the saddest words of tongue or pen are none other than these : it might have been. [gertrude stein]
x
[ginsberg]
She can tell by one lift of his smarmy eyebrows that he is exactly the kind of reckless that should send her running in the other direction as fast as her saddle shoes can take her, but for some reason, she kind of likes his crooked grin and the way his eyes are burnt amber holes set back in his olive skin. His hands tell his experience and with one glance, she can feel stories brewing on his fingertips as if they were inked in there before he even knew it because the way he stands so confident and lets the monosyllabic drawl roll off his golden tongue sounds like he has measured it off since the start.
So she pulls back the torn hem of her gown to cross the damned gates of hell and never peers back over her ivory shoulders.
[dickens]
It comes out of her mouth like some verbal vomit because she is notthis girl in the story. She always fancied herself to be the proper good one that never really breaks the rules or runs away or does anything worth writing about, but something in him makes her jump [leap, catapult] off the page and with one hand on her borrowed copy ofHowl and the other tucked into a faded pair of blue jeans, a smile plastered on her coral mouth the verbiage slips and writes itself.
"Goodnight Dodger."
She can see his eyes widen a bit at the rims, amber engulfed in a cocoa fire as he examines her unabashedly from head to toe admiring how she plants feet firmly on the ground and head sways just above the highest bits of heaven. It's coy the way he teases her because he knows [understands, is kindred to] the words and story and has heard it to the point where it becomes a daydream in his waking hours as a new tale spins outwards.
[shakespeare]
It's almost too ironic to sit in the diner with a half-eaten piece of cherry pie strewn aside with her coffee mug as she loops cursive damnations of Romeo and Juliet as he props himself against the cash register, fingers preoccupied with leaves of parchment rather than her for once. Taking little peeks from under her smoky eyelashes, she watches him without abandoning her hand scratching across the page because in some twisted way he has this quality of fiction to him. An almost kind of ghost like presence that can be pulled out from under her without any time to finish.
Pen swiping on the calligraphy of the sheet as she writes that nothing was wrong except the timing and as she knows [not from experience of course (not yet), but mountains upon mountains of literature] that is everything. He places the dog eared yellowed text on the counter and slopes over, pouring some coffee in her oversize mug and eyes the assignment, olive fingers tightening around the carafe as he snarks a smirk in the corner of his mouth and walks away.
(The next day, Vonnegut has been cast aside and his amber orbs are quickly passing over a library copy of RomeoandJulietwhile he pretends to man the coffee pots for Luke.)
[hemingway]
It feels anything but scripted with him watching her as she explains the importance of her literary world with excitement because she has never once [Dean, Lane, Mom, seriously?] gotten to express how important this other plane is to anyone before because while she may exist in this realm with the cookie cutter boyfriend and half-hearted tiara atop her flawless head, she also breathes and dwells in this other place.
A place with no rules and regulations to her imagination that permits her to just be the girl she could never be here in this place. Where she is now with him dangerously close so that she can count the spheres of cocoa in his amber eyes and the lines ticking up into his sculpted cheekbones and feel his hot breath on her coral mouth in the cold of January and it kind of seems like a history that she could never finish because she is afraid of what would go on in her mind as she delicately prints the letters and goes off scene.
"Ernest has nothing but lovely things to say about you." He dares her and grins and her heart spins a flurry in her chest and the chapter ends with a cliff hanger of monumental proportions, but this is not hers [their] literary world.
[bronte]
He appears like an apparition with a box full of delicacies and a proposition that makes her wiggle in the doorway as she blocks out all emotive response to way he leans into her body, contrasting ivory with olive. She swallows and is sure the whole universe hears it as he brushes past her, skin on skin [ice on fire], and roots himself in her evening of literature and sarcasm.
Lazily reclining with his feet up in her mother's garage sale kitchen chairs, he is the picture of young and troubled but commands her attention with one hand writing prose mid-air and the other flicking around dinner remains on the tablecloth. She and Paris listen with rapt devotion before launching into a five paragraph essay rebuttal on his points as he chuckles and sits up, tossing lyrical madness in her face as she flushes red when he starts on Austen and Bukowski like they meet for drinks every third Sunday.
She rarely thinks in this other mindset as he ducks out the door, secrets stained on his mouth, but there is a reason that fiction is called fiction and fact is called fact because stories aren't real and there is a reason that Salinger was the way he was and an implante carbon copy won't make any difference.
[plath]
He leaves for New York and she forgets what fiction is like because all of a sudden she is living it because things like this happen in her books and not her real live existence where she suddenly drops everything, coral lips parted as she grins and he leans just a scotch too close to her face and then everything goes black and the next thing she knows he is fulfilling his role as Holden Caulfield and she is the purest of the fallen angels as she rushes to the city that she hopes never sleeps to find him in the deepest and darkest parts.
No, no, this is supposed to be what happens in her books.
She isn't supposed to kiss him with such pent up force of a year behind her with his hands twisted in her tailored hair and caressing her nimble waist and all that is wasted when she breathes a sin and sprints off because once you taste fire, it consumes you whole and you perish in its wake, but she thinks to herself as she stands [straight up, cocoa locks tucked ever so chastely behind her porcelain skin and smiling with her mouth closed] that it is better to be eaten alive than die malnourished.
[keats]
Up in her face and so close that she can see the water stuck in his eyelashes and course down the swift curve of his collarbone hating everything about the way he is so sure that he sends every single one of her nerves into a terrifying jumble, she counts down how the wind flows into the sky and the sky into the sun and wonders when she became a poet, although she is sure [with almost every fiber of her silly seventeen year old heart] that you write about things like this.
You write about fights and swollen hearts and almost lovers becoming the fingers laced in your own and kisses on the nose and the way his mouth twitches up just a tad when you burst into the diner in your pleated skirt and he runs his dangerous olive fingers along your thigh and it throttles and you can see the sentences forming in his mind and scripting themselves onto your cheekbones with each touch of his feverish lips to your face.
And you muse to yourself every now and again with your feet in his lap as both sit quietly on the couch upstairs, the only sound of parchment scratching against parchment, that this may in fact be that great story that one of you [him without question] will write and it will not be fiction, but fact.
[rand]
There are arguments with slamming doors and screams so shrill that glass shatters and breaks the church windows and the whole town questions why his arm is around your shoulders, slipping the silk of your collarbone because he is all the tough stuff that a girl like you is never meant to know or understand because he has a complete set of baggage that he totes out in the open in front of everyone and doesn't really give a shit about your grandmother or the prom or winning over your mother with movie nights and putting water bottles in the holder or making sure that Lane doesn't hate your guts or anything like that. No, he isn't any of those marshmallow soft things that a boyfriend is supposed to be.
He's all jagged edges and sharp angles and it sometimes hurts more than you think that it should but you know without an unquestionable doubt that he [most certainly, surely, truthfully, head over heels] has been the other character [half] missing since the day he snarked a comment and waltzed away, only turning back to make sure that you were watching because he may not be everything that you want, but he is everything that you may need. The world is a terrible place, but you two don't really live there as your world is composed of phrases and alliteration and onomatopoeia and lyrics and the binding on books. Not small town antics or chalk board accusations or even clanging bells upon store front windows signaling home; no, your world is elsewhere and that is really what matters.
[faulkner]
The chapter ends on a sunny June day that is so happy you want to flinch because it kind of feels unfinished and you curse his shallow breathing when he dares to punch an area code from another coast.
You don't think about him in Europe. You don't think about him in Stars Hallow. You don't think about him at Yale. At least not until there is this brooding asshole in your literature class with his hair spiked high and arms resting cockily on the mahogany table, twirling a pencil between his index finger and thumb and spilling words easily off his tongue about things you know he doesn't understand. Snorting delicately and placing a hand over your mouth, he gazes at you with fabricated intensity and you want to laugh until it hurts because he just sounds so arrogant and pretentious that after class you go home and lie on the floor of your dorm room and just try to remember how to breathe.
This world was supposed to be your escape, not your prison. Or it wasn't until he skipped out on your heart and left his golden threaded prose inked on your skin.
[austen]
With the dying of February, he chases you and begs for anything you are willing to grant. Crying out that confession beneath moon lit tree tops and sultry skies makes you crave the age of innocence or something of that nature that blesses pleasure with pain and all the time in the world seems to spit in your face and you can do nothing, nothing to make him stay.
He is perpetually on the run like a convict in a dethroned prince's clothing and when he comes like a thief in the night with another year ripening in her ocean eyes, she wants to say yes terribly but what used to be left of their safe plane of words and calligraphy is spent on the floor, smudged and forgotten and this story has been over for a long time so there isn't any need for her to change course at the very end because the reader, scanning their careful eyes, poring over their dialogue anticipates what happens next as she stamps her feet and shakes her head and lies better than she has in her entire life.
[salinger]
Time runs faster and her hair lays in a neat curtain against her shoulders and her eyes are glazed with experience that she didn't need to have and failure is struck across her forehead as she watches him lazily lope over and lean on her car and watch her with eighteen year old eyes and a twenty two year old grin.
He may not have grown out of Holden but it sure has grown into him, and like the outstretching branches of a dogwood, he extends an olive hand [help, aid, salvation] and pulls her up and up and back to where they live and by good Jesus, it is beautiful and she wonders why she ever left this place where they can be sure that something this moral exists.
He has always had a way with a turn of phrase and sends shivers down her spine as he pens truth on her sullied bar napkins because damnit [and she cringes at the way it sounds on his mouth] you are not this. And he tells [shows, reminds, remembers] her for what she is, notwhat she has become.
[kerouac]
Really the northeast is a tiny place with all of the secrets spat out in dark blood across the white sheets of the region. Her hands feels foreign on the wheel as she crosses state lines with her fingertips buzzing in a way that they haven't since she was so young and thought that seventeen was immortally stained with him on her conscience. He can't be Gatsby to her Daisy because she never was that foolish and he never was that kind and she can't help but understand how much harder this is going to be for him as she passes a doorway and feels all eyes zoom into her with the clang of the bell against the frame but the only set of eyes that actually matter are amber with cocoa fire and deep set back into an olive face.
She can tell he is surprised, but he hides it well with his twenty three year old poker face mastered in the practice. And with a slight lilt of the head, running a hand over the scruff of his chin and ghosting an extraneous half smirk on his bitter mouth, he turns into her, running an olive finger over her porcelain cheek and probing those ocean eyes.
For once, she gets to run and she does like lightning, quicker like sand between his hands as she pulls and shoots off. And he sits there like a dumbfounded idiot, wondering his role in their world as she brushes against him like ice on fire, exacerbating the wound. The touch is dangerous and volatile because this is not fiction, it is fact and it has already been shaded across many pages with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
[mariano]
In her car on the way back to New Haven, she once recalled him at eighteen with his hands in her hair as she lay in his lap, feet dangling precariously off the bridge, books and pencils placed aside as he barbed her with witty remarks and healed her with his mouth on her own. He told her that he had compared them to Romeo and Juliet to Luke, with his fingers writing poems on her knee highs, and how they still managed to do so much trouble in a time when trouble was the last thing that either one of them needed or cared for. Luke had scolded him and told him to keep his literary mind locked up inside his imagination as that was a place for those kinds of things to occur, not out here, not in this place.
She pulls the car over in Stars Hallow and sits in the diner, reading from start to finish, ocean eyes never once leaving his gospel. The emotional rollercoaster flips her heart into a furious up and down see-saw and images as she remembers and repeats stories and tales marked into permanence of their lives at seventeen, eighteen, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, and it all sounds so harsh coming out with vinegar and venom as it leaves the paper. But it also flows off with the simplicity of a boy and a girl and this world that was bigger than the both of them, but allowed them to fit perfectly in every crevice and niche, and together they fell and stumbled and weaved through this completely unnatural emotionally scarring experience called understanding.
Closing her eyes with a sigh sent forth from the chasm of her aching ribcage from her bruised heart, she still can't bring herself to say it [[love]].
x
He writes more four short novels [books] and each time she reads with hunger about the small town girl and the big city boy that never ever seems to get it right, hoping [praying] that maybe just once he'll write them as fiction, not fact.