I didn’t want to tell her. She was staring back at me with eyes that looked like holes and I was scared to make them deeper and darker. But I didn’t know what else would put a stop to this plane crash. These words couldn’t be fluffed up—they were going to hit like molten comets and create a permanent crater, but deep down I hoped grass could still grow on a broken landscape. “I’m waiting,” April spat out coldly. We were sitting in Au Printemps, the café where we spent countless hours. Actually, this was the place we met. It was last year, my second year in college. I was fed up with the school’s library and needed somewhere different to host my long nights of homework. Someone had recommended this little haven to me. It was open 24/7 and had endless seating space for committed customers. The most magnificent thing about the cafe was its tall bookshelves. It was a grand place—almost like a library—except this cafe doubled as a used bookstore. It was a rainy night when I met her. I had gone for a cup of coffee and needed a new book to keep me sane from the outside world pounding down on me. While looking through the fiction section, I heard someone whispering. I walked to the end of the aisle and saw her sitting at the end of the bookcase. Her black hair was wet and sticking to her face like small tentacles. Her skin was pale, so pale that for a second, I thought I was looking at a ghost slowly disappearing before my eyes. I don’t remember what she was saying but she stopped once she saw me staring. She stared back with a broken smile. That night I treated her to a coffee and we opened up to each other easily. She had just been dumped by her boyfriend, but I knew it was more than that. I noticed the bruise on her cheek and another one on her arm. But I let it pass. The way she rushed her sentences and disregarded punctuality made me think she was in a hurry to move on, so I helped her. “Why can’t you love me?” I asked in reply. She cringed at my question. I almost put my hand on hers, but stopped halfway. After the night we met, our relationship grew rapidly. At first I thought it was faith, but it was something more selfish. I had just gotten out of a relationship that same day. Her name was Sylvia and we had been together since high school. Because we went to separate colleges, we heavily relied on webcam to keep the lifeline of our relationship strong. It was difficult to see her and not be able to touch her, to hold her when she was sad or kiss the smile that sometimes wedged itself onto her face. It was even harder when I didn’t have someone to hold onto when life was just too damn hard. Sylvia soon found someone else, and I guess I found someone else too, for a while. “I-I do love you,” April said. But the words came out with a heavy emptiness that made it difficult for me to breathe. The day I knew it wasn’t going to work out was one of the worst of my life. I had gone to her apartment. She lived on her own, naturally. April wasn’t very social and I never asked why, because I wasn’t either. I walked in through the open front door, expecting her to greet me with the usual forced gestures that made her look like a marionette, but she wasn’t around. I called out to her, but there was no response. I went toward the dark hallway leading to her room and noticed the bathroom light coming from under the door. I knocked a few times, but there was no answer. I remember an uneasy feeling as I opened the door. I found April on the ground locked in the fetal position. She was wearing a transparent night gown that looked like a thin membrane. She was bleeding heavily from her face and knuckles. She stared at the washed-out red with a blank expression. I opened the door further and walked into a sea of broken glass. It was everywhere. I ran toward her and put my arms around her. She wept for an hour. Between sobs, she would talk, but not to me. She kept screaming at someone to leave her alone and I couldn’t do anything but wait until she stopped. She did eventually, but it was too late for us. “No you don’t, April. You can’t love and it’s not fair to me.” I stared at the cuts on her knuckles. They were mountain ranges of things she couldn’t overcome. But I couldn’t help being a bit harsh. I felt conned. When I let someone in to my heart, I become a wide-open book. I enjoy when people come and fill it with stories and read the stories already written in it. It fills me with a warmth that even the sun can’t conjure. But April came and abused it. In fact, she ripped out pages that she didn’t like and wrote over parts that, to her, “needed a little help.” “Are you kidding me?” April replied, scrunching her forehead, making her wrinkles resemble the cuts on her hands. God, I hated when she did that. It was an exaggerated expression she used to defend herself. She wanted me to feel bad for her. “You are a fool! You should have figured out what you got yourself into. I warned you!” April got up and rushed out. As she gave me a last look, I noticed a dim light in her dark eyes, as if I had revealed something to her. Although she was gone, there was a strange coldness coming from the seat where she sat. That’s when I noticed she had left her journal. April always carried it, but I never paid any attention to it. I opened it up to a page with a sticky note hanging out. “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness…” I couldn’t keep reading it. It took me a while to remember where I had seen this before. It was Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. This was the thing she was muttering the day I met her. For a week, I didn’t bother to look for her, although I thought about it several times. The thing is, I really did miss her. I didn’t think it then, but when she left, she took something. I don’t know what, but there was a new heaviness to my steps. I hadn’t gone to Au Printemps for the whole week. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had a big exam the next day, but I decided to study in my room. I couldn’t concentrate; I stared out the window. I kept my gaze upon a lonely daisy. Its yellow middle was broken and its white petals were falling off like broken-winged doves. The wilting flower drooped to the ground. It was giving up, I guessed. Or the weight of the rain snapped its spine. I began imagining April as the daisy. Somewhere out there she might be slouched on the ground, the raindrops falling between her knuckles and her slow breaths disappearing into the cracks on the ground. I looked back at the daisy. The last petal had fallen off. All that remained was a decaying skeleton.