You want to be thin. You want to be thin because it represents beauty in a fading world, a world that's rushing by all too fast, slipping out of your grasp like water from the clear natural waterfall you've never been pure enough to see.
You want to be beautiful. You want to be beautiful because you want to look at yourself in the mirror, look at social media and all the false, overwritten, distorted images and say YES I am larger than that; I am free. You want to be beautiful because you have always dreamed of fame, and TV screens, and playing the part of a story that's too real and too true and too bright to actually be yours. You want that life, you want to sing, you want to dance. But you can't. So you dream.
You want to be more than a shell. You're not a shell right now.
You want to be loved, to have this gaping wound in your chest close and leave and for it to be like it was never there. You want to go back to before you started caring, back to first grade-back before classification by academics or friends or social standing. You want to re-do your life. You want to take a different path.
You want to live forever, and to have each path carve out a different destiny.
You want to be an actress, and a singer, and a dancer, and a doctor, and the president, and the president's wife, and an ambassador, and a foreign correspondent, and a rich heiress, and a princess, and a multi-lingual research specialist who charms and travels and is forever young. You're not eighteen. You feel so old.
This, then, is the conundrum of modern-day youth: time does indeed pass differently for you. What's prized is not maturity, but the reckless ambition that comes with youth-falling stars and high-rise buildings and the twisting pink fingertips of sunrise. You can see beyond the dream, and beyond the superficial. You want it anyway.
oOo
Come, says Kid, hand perched on the side of the very high-rise you've always wanted, never dared enough to dream. I am immortal and the night; I am bright eyes and adventure and the accomplishment the world will never know. I am invincible.
You want his infamous fame, you want his charisma, you adore how he always knows what to do-how you are always falling when you are around him, and smiling as you do. You want his thousand faces shouting as one. You want his mask.
Oh God but I'm empty inside, he thinks-you see the precise moment when he realizes you've fallen in love with his illusions-and stupid boy, it was always a little too late for the girl with the wider-than-life dreams.
oOo
Come, says the man on the TV screen-the man it was so dangerous to love, the man whose little perks and quirks do nothing but make you realize how wrong you would be together, how he'd never, never understand you. (But it doesn't matter, because the world is one big frightening stage, and time is a second that you can and will reverse until the hourglass topples on its head.)
"I suppose you wouldn't object if I pushed you out?" you say with a wry grin. You want him. You want what he stands for. You want it all.
He laughs, because of course he doesn't understand you and that you are not make-believing this time. He laughs, and is still laughing as you latch onto him with fingers that are more iron than bone, bleeding both of your dreams dry because then-then you'll get to find another one.
oOo
"Hey," says the devil, hands shoved into his baby blue jean pockets, one hand frozen in unobjective surprise over the strap of his backpack. Hey, he says, and nothing more.
You think of everything you've wanted to tell him these past years-your best years. You think of everything you wished you could have shared with him: how he meant more than just silly love and crushes and riding off into the distance. You think of the promises he made and didn't make, and how they both hurt the same, and how you stubbornly refused to believe because you are worth more than the reactions of others and you thought he cared but he didn't and you'll never know why.
You think of the hundred thousand million things you have to say to him, and the one question that you've been wanting to ask since you fell so hard so young: Did you ever love me? You ask, and it echoes across the empty chasm, but you know there won't be a reply, at least not for you. Even if he does answer you'll dissect it into a million jumbled not-ends and almost-beginnings, smaller and smaller and smaller and never quite going away. You don't deserve that type of release.
You want to ask why he chose you. You want to ask why he didn't. You want to ask where he's going. You don't ever want to know, because it'll always be away from you.
You are a girl not yet a woman who's been loved and lost, you are the beginnings of a conscience so doggedly against dependence that it hurts you too much to rebuild yourself, you are melted dreams and chocolate and desire that burns brighter than any redemption could hope to extinguish.
You can't decide what to say to him. You need this moment to occur again at least five hundred times, so you can unload all the ways and ends of your existence that you've collected, unsinking, in your heart.
You can't decide what to say to him, so you kiss him, fingers dragging through his coarse hair, tears burning their way down your throat and down his, and this is how you lose your first time.
You were never pure to begin with. You've always wanted him.
He kills you. You leave with a smile.
This is how your world ends, bright and shape-shifting and demonizing and blessedly good-this is how you conquer him, your biggest fear and your greatest love, the love that was too much to take for someone like you, with your not-stellar friends and your not-stellar looks and your not-stellar excuse for a family. He is your best friend, he is your only friend, he is you in the mirror and you in the window and you in every waking moment you breathe.
He knows you love him. He's always known. He never will.
You want to tell him you miss him, and ask if he misses you too. You do, because you want to hear it. Need to hear it.
Yes, he tells you, fingers trembling, and takes the air out of your lungs.
You want to ask if this is a dream, because there's no way he would-
Yes, he laughs-all the world's a dream, and you are mine.
Bright eyes, soft hands, and he's warm and lean and toned beneath your fingertips. You love him. You've never really left.
In the early morning light you see the disguises fall away and there is the angel who stole your heart. You find him, then, in the invisible wrinkles that mar his complexion, and sit by the wayside with a cup of coffee, waiting for him to return to you for all of eternity.
He will. You will. He'll stay. You'll never go.