Disclaimer: I don’t own Dashboard Confessional…

She listens to Dashboard Confessional’s song “Dusk and Summer” because it reminds her of him. She cranks it up and closes her eyes, and she takes a deep breath. And she thinks of him.

She thinks of everything they’ve shared. How he knows more about her than the best friend she’s had since she was born, practically. She trusts him, trusts him with everything. There isn’t one thing she’s ever lied about.

Everyone says that their relationship is a joke, just a silly game. Well, the people she’s even bothered to tell say that. Her best friend, Jessie, mainly.

“Come on, Rachel. It’s not like it’s a real relationship. He lives freaking across the country! You’ve never talked to him on the phone, never met him in real life. And you never will. For all you know, he’s lying to you about everything.”

She can almost picture Jessie as she’s saying that. Laying on her back, her head dangling off the edge of her bed, looking up at the room upside down, chewing a piece of bubble gum. Jessie would be wiggling her toes around. Smiling, and singing into the telephone the way she always did.

And usually she laughs and sings back, but not today. Today her heart jumps into her throat, and her voice gets all husky the way it does when she’s holding back tears. And she tightens her grip on the phone and slides deeper into the armchair she’s sitting in and says, “OK, fine, Jessie. It’s not a “real relationship”. Whatever you say.” She sniffs and says, “I’ve gotta go. He should be on soon. Bye.” She hangs up the phone and bursts into tears.

“Jessie say it’s not “real”,” she types to a friend of hers online that night. “She says that there’s no way it can be a real relationship with him so far away.” She wipes back another tear and says to her: “If it’s not real, how come I’m falling in love with him?”

Everyday it gets just a little bit harder. A little harder to know that he’s across the country, away from her. A little harder to know he won’t be holding her in his arms anytime soon. Knowing that he is her sweetest hello, and her hardest goodbye.

So, she swallows back more tears at knowing he’s not right there with her, and blasts that Dashboard song. And waits for him to come online. Because as far away as he is, it feels like he’s right down the block when he types to her, and somehow dries her tears that way.

Love is a silly thing, she thinks. It spares no one, and it leaves you flawed, by knowing that the one person you want to be with is the one person you can’t be with…