I’ve walked a thousand miles up and down these halls; the same corridors where I spent my youth. The plan was always to become a teacher, but I was never meant to return to this place once I had finally mustered the strength to leave it all behind.

Love has a crazy stupid way of changing everything. It can make you forget you were supposed to be someone else. Sometimes, it can make you forget who you always were as you blossom into someone new.

You take the good with the bad, and pray silent enough so no one can hear you. You pray that somehow the good outweighs the bad, and that’s the secretive formula of happiness:

There are people in this world who can’t be happy, and there are people in this world who don’t deserve to be happy. I’m not happy, and I don’t know if it’s because I lost that ability a long time ago, or if it’s because I don’t deserve it.

It doesn’t much matter why though.

I feel as if I’m walking a tightrope, but with every careful step along the slim rope, I find the destination slipping away from me. One step forward, and two steps back. I look over the edge, and think about jumping.

I never do. Whether it’s reality, or a too real to not be a dream, I always come back from the brink and continue my march across the tightrope. That was then, and this is now.

Rage races through my veins. It took an injection of anger to diffuse the sadness of a broken heart after that fateful phone call. It was a call I’ve been waiting on for a year minus a day, where each day I woke up thinking, today’s the day. Naively, I always believed he’d pass on his own in the depths of the night. I couldn’t have foreseen that his parents—the people who had sent him into a downward spiral because they refused to accept who he was—would be the ones to pull the plug.

Nathan’s dead, and the last vestige of my heart has been ripped off like a BandAid covering a fresh gunshot wound. It hurts at first, and then it burns. Finally, it goes numb.

I’m numb, but somehow I feel the cold metal sheathed under the weight of my right hand. The hallways are dark, with the softest paintings of artificial light lighting the thin passages just enough to see. The air is thick, but chilly, suffocating me with a torrid vengeance.

Outside these hallowed halls, a battle rages on the field, where each team is lost in a game that has the obtuse power to dictate futures. Young men will lose their souls on that field tonight, while others will find validation.

Others—my husband—will lose everything the way I once lost everything. What’s left of his heart and soul could be shattered, but he’s losing more than that. He’s losing the power he holds over me. No longer will he question me about my whereabouts in the heat of a game.

I come to a stop at a four-way intersection, where a short hallway bleeds into the oversized cafeteria on one side, and three corridors of classrooms all meet in this center.

It’s poetic that my life will end right here in this spot. I raise the gun to my head and close my eyes.

My heart pounds against my chest, crying for me to stop. My brain kicks against my skull, begging me to reconsider. My soul does nothing—it’s too far gone. In a world where I’ve become inundated with voices dictating what I should do, and who I’ve become, I opt to listen to the most silent of the voices.

My finger hovers against the trigger with an eerie rhythm pulsing through my sweating appendage.

“Stassi?” a familiar voice calls from beside me, a voice belonging to a certain stranger named Kemper.

I angle my eyes to look at him, standing beside me in bootcut jeans, wearing a white jersey with purple numbers, tucked underneath denim. He’s sweaty, his hair tangled just above dark brows, and his face glistening under the low blue-toned light. There’s a haunted pale look etched into the design of his face, contrasted against the darkness behind him and in the space between us.

“What are you doing here?” I question.

“I think that’s the least important question in this scenario.” He raises a hand, cautioning me. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Don’t pretend to know what I do or don’t want.” I twist on my foot to face him, holding the gun still in the process so that it’s still aimed squarely at my head. “You don’t know me.”

“That’s true.” His tongue laps around dry, parched lips. “But I want to know you.”

“You’re a student.”

“That’s also true.” He nods his head, an attempt to distract me with his God-crafted face, but I eye his feet as they take a measured step toward me. “But I know what I feel for you. It’s crazy, I know that, but it feels real.”

“Please stop.”

“You’re not exactly giving me that option.”

“Stop or I’ll shoot.” I reaffirm my grip on the gun, my trigger finger flirting dangerously close to finality. “I mean it.”

“You’ve been hurt by someone or something.” He shrugs, as if he’s carrying apathy on his shoulders. “That’s life. It’s hard and it’s stupid, but it’s also beautiful.” He nods with a forced smile, a promising ray of light in the darkest of nights. “Choose life, because it’s beautiful.” He takes another step, but I counter his approach with two steps back. “There’s pain, and there’s sorrow. There are clouds on rainy days, and sometimes I’m too burdened to get out of my bed on Monday mornings.” He stops moving when he realizes that with every step he takes, I retreat further from him. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I want to know. I want to know who you are beneath the facade.” He exhales a warm explosion of air and wipes his palm against his sweaty face. “I want to know that people can come back from the darkness, because it gives me hope that the darkest of days will fade away.”

I stand there motionless in every part of my body, except for my beating heart, racing mind, and dancing trigger finger. An uncomfortable silence settles in, and a door slams in the distance. I swear I can hear the bowel of a ship buckling as if it’s sinking, but it’s just the precursor to victorious cries screaming from the stadium as someone has scored a touchdown. Presumably from the thunderous chants, the Chiefs are once again winning.

“My parents disowned me because I was a user,” he continues. “After living on the streets for three months, I checked into rehab. I lost a year of my life, but I saved my life. I’ve got no family, and I’ve got no friends. In this spinning world, I’m driving solo, and sometimes the loneliness eats me alive, and other times, it’s the most peaceful existence.” He eyes me for a brief moment and takes a calculated step toward me. I don’t flinch or stumble backward. I’m stuck in place like a fool who should have jumped a long time ago. “Nobody knows me here. It was the only way I was going to get a fresh start, to move somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I shake my head in disbelief. It’s not something I’m used to, growing up in a place like Ridgefield where doors are kept closed at all times, because if they’re not, that’s when people start to talk.

“Because I’m tired of feeling alone,” the words come barreling out of his mouth like a truth cannon, locked and loaded with sadness, riding a quivering wave of solace.

“It’s all we have in this world. Ourselves.”

“Maybe.” He shifts his eyes to the gun. “But if you really believe that, you’d put that gun down.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Make it that simple,” he commands in a roaring tone. “Choose life because you know it gets better. Choose life because, like you said, all we have in this world is ourselves, and you don’t want to let yourself down.”

“That ship sailed a long time ago.” I purse my lips and shake my head gently, afraid if I make too sudden a movement, I’ll accidentally pull the trigger. “I can’t live with what I’ve done. I can’t live with what I’ve lost.”

“You’re not going to do it,” he assures me and takes another step.

“You can’t know that.”

“You’re not crying.” Another step toward me, and his face is illuminated in a faint light pouring downstream from the cafeteria. “When people are really going to pull the trigger, they’re crying.”

“Crying?” I stumble over my own words, trying to process them. I think to myself, why am I not crying? I settle for the first answer that crosses my mind, because I don’t have to.

“They cry because it’s the end. They don’t want it to be the end, but they’re trapped with no way out of whatever particular level of hell they’ve found themselves in.” Now within touching range, he reaches for my hand, tangling his palm around me, but he doesn’t take the gun. “You have a way out, and it all begins with putting that gun down.”

“I’m empty inside,” I cry softly.

“That’s okay.” His lips roll over each other, and he reaffirms his grip on my hand. He won’t steal the gun away from me, because maybe he thinks I have to make the choice to live.

I make it.

The gun clatters against the wood floor and I collapse forward. He catches me in his arms as we both spiral to the floor. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I became a teacher to save students, and now a student has saved me.

I give into the tears, and they come like a flood, drenching my face in a stream of relief and regret, of pain and sorrow, of freedom and a second chance at life. But I know it’s not that simple. The path I must walk in life has been irrevocably changed.

He cradles me in his arms as my emotions stain the floor. And gently, he whispers to me, “You were never going to pull that trigger.”

“Maybe,” I whimper. “Maybe not.”