Emotional Renaissance

He hears about her death late, which seems slightly absurd considering how fast news travels these days. Nevertheless, the words shake him in a manner that he's not used to. She was so very young -- they all say, including him, although like all other things he somehow manages to make it about himself. It's a way for him to better assess his own mortality at twenty-three; his past failures, lowered motivation, self-esteem, but above everything else what gets to him the most is his lack of effort to care before she died.
They hadn't spoken in person for over a year; their last encounter brief due to his crippling infatuation with another. He thanks the universe that she's still breathing, even if some of the consistencies aren't quite what they used to be. Then the overwhelming nature of the phone calls and text messages filter in. He loosely flirted with the idea of this young and recently whittled flower unbeknowest to anyone else (His productively close and strangely distant friends and acquaintances)
It was a personal conquest to prove an age-old point to himself. A lack of concern for everything she was, only made her want him more and furthermore turned his own thoughts on the entire situation inward.
He wasn't himself in brief technological flashes of boredom. She would send him her vulnerabilities and he would return the favor with an intelligently bloated facade of a personality.
And this trend didn't so much continue as it popped up on occasion in the late and vacant nights spent in similar small towns with dry wells and feeding holes, until it became too much for him. Not the thoughts necessarily. They were genuinely fantastic while still remaining marginally false when push came to shove. The slender form saying all the right things in the back of his head wasn't her, but more so the her that he wanted her to be. The girl that chose him and his anti-social tendencies or compulsive vices over the brightened lights and blurry Sunday mornings.
She invited him to participate in the safe and expendable occasions to which he denied at least three times like Peter, before the end of it.
Part of him didn't want to put up the effort of selling himself short for what would have tragically amounted to an easy lay for mostly everybody else. Not him, though. He refused to take the drive, to order the drinks, to listen to the same stories heard a thousand times over, simply in preparation for the standard effects of alcohol to sink in. He was above the curb, while still unfortunately stranded below it.
Communication was finally cut following a table tennis game of electronic symbols, sent back and forth before he got his cellphone plan changed to compensate for evolved times. She considered texted sentiments communication while he was simply trying to work on something more concrete, about the ones who truly managed to spin him around blindfolded in all directions.
She felt inferior and dumbfounded by him electronically shrugging her off of his shoulder and soon sent her emotional imbalances back through the same means. he told her to go fuck herself and thought nothing of it until after his work was done.
The images then pounded away at his brain on sporadic and unnatural occasions when he was having problems deciding on a direction. The fantasy still surprisingly held up for him, representing in the simplest of definitions a last resort for a new era. One when it all suddenly made sense. He could be the fully-fleshed example of what he always wanted to be with a girl so beautiful, but at the same time, only worth the experience of another late night.
That was all her really wanted, and yet as it still somewhat tears him apart, he has problems deciding what defect made him stop caring. He's not sure if it's a still grainy moral code or just the way times happen to be sputtering along. A refusal to conform, tied together with the strings of a philosophy that clearly states -- it's so much better to be alone, waiting for something spectacular to come along rather than placing half the dozen eggs into the carton and seeing how well they sit.
However, despite all his thoughts on unexpected circumstances (poor motor skills in beach side communities) he still can't help but feel that there is always going to a splotchy void within himself simply because he knows now that she is forever gone. Regret is a piece of it, although double-edged in nature. Part of him regrets the way he acted, whether it was virtual or in person; the seasoned appearance of someone who didn't ever give a fuck. The second and less stable part regrets that the fantasy will never be the same again.
It fell apart before it's time, and now only acts as a reminder to an in-between period of his life when he didn't completely and fully understand what it meant for life to be fleeting; for last chances, however mediocre they may be, to truly be last chances. He hates that every similar thought of her and the person she was trying to be makes him think of death, but in any case has learned a valuable lesson in the proceedings. There's no point in being so short with the others anymore.