We sit on the top of the black baseball field post, the summer sun hot and burning. Your hand creeps up to cover mine. My thirteen year old heart flutters and a grin overtakes your face. We are young. We have nothing but time. And we sit on the post and we hold hands and I let the summer sun soak in my dark skin.
Five years later, you sneak in my bedroom through the window and give me the trinkets of automatons that you made for me. I leave my blinds open when I change because your room is right across from mine. You do too. We're eighteen and we only get drunk with each other because you can't watch me with another boy and I can't breathe when you touch another girl. We're eighteen and the metal kestrel you made me hangs from my neck and you tuck flowers in my ear and stain my white bed sheets. We're eighteen and we try not to think about how we have to leave soon. How this might be the end of everything.
It's been six months since we last saw each other and all we do is fight now. We're twenty one and on top of the world. We forget about how we used to leave kisses on each other's cheek when we were eight and how we used to run in meadows when we were twelve and how our skin used to melt and become one and your head used to be buried in my neck when we were eighteen. We forget how we used to dance to no music and soak in the summer downpour and play the piano together.
We're twenty-one and we forget why we love each other.
At twenty six, you have a new girl. She hangs on to your every word and looks at you like you put the sun in the sky. She expects you to get on your knee soon and ask her to be yours forever. I'm with a boy who smokes (for fun) and drinks and rides motorcycles and breaks hearts. He's tall and bad and he has me convinced that if I try hard enough I can make him good. We're twenty six and we're both in love with different people. We're twenty six and you still have the small paper flower I made you when things were still soft, and I still have the kestrel that you put on me hanging from my neck.
We're thirty and nostalgic. I spend days looking through all the little automatons you used to pass from your bedroom to mine. I spend nights pouring over pictures of us. I can't stop looking at the graduation picture my mother had managed to capture; the way we smiled even though we knew what awaited us down the road. How I stared at you with the biggest smile on my face and you couldn't stop laughing for more than a second to even take the picture. How your hand was wrapped loosely around my waist, how we loved each other as if it was as easy as breathing. You spend nights awake, wondering why things didn't work out, why we stopped everything so soon, why you couldn't just crawl out your bedroom window and bury your face in my neck again.
"I love you," I say to your ghost, to all the pictures and the trinkets. Sometimes your ghost is so real I almost feel like I could reach out and sleep on his solid chest like I used to do on yours. But I go to sleep in a cold, empty bed.
"I love you," you say to the moon, because you know I love talking to the moon and she knows all my secrets. You pray that she whispers your love to me as I fall asleep.
We meet again, at a wedding of a friend of ours. You think I look like I'm wearing the stars, that the most beautiful jewels have found their way into my hair. I think you look like a full course meal. We look at each other and I smile. You smile back. We both wonder if the other one can tell that we're still in love with each other. But we are always us. After the haze of almost a decade wears off, we become us again. We find flowers and you blow dandelions in my face. The only thing you wish for is me. I force you to go on the dance floor, and you laugh as we butcher the well coordinated steps. We laugh as if the past years haven't passed, and we're still thirteen and holding hands in a baseball park.
"I love you," you slur out, drunk. I say that I love you too. But we wake up in the same bed and the magic wears off. We wake up in the same bed and you remember why you didn't want me anymore when we turned twenty one. We wake up in the same bed and I let you have all of me, and instead of accepting my heart your throw it away.
You were scared. I know. I was too.
We're fifty now. We still live in the city. We don't have the same bubbles we did when we were thirty. But you still hold my hand in baseball parks. We don't talk about how I left you at twenty one and how you left me and thirty. We don't talk about how I broke your heart and you broke mine right back.
Instead, we talk of things that matter. We talk about everything and anything. We talk about how my eyes are your favorite shade of brown and how your calloused fingertips look like stars to me. We spend our afternoons making music together, as I play the piano and you sing. Your hand always finds its way to the small of my back. We spend nights in each other's arms, your tall frame cocooning my small one. In the winter, I wear your sweatshirts and you kiss the tip of my cold red nose.
As I watch your slightly graying black hair blow gently in the wind, I know now. That no matter how old we get, our love just gets stronger by the minute. It's just sunny days from here, sweetheart. You get more handsome by the minute, and I fall in love even more by the second. We can look after each other. My soul was made to love you. It is yours. And you are mine.
And life, from here on, is just smiles.
—Endless Love, Stardust Scribbles
