanted to ask why the room would suddenly feel still. Like a film in slow motion – everything much dragged than it actually is, and the unspoken tension between us almost feeling too static. Almost electric. Enough to burn. I could feel your eyes, the anger in them. The sadness. Despite the distance, I can hear your hammering heartbeat through the white noise. It doesn't synchronise with mine. It never does.

I still wonder how painful it must've felt for you to turn on yourself in order to protect what's left from what I haven't destroyed. I wonder why I didn't try harder and why I let you destroy the remaining pieces.

I still wonder why we chose to sit back and watch as we destroy ourselves and each other.

The questions don't end there though. Back then, I wanted to ask you a lot of things — I still do. The bewilderment is still unsettling. It never did cease, not even for a second, when I'd sit in my room at three in the morning, thinking about how everything had turned out and hearing you cry next door – and when you'd shove me away and yell at me to disappear the day after.

I'm even more incredulous to the fact that nothing really changed since.

And as I watch other scattered teenagers in this room talk about the things that don't really matter to any of them — things that never will — I think about how they try to shape their next reply to fit the ones laid out before them. I think about why someone would drastically try to bend their honesty just to nod in approval at a blatantly offensive opinion, something so messed up it catches you off guard. I think about how everybody's so obsessed with fitting in and somehow along the way they leave themselves behind. Do you get what I mean?

I think you'd know and understand better than anyone else.

I think about you and how you've become so much like them. I think about how I'm terrified for you. I think about how much you've come to despise me, how much the narrative has skewed that you've began thinking of me as the enemy. How you protected me. Abandoned me. Hate me.

I think about how high school walls are a lot more stifling than what a lot of people think, or let themselves believe, and I guess at the back of our minds we all know. We've always been aware. Always on the lookout for the next victim, the next sad story to dip our feet into.

I think about how deathly it is when the stories that coat each slap of a tongue get steeper, and harsher until we're too speechless to voice anything out.

It's okay if you don't understand me.

It's okay if you won't forgive me.

I'm kind of used to it now.

Because your gaze is not the same anymore, and nothing feels static. There's nothing left to hide behind the mask. It all just feels like a raging whirlwind of voices, and bruises, and stares. The stares are brutal and so is the name stapled onto my skin. This isn't a movie in slow motion and you're not made up, and these feelings — the disappointment, the anger, the guilt, the shame, the pain — aren't.

And nothing is in sync.

Nothing at all.