She winced every time someone wished them a Happy Anniversary. It was like a dagger in her heart, she was physically feeling pain. No one had done it before, and it didn't feel special. The occasional Facebook post or a card had come, but for the most part it had always just been a date. The date that always reminded her that when she woke up 11 years ago, she had felt like going to see a movie instead.
Not that she didn't love him then. Not that she didn't love him now. The love has just changed, evolved, devolved. Things were different now, and being seen in a different light. A book on love languages was seemingly ignored, but then her love language was suddenly being taken care of slowly. It turns out he had heard and thought about it, but seemed to ignore it when she wanted to discuss it. She wondered for how long that would actually last, feeding the romance. She guessed it would be about a month before things went back to "the old normal."
In the meantime it was easing the stress level by a smidge. It wasn't really helping her great feelings of loneliness and isolation in her current run of friends. She felt everyone else had a stronger connection to another person, and her anxiety and fear of rejection stopped her from really sharing or allowing herself to get close to all but one. PJ.
PJ had just started a relationship with another mutual friend AB, and she could see and feel him emotionally slipping away. He wasn't the type to be anything but 100% with a girl, so their friendship had lasted a few short months before essentially dying on the vine. A snippy response from him on something that wasn't a big deal had crushed her. Happiness for others and jealousy are emotions that ride shotgun alongside each other.
Maybe it was mostly her overwrought emotion, and it wasn't all this terribly empty life laid out in front of her. Suicide entered her thoughts again, but not like the serious times before. She didn't really want death, just something different from what she had.
