LastLove.com

I was walking home from school on a cool windy day, listening to “Does Somebody Love You?” by Hardcastle. I was off in my own world. Watching the birds fly and the town life bustle by. I was thinking about how to kill myself. It sounds dark but when you live in a town of 30,000 people where barely any of them know the definition of LGBT never mind non-binary and understanding they and them pronouns it’s not exactly the happiest place on earth for you.

It wasn’t like my parents were taking any of it seriously either. They thought it was something that would pass with time. A whole tom-boy phase. They thought once I met a great guy, I would do a complete 180 and want to wear a wedding dress, give birth to kids, the whole shebang. My friends well they were nice and everything, didn’t get it. I was all alone, one in 30,000.

I thought about drowning myself in the bathtub, hanging myself in my closet, downing pills six ways till Sunday, slitting my wrists. Nothing was off the table, that’s how far gone I was, and how desperate I was for the pain and loneliness to end.

The wind blew harshly again, my mother had pleaded with me to wear a sweater to school this morning but I hadn’t, secretly hoping I’d somehow freeze to death on the way home in the fall weather. The wind gusted again, I was paying so little attention that I didn’t see the piece of paper dancing in the wind until it was whipped into my face. I was startled. I stopped in my tracks peeling the paper off my face and looking at it to see what it was.

The title at the top read: LastLove.com.

I peered further down at the explanation.

The place for you to meet the last love of your life. Are you terminally ill or getting on in your age? Try LastLove.com where you can find someone to spend your last days with.

It listed the website and sign up instructions below. I almost threw the paper on the ground again when a thought popped into my head. What if I could find someone on here who would love me, accept me and understand me?

I shifted my dark brown bangs aside as I thought about it. Did I really want to get my heart broken before I took my life? Most of the people on the site probably wouldn’t even understand because they either wished they could live longer or wished they were young again. But then again, what did I have to lose?

The wind whipped by again, blowing my unbuttoned plaid shirt ends in every direction as I thought about it. I folded up the paper and placed it in my jeans pocket and continued my walk home. When I got home I rushed upstairs to hide the paper, all I needed was for my parents to see the paper and somehow connect the dots and try to stop me regardless of whether they respected my identity and who I liked.

I re-emerged from my room almost colliding with my younger brother Simon who, at fifteen, already towered over my five-foot-five stature.

“Hey, Callie,” he commented and I raged, (internally).

I didn’t say anything and made my way back downstairs to make some tea and calm down.

Despite making it pretty easy for them by choosing a name that started with the same letter as my birth name the times I’d actually heard them say the name Cobalt was when I was physically present or when they were arguing over whether or not to send me to a real doctor as my psychiatrist was apparently not one. They never reinforced it with Simon to call me Cobalt either, so I’d taken to calling him Sim when our parents weren’t present, like the sims in the sim’s games. Mindless, assholes who if you didn’t take care of them would die on you like the assholes they were.

I pulled a coffee cup out of the cupboard and set the kettle to boil. I got out a spoon, two sweeteners, and some peach tea. I wrapped the string on the bag around the handle so the bag didn’t sink to the bottom or get tangled around my spoon as easily. I poured the two sweeteners in and waited for the water to boil as I took deep breaths.

I hoped Simon would stay upstairs away from me. My mother was in the backyard tending to her garden. Watering her potatoes and tomatoes and the sunflowers that towered over both of us towards the blue cloudy skies. Her skin was tanned from how much time she spent outside, her freckles were barely noticeable while mine were like orange polka dots dusting my pale nose and cheeks. I stared at my reflection in the window, directly into my green-gray eyes, the only quality I had inherited from my father. I turned away before my mother could notice me and poured my tea and stirred it so all the sweetener denigrated.

I carefully carried the glass upstairs, opened my bedroom door, and set it down on my dresser.

Simon came back out of his room, “So are you a boy or girl today?” he questioned sarcastically.

He was a) being a complete asshole or b) still didn’t understand the definition of non-binary, even after five months of me repeating the same definition over and over. You'd think they’d have it memorized. I was neither, all the time, all day, every day.

Maybe that was another reason I choose to name myself after a metal. The metal had no gender, it was just made into things and the name sounded cool.

I just shut the door, in anger, again and flopped on my bed. I pulled the paper out from under my mattress and stared at it. It was crumpled, and stained, probably from its clash with the outside elements but still readable.

Who would love me? What would be the point in looking if they weren’t anywhere near me, either? It felt like my family didn’t love me sometimes with the way they treated me. I felt more love from my psychiatrist than from them, at least my psychiatrist respected me and used the right name and pronouns. She was my favorite person in the world right now because of that, and the only one I really felt would care if I did kill myself.

I sat up and pulled my computer out and typed in the website into Google. It popped up right away, I clicked the link. The page loaded up showing an older couple and a young couple with oxygen lines going into both of their noses, they had those sappy, in-love expressions on their faces that I despised right at this moment.

I read over the instructions one last time before throwing caution to the wind. There was a teen dating and an adult dating option. I picked the teen dating option because I was a teen and I didn’t want to be paired with some ninety-year-old person.

I put my name in, Cobalt Shapiro. Age, seventeen. Gender, not specified was an option surprisingly. Sexuality: Pansexual. Likes: Read, music (all music), movies, and TV shows were pretty open, too, aside from action, wasn’t really a fan of those. Birthday: October 31st, 2002, yes, I was born on Halloween, at 11:00 pm at night so I am a Libra. Location: Madison Heights, Michigan.

I didn’t really know what else to put so I just hit submit.

You have 11 matches, the site states. I was about to go through them when my mother shouted, “Dinner time!”

I sighed, locked my computer and hid the paperback under my mattress, and made my way downstairs to the kitchen.