dcrbyalbright:
Darby always found emotions fleeting. “I love you,” her mother would coo, pressing kisses to her forehead in a drunken haze, only to lock herself in her room the next day, shouting when Darby tried to enter. Everything felt ephemeral to her. Fading quickly, like a fogged up shower mirror. Not worth it to indulge in anything above the surface level, constantly treading water. But with Holden she had once dove in. Now found herself constantly pulled under his tide, despite her own protests. It felt more right, touching his hand, than it had when someone else’s tongue had been shoved down her throat. It was more intimate, somehow. “Thanks,” she told him, blurting the word out, cheeks growing red at the relief that he would still let her join. Sometimes around him, she still felt like the flustered girl she had once been. Trotting towards the boundaries of the smoking area as he spoke, she hopped the low fence, stepping over, cigarettes perched in her hand precariously. She grinned at his recitation, wondering about his choice of poem. She often took people’s memorized poems as an indication of their innermost self. “Do you know Mary Oliver?” she asked, almost growing bashful as she prepared. her intelligence still managed to embarrass her sometimes, like a long held secret. “You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call certainty,” she recited to him, stopping in her tracks afterwards, offering him another drag of her cigarette, almost smoked down to the nub. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, without warning, thinking of how he had seen her earlier. Kissing someone else. Her eyes searched his, blinking rapidly, flashing a cat eye lined in golden eyeliner rather than black. “I mean, for kind of ditching you. Are we okay?”
“Think so,” Holden told her, nodding as he followed her example and hopped the fence. Though much less gracefully than she did, almost tripping and having to steady himself with a laugh. The name sounded familiar, but then again he couldn’t be sure. His memory oftentimes feeling like only a collection of hazy experiences that were sometimes undecipherable from each other. Static noise drowning out the bad parts. And sometimes the good ones too. Perhaps it was sad to live life that way. Almost numbed, not paying attention and missing things. But he’d always felt it was better that way. It avoided attachment. But maybe he hadn’t done such a good job of that, after all. Darby being the one thing he could never seem to kick. But it was moments like these, watching her recite poetry while everything else seemed to fade around them, that he was reminded of why that was. She would always seem to be a very real thing in what seemed to be a very false world to him. “I like it. Feels very... I don’t know, you.” He shrugged, offering her a small smile as he gladly accepted the cigarette back for one final drag. Not really sure how else to put it, despite feeling like that was an incredibly lame response to such a moment. He meant it, though, sincerely and in a good way. “Sure you didn’t write it and not this Mary chick?” He asked her, scratching the back of his head as he pretended to be skeptical in an attempt to make her smile. Grinning stupidly at his own bad joke as he gazed over at her, the air around them seeming to change with her apology, which he wasn’t expecting and didn’t exactly know what do with. Suddenly feeling the need to be calculated in his response in a way he didn’t inherently possess. “Oh that? No yeah, it’s cool...” The moment seeming to test him as he flicked what remained of the cigarette to the ground and smothered it with the toe of his boot. Almost calculating the odd of what would happen if he showed some kind of hurt or jealousy or anything, but ultimately deciding against it. Like he always did. “Life happens. No need for a guilty conscience. Promise I won’t hold a grudge. Couldn’t keep up with it anyway.” He assured her with a shrug, avoiding her eyes as he began to walk forward again. Then, turning around to face her when he thought of something. “What was the line in that poem, again? I don’t care to be too definite about anything... something about nothing having certainty. Yeah, I liked that part.”














