Firecracker

-9- ✔️

JULIA GUSHED, HER VOICE LACED WITH AWE and something else that I couldn't quite decipher, "Awe, that's so cute!"

I nodded my head solemnly, thinking back to the good old times that Michael and I had spent together. The countless number of times that we would laugh and playfully fight and bicker back and forth. I missed all of that.

I missed him.

Even though not everything in our relationship was all smooth sailing, I still missed it.

"Yeah, well, that's basically the story of us. I guess. But that's all that I have to really tell you about Lydia. Other than that, she moved away about a year before Michael and I broke up"

"Do you think that she could still somehow be behind all the notes you've been getting?" Julia thought, but I shook my head no.

"I don't think so, to be honest. If she was, then that would be pretty weird. I mean holding on to a grudge that lasts about six or seven years? That would just be a waste of her life"

"What if she's mentally unstable?" Julia asked me, seemingly urgent for my response. I gave her a weird look.

"Even if she was crazy like that, I haven't done anything wrong. Michael liked me all along. He admitted to me that he never had any feelings for her, even though I kinda of tried to force him too. She would be getting revenge on me for something that I didn't even do wrong"

"Looking at this in her shoes, I guess that the only thing that you did wrong was being born, and becoming Michael's friend in the first place" Julia joked, shrugging her shoulders.

"I guess. But that's just being crazy"

She nodded, and a silence overcame us for a few minutes before she spoke up again.

"If Lydia was standing in front of you right now, what would you say to her?"

"'You're insane'" I laughed, and she laughed along with me.

"Well than Miley, long live the insane"

*

*

*

I went to the hospital today.

With everything going on around me, I found that it had been a long time since the last time that I went, I knew that it shouldn't have been. It was wrong to put my mother on the back burner of my schedual, yet I couldn't really blame myself. With all the new and top notch treatments that she had been getting recently, I knew that it was wrong of me to deprive her of any answers.

"Hey, mum" she was sitting up in her bed, reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose and she was in the middle of turning the page of a book.

"Miley? Sweetheart how are you? It's certainly been a while" she gushed, marking the page in her book before she motioned me over, enveopling me in her arms.

"I've missed you, mum" I sighed into her shoulder, inhaling her scent.

"I missed you too, sweetheart. How have things been?" I took a seat beside her and I held her hand as she focused her attention on me.

"Strange" I admitted, and a knowing smile came to her face.

"Care to explain?"

Immediatly, after giving her a sheepish smile, I explained to her the events over the past two weeks. Telling her why her treatments were getting better and how the debt was paied off. As awkward as it was to tell her, I spilled the beans about how I managed to marry myself off to a guy who couldn't really stand my existance at times. And while I went into some detail, her expression remained blank.