Re-Branded.

Miley sat scrolling through her instagram feed. 

She just wanted to chill with Trish and not think about the heavy things in life for just a minute. 

She felt stuck. She wanted to dye her arm pit hair a glittery pink and couldn’t. Life weighed heavy on Miley. 

For reasons she will never understand, Miley decided to click her ex-boyfriend Patrick’s new girlfriend’s page. Even thinking it to herself was a mouthful, let alone saying it out loud. 

She knew that each time she clicked this girls handle, it was like re-opening an old wound. Something that she constantly wanted to infect. 

Sure, she loved Liam unconditionally, he was her soulmate. He was the one that washed out reality when it became too much. 

Patrick, on the other hand, was like a sensory deprivation tank. Miley was unable to feel anything when thinking of Patrick. Her own personal defense system, wrapped up in a memory. 

She clicked through weeks worth of pictures. They went hiking, went to beaches, made S’mores. Everything that she and Patrick were supposed to do, but never did, because Patrick never quite loved her like she did him. 

Miley closed her eyes and counted to ten. She counted each number with a painstaking drag, figuring that the longer each number took, the less pain she’d feel. 

She was wrong. 

She thought about the video on Patrick’s instagram of him burning the last package she ever sent him. It was mainly shit that made her think of him. A pizza t-shirt, some song lyrics, the bright orange hat that he borrowed from her. The scent of his unwashed hair still lingering in the cap. 

“Trish!”, Miley yelled, a slight crack in her voice. 

Miley’s mom strolled into her bedroom. 

“Yeah Smiles?”

“Can you please tell Wayne Coyne to haul ass to my room? I need to work some shit out.”

Miley’s phone buzzed with a text from Liam. Miley wondered how it was possible to love two people at once, even if one of the person’s you loved never wanted to talk to you again. 

I’m so jealous of the girl you love instead of me. 

Jealous of the lives that you lead. The adventures that you go on. 

The adventures that we should have gone on. 

But I keep forgetting that even for the shortest of times, I did have you, and now I have another.