Falling - Part 2

Lester sat in the half-light of the same city that neither loved nor loathed him, only tolerated his presence like an indifferent host tolerating a guest who had long overstayed. His phone sat in his hand, a dead weight, a relic from a past life still too recent to be history, too distant to be present.

He had typed the message without thinking, his fingers moving as if possessed by something older than him—something primal, something desperate. The kind of desperation that sits just beneath the skin, just beneath the ribs, something warm and violent and entirely unwelcome. He had sent it before he could stop himself, before he could sanitize it into something noble, or even get ChatGPT to make it more emotionally intelligent. And now, there it was. Laid bare.

I’m going to come out of this so fucking strong.

Of course he would. Because there was no other choice. Because he had spent too much time dissecting his own ruin, turning it over in his hands, inspecting its jagged edges, wondering which parts had belonged to him and which had belonged to Ruby.

He had wished he could stop caring about her. But if he did, it would be a disaster. Not for her. Not even for him. Just a disaster in the abstract sense—a collapsing of meaning, an erasure of purpose, like a novel missing its final pages.

You’re just the object now.

That part made him wince. An object of disaffections now so awful and probably temporary. But it was the truth. The grotesque situation had moved beyond heartbreak, beyond regret, beyond any romantic tragedy he could neatly frame in his mind. He had reached a place of basic survival. Ruby had become the symbol, the talisman of all the unspoken things, the placeholder for a truth too massive to be articulated.

Ruby read the message and let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

There was no anger in her. No sadness. Just the recognition of a person she had known so intimately that his thoughts still echoed in her own mind, even from a continent away. He had always been the one who translated chaos into structure, and now, here he was, falling into his own disorder, writing to her like she was some ancient oracle who could make sense of his mess.

But she wasn’t an oracle. She wasn’t even sure she was a person anymore.

She had walked away thinking it would be cleaner, that distance would do what words could not. She had believed that space would heal things in the way time was supposed to. But Lester was still here. Still writing. Still believing that if he pressed hard enough against the shape of their love, it might reveal something new.

She sighed and typed back:

Yeah, I get that too. That’s my problem—I’m building a wall. I am feeling positive but also ‘missbraucht,’ and I’m a little bit scared of what that actually means.

The German word sat there, looming, heavier than the others. Missbraucht—a word that, on the surface, meant abused, but when split into its pieces, when examined under the strange microscope of memory, meant something else entirely. Wrongly needed.

Abused was for victims. But wrongly needed was something different. It meant that the one who was wrongly needed was neither villain nor martyr, just an object in someone else’s narrative.

And Lester—Lester had been wrongly needed.

Lester stared at her reply. His first instinct was to argue. I wasn’t wrongly needed. I was needed in the exact way that love requires. Love needs. Love clings. Love makes fools of the smartest people and saints of the unworthy.

But maybe that was a lie, too. Maybe he had been needed for the wrong reasons. Maybe he had spent years mistaking Ruby's acceptance of him for something deeper, something truer. Maybe their love had been an exquisite kind of failure, the kind that leaves you stranded in a place neither can reach. Maybe it was meant to be reborn and from any perspective is extremely painful process.

Still, something in him resisted the neatness of that explanation. He wasn’t ready to let her become just another lesson. He had spent his whole life hating the idea that people only existed to teach you things before they left. That wasn’t what this was. That wasn’t what she was.

But he didn’t know what else to say. So he wrote the only thing he knew to be true:

Love is never ideal but if you get it right it is perfect, a great responsibility. And I’d rather be wrongly needed by you than never needed at all.

And for the first time in weeks, he felt something close to peace.

Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters

Falling: Threads of Light Part 3