Tanya once compared your friendship to one of Laura Palmer and Donna from Twin Pеaks. Now she realizes that it's even more truthful, simply to how bitter and purely doomed it is. Except that the death isn't what separated you.

Yes, people used to view you two as some sort of iconic duo, like ones that scenarists show in fiction, creating history with one simple dynamic. She saw it this way, too. Tanya had quite a few friends and acquaintances—they all were good, she thinks, aside from a few rare exceptions, but no one was that memorable, no one got to her soul quite like you.

She always assumed that the only thing that could reach her so deeply was nicotine, but you proved her wrong.

The Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst once concluded that if a friendship lasts more than seven years, it is most likely to last a lifetime. Well, Tanya calls it bullshit because it seems like things break before you can relish in them fully, and they break much faster than you expect.

Why did you have to end on such bad terms? You were the first, so why couldn't you be the last? It certainly could've been avoided, yet she still can't decide whose fault it was. Yours, since the majority went against you, and you were basically expelled from the group? Or was it a collective mistake, and they, including Tanya, acted like assholes towards you? Now that the heat cooled down, mostly yet not fully, she thinks it over each night. She trusted you. She still does. However, if you were the peak of what she considers to be a friend, how can she look at anyone else now and consider them someone worthy? Would there be anyone as good as you?

She feels like she deserves to lose everything and everyone great in her life.

The sound of running water stops, and the quietness appears sharp. Tanya is currently drying her hair, eyes focused on the mirror; through it, she catches your reflection. She doesn't utter a word, and yet, her gaze follows your form the whole time. The silence between you that was once filled with lively dialogues now seems destructive. She doesn't want to pay attention to you, doesn't want you to let her eat out her thoughts, yet you do, crawling and wriggling inside her brain like a damn parasite. You haven't gone anywhere, after all, still here. In the same school, in the same classes, in the same world, in the same spot in her heart, she can't clean off.

Finally, she speaks. Her throat feels as if it's being torn, simply from how much courage she has to gain to talk to you again. No matter how skillfully she could keep a straight face, it had nothing to do with the anxiety and insecurities sprouting inside her more and more with each passing day.

"...Do you have a lighter?" Tanya convinces herself that it's an addiction that makes her act that way, but she realizes that it might just be an excuse.

Maybe things can be brought back. Would they be the same as always? No, never, for the better or worse. She doesn't like to risk, but isn't something better than nothing?