They meet a total of two times.
Once, when her heart is sixteen and sprightly, drowned in sunbeams and smiles and all too ready to fall too deeply in love. Again, when her heart is tired and broken, exhausted by days, months, years too plentiful in which she let her legs collapse and let the people around her continuously push her down.
First, he sweeps her away with a single curve of his lips, lets crescent-shaped eyes sway her into reaching out and when she does, he takes her hand and whispers promises of never letting go. He tangles fingertips into her hair and presses clandestine kisses against the crown of her head. There is something about the way he lets flowers bloom against the canvas of her skin that makes her forget the way those very same roots begin to creep up her throat and constrict her breathing.
He is beautiful-maybe not aesthetically-intoxicating, a star so small in the nebula that there isn’t anything she can do but notice him. It is his touch she falls in love with, his crooked smile, and the way his laugh reverberates off the walls of the room, of her chest, of her heart. It is the way his voice fills her lungs with joy and her heart with some indescribable warmth that she falls in love with. It is the idea of hands fitting together perfectly and legs tangling beneath sheets in perfect harmony that she is in love with.
She is not in love with him.
She was never in love with him, so she doesn’t know why she clings,
His footsteps resonate in her mind like thunder and her mind is flooded in that final instant by everything that changed- everything she willingly distorted for the sake of her own delusions of serenity.
When he leaves her pillows stop smelling like flowers and sunrise, but like cigarette smoke and the ashes of something she can’t quite identify.
Second, she lets herself waste away and waits patiently for the flowers pressed against her skin to disintegrate and die like the rest of her being. She waits for the roots to cripple and crumble; she waits every day, waiting until she can take that deep breath she’s always wanted to take.
But secretly, she picks at those flowers and lets sunrise soak her pillows. She lets dusk act as her blanket and dances her own fingertips against the top of her head when she’s stumbled out of bed, pretending that they aren’t her own, but his.
She pretends that things haven’t changed too much. She’s still the same minus the sporadic moments where she holds her own breath because she can’t tell if dusk is suffocating her or if those roots of those flowers fading from her clavicle are growing with each tear she sheds over an empty space in her life.
She pretends the world around her is still spinning, that the stars in the sky still twinkle and that the birds in the morning still chirp as loudly as possible.
But what she can’t find herself feigning is her own happiness, because when the sun bids adieu and she’s sitting on the edge of her bed, brown orbs fixated on what lies behind the dirty panes of her balcony window, all she does is squint because she thinks in that leftover orange hue she might find the imprint of his smile.
She thinks that in the ebony blanket of the sky, she’ll find that star in that nebula tiny and insignificant but still peeking through that curtain of dusk.
They met a total of two times.
The first time he captures her heart and lets it break.
The second time, she picks at the shattered pieces of what remains and lets her mind paint a picture, an idea that he is still there.
Her fingers spread apart and she closes one eye and uses the other to see through the gaps, making sure to be careful not to miss that tiny star in that giant nebula.
— Nadia Starbinski, Excerpts From The Book I'll Never Write
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