Page 78 of Poetry of Flowers

Heal yourself before you heal me

But he wouldn’t do that

There is no healing for me

let me help you,

He says trying to fix me before he goes

Goes to lose himself in the mindset of pain

I won’t let that happen

Let me fix us, I say

There is no you or me

only us

Let us fix us.

ChapterTwenty-Four

MATILDA

Kayden had the kind of voice you listen to when you needed a good cry at three in the morning. He had the lyrics to warm and break your heart at the same time, and that was precisely what he had just done to me. It might sound big-headed to say the lyrics, he had just sung were about me, but the way he looked at me, his voice made me question things I never questioned before.

I will fix you.

He had messaged me those exact words several times when I was not well.

He tried to fix everyone else when he needed to fix himself. Over the years he had become bitter. Kayden had never told me why, every time I tried to talk to him, he had changed the subject. I was his carbon copy in that way, and I appreciated not getting pressured to talk about something I didn’t want to talk about. I stopped asking him, but that was never a good idea.

What if he felt like me a few days ago when I got it into my head that life would just stop soon?

The night my mother died, I stopped believing in any future of mine, there was no future in sadness.

I still had those days where I couldn’t get out of bed because I had no reason to.

I was still in the process of learning that people cared for me, that there might be some kind of destiny for me.

Kayden had to be in that future too; otherwise I would regret my decision to believe in happiness.

If this song was truly dedicated to me, then I needed to talk to him because if he tried to fix me, I had to fix him too.

“Only fifteen minutes to go, kids!” Devon announced loudly.

Autumn and I had tried to wash our hair in the bathroom sink, which turned out to be more difficult than we could have ever imagined. I had hit the back of my head against the tap twice, and my entire shirt was wet and colored pink from my hair dye.

At some point, I should stop buying white shirts when I always ruin them.

At least we got rid of our greasy hair, even though the others got annoyed with us for taking so long. We learned from our mistake to never wash our hair in a dirty public bathroom again.

“What are we going to do when we arrive in Billings?” Theo asked. He’d been quiet the entire drive.

Kayden shrugged, “We find somewhere to stay and then catch a train tomorrow. I don’t have a plan,” he admitted to his friend, who looked him up and down.

“What if we end up freezing to death on the streets because we can’t find a hotel?”

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