Total pages in book: 185
Estimated words: 191421 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 957(@200wpm)___ 766(@250wpm)___ 638(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 191421 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 957(@200wpm)___ 766(@250wpm)___ 638(@300wpm)
And he did.
We fought on a Monday and he came to me on Tuesday.
He came and I cried and then he soothed me the only way he knew how.
The only way I needed him to.
I need him now too.
I need him to come.
My mom thinks I’ve come down with a fever. She says I look tired. My eyes are all swollen up and I am running a light temperature. She says I look pale too. All the color has leached out of my skin. I wish I could tell her that the reason I’m no longer pink is because I’m bleeding.
And the boy I was made all pink for has left me.
I have no reason to be pink now.
I have no reason to get out of bed.
So I stay in it all day, under my pink covers, hugging my pink pillow and muffling my sobs with it. Because my parents are home and I don’t want to alarm them more than I already have. I wouldn’t even have let them know this much — I’m used to being a good girl and taking care of myself when I get sick; no money for babysitters and too many jobs for my parents — but I guess that ship has sailed. So when they go in and out, checking on me, bringing me soup and medicine, I dutifully accept it all. I be a good patient for them.
Even though what I have isn’t explained by science.
What I have is a sickness. Of the heart.
And the drama queen that I am, it’s fitting that I’d suffer physical symptoms of it.
It’s fitting that I’m dying from it.
It’s fitting that I’m chanting his name into my pillow, trying to summon him, trying to make him appear.
And suddenly he does.
Suddenly through my silent tears, I hear my window opening and sit up in the bed.
With wide eyes and a trembling heart, I watch him climb over. I watch his feet land on the hardwood floor and the moment they do, I’m out of the bed in a sudden burst of energy.
In a sudden burst of wakefulness.
I cross to him and stand before his tall and barely breathing body.
I say barely breathing and I mean it.
I also mean it when I say that he looks like me.
All sick with heartbreak.
His hair all disheveled and sticking up on the sides. His eyes red and dilated. The scruff on his jaw thicker than usual. His cheeks hollower too.
Yeah, he looks like me.
I bet if I touched him, I’d find that he’s running a fever too.
“You came,” I whisper.
His features tighten up for a second in response.
“What… What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice trembling.
My voice hopeful.
Could it be that he’s here because he believes it?
He believes that he loves me and that we should be together?
“I’m here,” he says, thickly, “to make you finally understand what we are not.”
Oh.
He’s not here for what I want him to be here for. He’s here to tell me the opposite.
To prove to me the opposite.
Which is when I realize that I was wrong. He doesn’t look like me.
He looks much, much worse.
Because not only is he not dealing with our break up, he’s not dealing with the truth as well. The truth that he inevitably and irrevocably loves me.
So all my exhaustion washes away.
My own heartbreak set aside in favor of his crisis.
“My parents,” I whisper as my heart begins to beat for the first time all day, picking up speed with every second that passes. “They are… They’re downstairs.”
It’s not his usual time to come over.
Usually, he comes when my parents are deep in their slumber, dead to the world, oblivious to what their daughter is doing in her bedroom. And even though it’s nighttime now — I don’t know where the time went but I can see the moon through my window — they’re well and awake, busy downstairs.
“I know,” he says, his lips barely moving.
“Okay,” I say.
Wondering what I’m doing.
I haven’t forgotten what happened last time.
How two years ago on a night much like this, he’d come over and everything went to hell.
But the thing is that everything had to go to hell for things to fall into place. Everything had to fall apart and break into pieces so we could be remade.
So we could be here today, he and I.
So sick in love but also at war.
Me in my pink nightie much like yesterday, looking like love incarnate. And him, dressed in black, again much like yesterday, looking like summer and hate.
So maybe this time it’ll work too.
So by the end of this, everything will fall into place as well.
I take a step toward him and it’s as if something inside of him has broken loose.
Some bond, some chain, and he’s free.
To breathe, his chest moving on a large wave.