Stars hang overhead, saying to me in exasperated whispers that their light is wearing thin.  The dirt-and-weeds-chic backyard is lit with one light that shines loudly from one side of the house.  A shift in the air has just finished taking place- what was once reggae music morphed into the melancholy tones of Mayday Parade and a A Day to Remember.  It wasn’t surprising that there was somebody crying on my left side, the music was inviting to the idea.

Her usually shiny eyes are glazed over with nostalgia and bitterness and her voice shakes with the force of a hurricane as she explains to me that she’s worthless.  Throughout the entire night, I was trying to avoid this type of conversation like a drunk driver avoiding the approaching headlights, but we were bound to crash it if we stayed in the same place long enough.  Up until this, our night had been filled with very American-teenager style Rastafarian jokes and crazy driving, but now it’s like reality is moving in a pool of ice and sinking to the bottom of a place that we don’t like to visit. 
I’ve known this girl for about a year and in that time, she’s played the role of my girlfriend, a friend, and an enemy. Tonight, her only enemy was herself and I was supposed to be a strong pillar that she could cling to with bleeding wrists and nails painted the same color as the night sky- flaky jet black. It seems like her life is completely made of a feeling of flakiness. From the flaking of her nails to her grades and family falling apart at the foundation, she can’t seem to catch a break, unless it’s the shattering of hope - in which case her entire life is a ‘break’.
In a last attempt to cheer things up I open my mouth. “Hey but at least we’re alive!  Me and you.  We’re chilling out here on a Friday night looking up at the stars and we don’t really need to care about anything; sounds pretty cool to me.  Like isn’t life just cool?  You can do whatever you want… like in a few years when we go to college and leave all of these dumba** problems behind, like none of this will even matter, man.”  I realized that I began to sound like a hippie, so I tried to keep the ‘mans’ and ‘likes’ at a minimum, but I liked the fabrication that I was on to something.  “Imagine when we’re 90 and high school was just like 4 rough years in a long beautiful life- isn’t it just a like cool thought man?” 
I was speaking to the stars because I knew that she probably wouldn’t understand a word I said - I was right.  Her eyes that already looked like dams restraining cold water cracked down the middle due to my little speech and the tears ran black down the side of her cheeks as she shouted, “But I don’t want to live ‘till I’m 90, I want to live ‘till I’m 16- maybe.”  Hearing her say that was like jumping into a lake of a thousand needles and expecting to come out of it without any scratches.
For the next hour, she explains a backstory that few have ever heard (the ones who have don’t talk about it).  In her eyes, the story is not proof that she can bounce back, but an anchor cast of iron that pulls her down.  While I was listening to her, it occurred to me that she and I could just as easily be standing on two different planets, one overlooking the kind universe and the other overlooking the destruction and bleakness of it all.
I’m a believer that everything happens for a reason, even if the reason is nothing more than fate trying to kill you.  Her stories are sprinkled with dreams of the future but baked with loneliness and she cannot see the future as being bright, or on that note, anything less than a midnight forgotten.  That’s the seed of our juxtaposition of attitudes; no matter how ‘rough’ life becomes, in my eyes, I think that it’s worth it to see another day, another day which she believes will never come.
Midnight rolls along to one and it’s about time to go.  “So you’re going to school on Monday right? See you there, right?” I ask her over and over, acting like a broken record player until she promises that she’ll be there.  That’s the only thing that’ll hold someone to their word - a midnight promise that’s only good for two more days.