A/N: well it's been over a year since I've even looked at this story. Not much of an excuse except that a lot has happened since. But, with the release of the movie version of RENT, I was reminded of it, and thought I'd revise and add more. Hopefully now that there's a movie, RENT has a little more of a fanbase

JUST A STORY

INTRO RIFF: YESTERDAY

Yesterday

All my troubles seemed so far away

Now it looks as though they're here to stay

Oh I believe in yesterday.

"Yesterday" - McCartney

It wasn't a love story. Far from it. It wasn't a romance novel or even a fucking fairy tale. Nope, not Cinderella, nor Sleeping Beauty, not even Beauty and the Beast...though that last one is probably closest of all.

It was just us. No matter what she told me. And now it's not even that. Time and an eternity have passed since then. I'm sitting here beside a sickeningly new gravestone, shivering despite the heat and my sweatshirt. Not that kind of shiver... My head is resting on my hands; I can feel my pulse, weak but definite, a shitty reminder of life. Everything seems mixed up, in a haze, yet I'm more here than I have been in about eight months. Eight months, a week, a fucking century, they're all the same. They've all kept me high...till now. Now, I'm all alone to pick up the pieces.

Everything-the calendar, Mark-says that it's been about nine months since I met her. Sounds about right. It was autumn, I know because she told me she loved the leaves, and since now its summer...

It's fitting somehow. Nine months...she always had this saying. Good things come in threes, but bad things come in nines. She said since nine is three threes, the goodness all just cancels out, and you're left with the bad. It all had some sort of superstitious sense to it, I guess, but perhaps it was just the drugs…

She lied to me though. The note that she left, scribbled in her neat handwriting on the back of a receipt and taped to the bathroom mirror, held only three small words on it, yet brought all the fucking bad in the world crashing down on me.

Those weren't the words she left with, though. That morning, as my body still succumbed to the false reality, she left saying what she always said, trying to get me to write songs again I suppose: "It's a story. Write it."

And for the first time in the past nine months, I'll listen to her.

END INTRO RIFF