Goodbye.

It hurts. My body hurts, but it always does at night. I stretch out on the bed, across covers that have known too many bloodstains, and too little chlorox bleach. The laptop is open and green dots hover on the screen, denoting online contacts.
She starts talking to me, but only after I stay hello. Her words are mature and relatively typo-less, but she worries me. She's always worried me. My fingers fly over the keyboard and I press enter.
Don't hurt yourself again.
Shaky words reply that it's hard not to.
I shake my head and my eyes close.
Don't hurt yourself, dammit!
And she tells me no one cares.
I care.
There's a smile in her words. She knows I care, but she doesn't think it's enough. She's tired of liking a guy she's never met, some eighteen-year-old male from twenty-two hours away. She's exhausted with fending off questions from her classmates. She's tired of feeling like her affection is something wrong.
Something corrupted.
Please, please don't. I care. I fucking care!
She's laughing. She's happy. She says it will be all right, and then she signs off.
I stare at the grey icon – the little bubble of silver with an ivory x across it. I stare, and then I reach out to close the laptop and I am numb.
Ten seconds later my phone vibrates. It's my old one, the one from before I got my new one. It's sitting on the dresser, shaking.
The charge should have been out; I had it on all week.
I have a message.
I open it.
I freeze.
I always did love you, you know.
Goodbye.