Prompt: {"She loved him like he was sunshine. He loved her like she was death. Shadows shouldn’t fall in love".}
She was so bright and vibrant, most days; she naturally captured the energy of sunlight in her golden hair, in her faintest freckles, in those sunburst blue-green eyes, in her laughter. Excess exuberance bubbled over her boundless edges and she danced in the aftermath. She was a chaotic storm and she could love anything more fiercely than it had ever been loved before--she did not believe in hatred.
Yet there were days--sometimes whole strings of days, sometimes months--when there was a shadow cast upon her, and she could not find the source. She feared it came from within her, that there was a something looming deeper in her heart than she could (or would) dare to search. She feared putting a name to it, as if recognizing it made it more real, brought it closer to the surface, gave it power--so she pretended that she could hide it from herself. It was foolish, honestly, and she knew it: she couldn't hide something her own being possessed, something her own mind created. Yet she persisted, attempting to build up a physical barrier in her mind between this crushing darkness and her effervescent spirit.
Maybe that's why he fell so deeply in love with her.
Maybe it was the attraction felt when you can sense that there is another person coping with the same crushing defects in their soul that he felt for her. Or maybe that's just how it began.
He had never been sunshine or brilliance. He had always liked the color grey. No black and white, no happy or sad, no simplicities in his life; he lived in the in-betweens, those grey fuzzy compromises which compose the shadows of the earth. He dwelled where he could not find a direction or path--he had no serious meaning, yet he certainly most definitely did nothing without purpose. The sun was just the same to him as the rain, the earth was earth, and life was hard, and life was also incredibly, pointlessly easy.
Yet his life in the grey areas had lead him to find such a profound appreciation of the littlest, and simplest things. The way dandelions grew like mad in spring, and they were nothing but beauty and innocence and sunshine and earth, and all the people with white picket fences went crazy with chemicals, killing them all on sight. The way graffiti in unexpected places makes you stop and wonder why somebody chose that spot, why somebody wanted so desperately to stand out, why that stranger had thrown themselves out into the open with aggravations and confessions on old brownstone buildings and subway tunnels. The way sometimes you could read a poem and discover that through all the creative language, all the "extra" stuff, all the description, the black and white realities that sculpted the theme are still there, like bleached skeletons hanging in dusty closets. He could love these things. He could take them for what they were and simply admire, without labeling or sorting or categorizing. He could just love, simply, in those grey areas.
Maybe that's why she fell so deeply in love with him.
She admired his patience as he took in the world around him--he grew drunk on the pace at which she soaked up every new piece of life around her. They learned so much from each other, yet neither ever felt like they were teaching.
It became a kind of love very quickly, but neither could describe the kind of love it was. Maybe it was a love concealed in shadows. She could feel the shadows in her soul, and she described them with his sense of greyness--of incomplete wholeness. He could feel that his life was lacking boundaries, and that he craved them, he craved a purpose--he fulfilled it with her utter disregard of the limits she could so clearly conceive that existed around herself. They pushed each other's boundaries, and they utterly destroyed their own.
Love like this could only ever end in a massive, explosive conflagration.
They knew this. They didn't care.
Maybe shadows shouldn't fall in love. But when you shout that into the night, desperate and hopeless and completely destroyed, the darkness yells back at you and says "Look at me! I exist." It's then when you accept that without the melding of shadows--without the development of those grey areas and those deep dark shadows that come into our lives--there would be no night. And what significance can day hold without the darkest of nights?
