Rated T but y'all don't give too much shit about rating anyway asdfdgkgfksl

Summary: it is no wonder, you think furiously, that a boy like him falls in love with something bigger than life. – lenku, hanahaki au.

Author's note: I'm totally not saying this but mental breakdowns make for cring-y writing, which is, well, better than not writing anything at all.

Disclaimer: Hahahahaha. NO. The title belongs to Richard Siken. The synthesizers and all the copyrights being to Crypton.

"How do you love him?"

The flowers in your hands are in full bloom, pure white and gossamer-light, a butterfly fluttering on your skin. Baby's breath, you learn their name between breaths gulped down a parched throat.

You pluck the flowers off like weeds. Their stems scratch against your throat, runny sap splashes on your skin; raspy declarations of affection that were never given voice, this is how they manifest.

The flowers in your hands are more ivory, this time, tingling and airy like his laughter, the colour of cotton-candy clouds and hope's feathers. You look up to the mirror and see a ghost, with words dripping down your chin; and it's a familiar image of heartache looking back at you.

You were sixteen and he was beautiful, soft eyes and golden wind-chafed hair, and the curl of his lips was the moon pulling the tides of your heart closer closer closer still.

Gardenias bloom on your lips, pure white and barely fit in the roof of your mouth. It hurts to swallow. It hurts to even breathe.

Len is lying on your bed.

You have half a mind to shove him off, of course. This is your room, your domain, and he is a guest.

You explain this to him all in a surprisingly long breath, and he stares at you like you've somehow betrayed him with perfect, sound logic. Len stares and stares at you, and as soon as he realizes you are not going to change your mind anytime soon, he kicks you. Hard.

"That is uncalled for!"

"Kicking me off my rightful place is also uncalled for," – Len scowls, plopping up on his elbows and doesn't even pretend to care about your words. – "I've been a frequent presence in this room, I have just as much right as you do."

You are not going to kick him in retaliation. You are not that petty.

He pushes you off your bed.

What were you thinking? Of course you are so going to kick him in retaliation. Your abused backside demands retribution.

Then he laughs at you, and you forget what you were even angry about.

The flowers are not on your hands. They flood your sink instead, splashes of white tinged with red on ceramics, threatening to overflow.

Carnations this time, you think, trying very hard not to notice the scratches on your cheeks or droplets of amaranth staining the corner of your lips.

You think of Len, all spindly and long limbs, and pale eyes and golden hair like Adonis. You think of his laughter, the way it trickles down his neck like honey, of the way he smiles at you and strokes your head, his fingers brushing against your temple tenderly.

(Once, in a distant childhood when you were both awkward and bumbling and your mothers had to scold you for getting scrapped knees, Len told you about paper stars, and in his chubby fingers held sparkly strips.

You didn't like it then, preferring hopscotch and tag than sitting still and folding papers. They crumpled in your hands, never taking their supposed shapes. But they bloomed in his, constellations after galaxies after universes – even then, even then, he had been gentle when you could only destroy. At the end of the day, you still came home a glass jar of stars and a smile richer.)

It gets worse.

Len doesn't know about his effect on you, and you are careful not to let it show, because he was your friend first and foremost.

And yet, and yet.

Logically, you know about your condition: Unrequited love grows into flowers in your lungs until you choke and die. It is not poetic but factual that this is a disease. It is not figurative but literal that he takes your breath away, that he makes your heartbeats erratic, that your air and blood and life are to nourish this ache, this emptiness, this void.

He is beautiful in all the wrong ways, you muse quietly, and you are falling for him in all the right ways.

(Mellow, you call him, sweet and melting on your tongue. Lovely, you describe him, with all the shades of pastel and soft pearls, and cotton candy and butterfly-pea and all the most nebulous words. Easy, you say, like having him so deeply ingrained in your mind is the most obvious choice, like there isn't even any alternative to consider.

Loving him is the hardest thing you've ever done.)

A joke: Len is in your room, sitting in your chair. You would call his eyes kaleidoscopic, but that term is just cliche-riddled and invite a whole slew of implications that you wouldn't like to admit (that you watch him and memorize the way sunlight flecks change his eyes from frost sea glass to watery pain to plain fathomless blue, far too extraordinary for any word to describe.)

Another joke: He has long fingers, the hands of a lover, that often he has to keep them occupied, either with spinning a pen or tapping away on his phone or shuffling them in his jeans pocket.

They are funny because they are all true (and the punchline is a message in a glass bottle, buried deep down yellow sand and overlapping waves.)

Your eyes are heavy and drowsy with sleep, and you think, maybe if I close my eyes I will fall asleep.

(Except it's a lie, and you won't fall asleep, and you won't be sleeping anytime soon, but for all the wrong reasons.)

Sometimes, at times like this, four in the afternoon – when it's too early to bury yourself in bed but too late to go outside when the rain is pouring, you entertain the notion of moving away, in the middle of the night. You can survive with one hand-carry suitcase and the barest necessities. You can travel the world and sleep on a stack of straws if needed be.

(You can also try winning the lottery, and the odds of it happening will be the same as the chance of you actually getting away.)

Mostly. You can't sleep. It's not the appropriate time to rest, in the middle of the day. Your muscles are too energized, your mind too high-strung. You are not supposed to sleep.

Rest is pretty much useless and unnecessary when you are, well, rested.

You say, there is no meaning in this moment, it just is.

You say, this is not the right time.

You say, I can't undo this, whatever it is.

(Except the meaningless moments keep adding up until it's higher than you ever anticipated, and it is a fixed point in your life, and you can't change whatever it is because you don't know where it starts, where to unravel, when all the vertigo and reasons and time tie together into the beginning of this, and you. Cannot. Stop.)

(This is not about not being able to sleep anymore, is it?)

Len has always been in love with the stars.

It is an unconscious love, perhaps. He folds papers into stars that can be put in glass jars and lines up his walls, strewn across his desk, scattering on the floor. Later, he admires the stars – actual ones – with a reverence most reserve for a lover. Later, you say, it's like a premonition – a boy like that, of course he would love something so unattainable, he himself is unattainable. Of course he would love something larger than life.

No bell tolls the moment you fell for him. You don't even realize it yourself until much later, in the depths of the night and the comfort of your bed.

Love is supposed to be a grandeur thing. And when it arrives, you expected thunder and bone-rattling prophecy and exhilaration, not your own quiet, shallow exhale and watery fear.

An epiphany with the delivery of death. Your chest heaves, quietly.

Here are your hands. Here is your breath, frozen into smoke. Here is absinthe.

Hold them. Share the same breath until it dribbles down both your chins and you can't tell where you end and he begins. Drink all the absinthe, un-diluted and feel the unbearable burn on your tongue, or pour them down the drain and watch liquid color scratch on the kitchen sink, or use them to wash the grime of your skin, wash the dust and skin and indecipherable, inexplicable longing that settled like congealed blood on flaky skin.

You are in love with him. You are in love with him.

Your friend. Jesus, your friend.

(He is a good guy, through and through. He won't distance himself from you because of this, won't try to take advantage of you, and will apologize profusely. That's just who he is. You will feel it, unbearable, though, the unconscious assessment of you, the reevaluation. He will still offer his hand for you to take, but not without the seconds of hesitation and uncomfortable silences and, you, you will be the one not taking it. Your friendship, your confidante, your comfort will dissolve like smoke and mirrors under too-harsh sunlight. It will be awkward, and it will be messy, and it will be your fault.)

(It is not a crime to want, but you tear like wet paper on moonlit floor.)

(You were in the shower stall when the realizations hit. Fog lines up the glass panes, weightless and translucent and you hope, with all your might, to be able to dissolve that easily, to just melt into nothingness, and maybe your trouble will go away like this, with a snap of your fingers.

This is your body. Blue hair, not sky blue, not topaz, just blue, dripping wet, matted against your skin, scraps and scars, and thighs that spill out and skin. The closest there are to constellations on you are freckles dust. There is nothing majestic about you.

You have always been so human.)

So this is it, then.

You crack open your rib cage and held your heart like a bluebird and absolutely refuse to tell him any of this. You cut flowers from the ground and from your lungs alike, and chuck them like pennies down a wishing fountain. You keep breaking your own bones and wear them like a wishbone around your neck, hoping to see stardust spilling out instead of spinal fluid, instead of common sense.

Pick a poison, any poison. Name it after him and drink it all.

In many ways, the decision is as easy heartbreaking and easy as it is loving him.

Not because you are selfish or afraid of death (not when you can't bear life without him in any form). It's merely an inevitable conclusion to come to – an unglorified truth. You have a life. You have a future.

You love him, you will. In one way or another, this truth will live on.

This is the only reasonable solution.

(You are a coward.)

You say yes.

"How do you love him?" And the question is in present tense, because you are in love with him, a fact that transcends time.

There is no right answer for this. You have written everything about it on a paper and swallowed it whole, and the words are fertilizer for the flowers inside you: of baby's breath and gardenias and carnations; how your heart palpitates and slows down to a valse; the curve of his throat – long and lean and gorgeous. The curve of his lips, star-pale and crooked into asymmetry. How his wrist arches into a bridge that carry you into dreams.

Smile, all lips and no teeth.

"On my own."

So yeah, to save y'all from having to google this, here are the meanings of all the flowers mentioned. Well, the intended ones.

Baby's breath: Everlasting and undying love

Gardenia: "You're lovely." (and also, interestingly enough, secret and/or untold love)

Carnation:(striped ones, in this case): "I'm sorry, but I can't be with you." Or, just, rejection and regret.