On dozy mornings, when the world was still in that evanescent stage between dreaming and awake, I would glide my hard fingers along your jawline, letting my fingerprints trace the sparkling galaxy of your skin, the constellations that lolled behind your fluttering eyelids.
Yawning sunbeams would stream in, playfully tickling your splayed peach strands, painting a luminescent crown on the honey canvas of your hair. I would imagine glittering rubies encrusting that twenty-four karat gold crown, amber dazzling along the rounded edges, and of course, all-consuming, vision-blinding amethyst sitting benevolently in the centre, claiming its rightful throne.
If I squinted, I could still map out the faintest traces of the freckles that had once adorned your infantile cheeks: scattered like dusky rose petals along a wedding aisle. As a child, those brown flecks on your skin had been the least of your concerns. We would frolic in the plush meadow at the end of the street from which we lived, conjuring worlds behind our eyes that were vivid enough for us to touch. I wondered whether, when you slept, you dreamt of one of those worlds, or you hallucinated new ones entirely. We must have exhausted every single imaginary universe there was out there.
My thin bed sheets moaned from all the crinkles we embedded in them, our giggling bodies printing mountains and valleys in the linen terrain. I thought maybe, in your dream, we were backpacking through said topography, waving disjointed sticks around in our free hands, pretending that they were swords that would fend the dragons off it they came to get us. Our hands would then clasp together, a feeling so familiar that I was certain I had spent the entirety of all my past lives with your svelte fingers laced through mine.
Your eyelids would stir, ever so softly, the very first flap of a butterfly's wings, your eyelashes gradually lifting like a curtain on opening night. The main performer would then make his grand entrance, spreading his flamboyant arms with glorified flourish; your amethyst eyes revealed in all their magnificent splendour.
"You have skin like an alligator, you know that?" you would mumble, encased in that drowsy cloud just before consciousness, lissome hand wrapping around my wrist, lips fuzzily pressing secret kisses along my palm. They burned star clusters into my cells.
"Good morning," I would smile back, nobly ignoring your thorny comment, your means of shrouding your naked heart, "I can't sleep."
My father once told me that people in the army do more by seven am than most people do in an entire day. My father was a good man – a true military soul. The wrinkles in his sagging face, the deep crevices in his loose forehead, built a bird's nest of stories; of the things he'd seen as a soldier. This twig: the time he had to shoot a man. This pebble: the day he found an injured Labrador, and he tenderly lifted the puppy into his camouflage-speckled rucksack, trading food and water rations in favor of this wounded hound.
But, I thought: if I woke at six fifty-nine am, and turned to you to trace the outline of your lips with mine, I would have done enough, and killed no one in the process.
Then, after I felt the distinct creases of your lush lips against my own, I could drift back off to dreamland, where we would voyage through valleys, chasing fire-breathing dragons and sprinting for so long that we would forget what it felt like to have legs.
A season passed. The winter you left transitioned into the spring you weren't here.
I awoke with twittering cuckoos harping outside my window. Dawn brimmed along the horizon, glowing orange bashfully peeking out from behind the lapping sea.
I felt the urge to let the five words flitter out of my mouth, carelessly falling for ears obscured by disarrayed peach locks. I banned them from departing – if they left my throat, there would be nothing there to catch them.
I imagined you walking in the landscape I loved so much. The plains morphed into a crowded street in France, your gloved hands – ivory white, with the slightest tinge of gray creeping along the inseams – shoved into your pockets, tweed scarf flapping behind you in the glacial wind. Your three bobby pins would mirror the dim overcast sky, tapered peach strands nestling comfortably in their grips.
This time, I imagined you alone.
Because you were on a journey that I wasn't a part of.
And I was trying to be okay with that.
But.
Good morning, I can't sleep.
"Molly, open up, it's me," Kathy's chirpy voice rang through my oak-paneled walls. Kathy had a voice like whisky: it started off smooth, an explosion of country malt dizzying around your eardrums, before reducing into the granulated burn that slinked from her throat to yours. At times, it could be grating, chafing against the pale shells of your ears, but at others, it was a blunt orchestra you wanted to hear again and again. Sometimes, it was both.
"Hey, Kathy, it's good to see you," I beamed feebly, as her effervescent emerald eyes greeted me at the door. I gestured for her to come in.
"It's even better to see you," she sung back, curvaceous exposed midriff jiggling as she sauntered over to my dining table. The fresh summer light threaded incandescent pearls through her platinum ponytail. Kathy's every motion buzzed electric: she was crackling fires in a hearth, bubbles fizzing erratically in a soda, bees bustling from bright fuchsia geranium to geranium.
Her mother passed away when she was four. A virus attacked her cerebral cortex in her sleep – when she woke up, she no longer had control over her movements. It was only a matter of months before she degenerated into a husk of herself, only her dusty ashes left inside her soggy membranes. Kathy had told me that that was when she decided she would never be paralyzed. That, in spite of the inevitable, she was determined to have a life that was perpetually pulsing, never stagnant in fear. Her every action carried a poignant deliberateness. It took me years to understand why: she carried her mother in her movements.
"I brought paella for you," she declared, ceremoniously plopping the steaming container onto my table, clothed in a multitude of gaudy colours bursting from the table runner, "Cooked it myself."
"Thanks," I replied gratefully. Kathy: my closest girl friend, and ever the big sister.
Quiet washed over us, drooping capes over our shoulders. Kathy finally spoke.
"Everyone really misses you, Molly." I stopped mid-bite, spoonful of paella suspended in its tracks. "But we can understand why you would want to be alone for a while. I mean, we miss him too. Despite his really cruel words sometimes," she chuckled vivaciously, corners of her eyes tucking into three distinct folds; the beginnings of crow's feet, "You know, right before you guys got together, that period when he was being a total baby and having all those mood swings, Selena said something or other that irritated him, and he told her to buzz off. I swear, I'd never seen her look more offended."
Giggles erupted from my mouth. It felt good to laugh.
When he was still here, when we were still together, I couldn't pinpoint a moment where my lips weren't curled upwards, whether they were snarkily challenging him in a battle of wits – he always won, his tongue was programmed to falsify the most elaborate insults the world had ever heard – or howling in laughter as his lissome fingers attacked my ticklish side. Ever since he left, I had been finding it a chore to smile.
"He really could be a blockhead," I contributed all too willingly, no doubt in my mind that if he were here, he would be ready with a light knock to my brow with his knuckles, chastising me for selling him out, while simultaneously grinning at me with his gemstone eyes. Emptiness churned in the void within. I sighed, melancholy.
"I never really got that about you two," Kathy chimed in, sensing I had spiraled back into the deafening nothingness I had been finding myself in for the past season. Darkness was better than the hollow: it was black, something tangible. It skulked shadows in your lungs, crept unbelievable anguish into your brain, but at least there was something there. Even gray was better than this hole of waiting. This abyss that had no end.
I felt like I had coughed out my heart. Chase had taken it with him, tucked into his pocket.
"Got what?" I echoed, distracting myself.
"You guys were always bickering and throwing insults at one another, but it was like you two had some secret insiders club that no one else could ever dare to touch. The two of you just got each other, you know? Maybe it's because you guys grew up together, that's probably why. But, even when he was calling you stupid or something, he still smiled at you like you put the stars in his sky. He only ever smiled like that for you." The corners of her glossy marshmallow-flavoured lips lifted kindly, a product of her reminiscing, her having watched with darting eyes from the sidelines. "It felt like you guys were telling one another secrets. Everything the two of you said to the other was riddled with inside jokes, full of other meanings. Like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code for all the things you love about each other."
I didn't even realize it, but before I knew it, salty tears were dripping down my face. Streaming waterfalls raining across the paths they had eroded away. Engulfing, consuming, profound sadness clenched at my throat, heaving itself out from my heart and into the world. It gushed into the hollow inside me, filling it and filling it until it spilled over into all my other organs.
Sadness: there is no one organ that can take it all.
"Oh, Molly, I didn't mean to make you cry," Kathy cooed apologetically to me, wrapping one perfumed arm around my shoulders. She always smelled of limes crushed in sugar. Her silver earrings pressed against my temple as she laid her head atop of mine.
"No," I hiccupped through blossoming tears, "It's good. I'd rather be sad than empty."
"You're allowed to mourn, you know," she consoled, soothingly rubbing her hand up and down my quivering shoulder, her motions packed with purpose – with the movements she made for her mother who couldn't, "I've never seen two people better suited for one another. You two were meant to be together. You have every reason in the world to be sad."
"I just don't know how long I'm going to feel like this," I agonized, hopelessness dragging at my heart, "Having to speak about him in past tense. Living my life in just a memory."
"Don't become a shell of yourself," Kathy warned meaningfully, a photograph of her motionless mother flashing, like rolls of tape, behind her emerald eyes, "Chase was great, despite all his flaws, even though you never saw them as that. And he loved you like crazy. I know neither of us wants to hear this, but he's gone now, and you need to move on." She softened. "Not right now, of course. And not soon, either. But, eventually." She lapsed into silence, before continuing, "I'm speaking for myself, as well. It's been two seasons, and the bar's kind of fallen into a time vortex ever since he left. We were all friends, after all, even though he'd probably sooner have his tongue cut off than admit it."
I laughed through my tears, ferocious claws gripping my heart and squeezing blue out of it. Or into it. I wasn't sure anymore.
"It's weird," I heaved through sobs, resting my panging head against her firm shoulder, "It's like, I am so incredibly sad that I don't even know what to do with myself, but at the same time, I'm also happy." Kathy turned her eyes to me, surrendering her full attention. "I'm glad that I could have someone that could make me feel so deeply. Even though I miss him so much it physically hurts. In a way, I'm just grateful that I had the chance to be with him. Even if it wasn't for long enough, even though I wish so badly that I could have gotten more time with him. But forever probably still wouldn't have been enough." I burst into new tears. "Things don't have to last forever to be perfect. I'd rather have the time I got and this excruciating sadness than none of it at all, you know?"
Droplets started to fall from Kathy's eyes, as she wrapped her arm tighter around me. "I know. I know."
That year, I learned a sadness like never before.
Seagulls cawed their jarring tune, soaring across the hastily darkening evening sky. The ocean waves tumbled over one another, plunging headfirst onto the sandy shore, hitting its teeth in its mammoth fumble to plant an adoring kiss on the shoreline's feet.
"How're you doing?" my best friend's serene voice coiled along my shoulder, tip-tapping its fingers on my earlobes. Toby cut a homely figure against the backdrop of the shimmering ocean. I almost believed that his feet, buried in the sand below where he sat, dissolved into the saltwater underneath – the sodium in his veins going back to where it came from.
"What kind of question is that?" I deflected in amusement, wiggling barley-coloured grit out from between my toes, "You see me all the time. You know how I am."
"You know what I mean," he answered back, gentle spirits unfaltering in the face of my hardheadedness. Stubborn mule, Chase would have probably christened me.
"I can't believe it's already been three seasons," I let the autumn draft whisk my words over to Toby, allowing the creeping acceptance to rest on his listening ears. Furious denial on can't, tormenting pain on believe, faint acquiescence on already. The shameful head of a white flag peeking out from behind a shell hole. "Almost a year, actually. Even now, sometimes I'll still catch myself instinctively searching for his face when I walk into Brass Bar." My hazel eyes scurried down to my fingers, the spaces between them now gaping cracks missing the tree they had once grown around. "I still miss him, Tobes. I don't know if I'll ever stop."
"There's nothing wrong with that," he affirmed, silvery blue locks whipping snappishly against his fair cheeks as a chilling gust zipped past us. Whenever I looked at Toby's jade eyes, I was always reminded of the same oval gem nestling in the diamond-encrusted prongs of my mother's engagement ring.
"Is there anybody that you miss?" I wondered aloud, admiring the serenity that basked in his jewel orbs.
"I'm twenty-four," he chortled noiselessly, tilting his head as he spoke to me, "so naturally I miss everyone."
The setting sun cloaked us in its rosy glow, a cocktail miasma of caramelized orange and saccharine carnation. Our elongated shadows played catch with one another, youthful gurgles almost audible amidst the breaking of weeping waves.
"Who's everyone?" I probed pointedly.
"My parents," he elaborated, snapshots of a time when they were still together flittering through his optic nerves, "my brothers. My friends from back when I was a kid. Everyone I've ever known, I guess."
"Are there some who you've forgotten?"
All at once, Toby immediately understood. He exhaled smilingly, resting a line-scattered palm on my slouched shoulder. Nuggets of infinite wisdom embedded in each distinctive crease. "I remember all the ones that mattered."
My eyes skidded along the horizon, noticing a lone dolphin blowing cheeky bubbles to the surface of the sea. It squealed soundlessly to itself in delight, nudging its waxed snout against the rapidly popping spheres. Free from the binding disappointments of human condition.
"It always takes me by surprise," I confessed contritely to Toby, forehead crinkling in soul-wrenching guilt, "I'll be doing something like brushing Cream or fishing with you or laughing with someone or other, and suddenly I'll realize that for a split waking moment, he wasn't on my mind. And I know that that's how normal people would want to feel, like I should hope that it'll keep happening until, eventually, I don't think about him anymore. But, at the same time, I can't bear to let that happen."
Toby always knew just when to speak, and when to be silent. He let the air loop around us. The earth continued with its revolutions.
"I'm afraid that I'll forget him," I whispered, the words that haunted me finally released into the world; given life to take on whatever form they desired. They chose a ghost.
"That's insane."
"What?" I reverberated back, worry seeping into the neat pleats I conjured on my brow.
"In all those years that Chase and you were separated, did you ever really forget about him for a single moment?" Toby interrogated purposefully, jade eyes sentineling for my reaction.
"I-"
"He was always somewhere at the back of your mind, right?"
"You didn't even give me a chance to answer," I retorted.
"Because I already knew it," he tittered compassionately. The midnight navy sleeves of his loose over shirt fluttered in the ocean breeze, the crisp white line circling above the edge: drawing swirling froth on the sprays of his flapping hems. "It's inconceivable that you'll ever forget him," Toby went on, before shooting me a look that said everything, "or that he'll ever forget you."
He had understood completely everything I hadn't said. "Why do you always know all the right things to say?" I grumbled semi-jestingly, semi-genuinely.
"Comes with age," he joked, beaming back in response to the appreciative smile gracing my face. His milky cheeks were tinted flushed coral from the looming cold. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he watched me slowly come back to life – back from the ghost I had became for the past three seasons. "That's better," he stated knowingly, with a slight nod of his head, "You're at your best when you're smiling. Not when you're frowning, and giving yourself wrinkles that I'll never hear the end of."
"Hey, don't say those kinds of things. You'll make girls fall in love with you," I protested good-humouredly, the liberating feeling of laughter finally returning to my bones, "even if it's by accident. Except for me, of course. I'm immune," I boasted impishly. "After all, you've already got a girlfriend."
The effervescent sugar crystals in our lively atmosphere precipitously vanished into thin air. The chord I had inadvertently struck twanged through the pregnant pause. A broken fingernail plucking an out of tune banjo.
"We broke up."
Unadulterated shock coursed through my synapses. If I was a deer, a car had just sprung out from behind, completely blindsiding me into paralysis.
Had I really been a ghost for that long? That I wasn't even aware of what had been happening in my best friend's life?
"Tobes, I'm so sorry," I started to mutter through my gaping mouth, jaw seemingly ready to touch my knobby knees, "Why didn't you tell me?"
He shrugged despondently. "You've had bigger things to worry about," he explained, the fishing rod of his eyes cast out to the exact middle of the ocean, glazed jade bobber swaying with the perpetual motion of the waves.
"I'm the worst best friend in the world," I lamented mournfully, buckets of belated remorse dumped over my head, soaking into my chestnut locks and drenching my lowered eyes, "And you're the best. Not for not telling me, but for having been there for me when you had your own problems to be worrying about."
"Best best friend," he rolled over his tongue, a warm sweet melting in his mouth; as if in deep contemplation, a monk who sits atop an alp and discovers the meaning of life, "I like that. I'm going to get that engraved on a medal or something."
"Now you're just being silly," I reprimanded teasingly, before slipping back into seriousness, "How long has it been?"
"About two seasons."
"Two seasons!" I bellowed, eyes expanding into flying saucers, "You and Renee have been broken up for two entire seasons and you didn't tell me. You let me wallow in my self-pity for an entire year when, for two seasons, we could've been wallowing in self-pity together."
"Now who's the one being silly?" he rebuked calmly, amused grin playing on his lips.
"Well, it's my turn to ask then," I announced, gazing empathetically at Toby, "How're you doing?"
"Good, actually," he admitted truthfully, drawing circles in the sand with his hard-skinned feet, "I guess we just outgrew one another. It was better that we let go."
"You make it sound so easy."
"Not easy, but necessary."
"Why's that?" I challenged, a rabid robin picking Toby's brain for crumbs of thoughts.
"I told you before, remember?" he prompted me, before granting me absolution from my short memory, "Because it's heavy."
Some people, like Toby, were capable of leaving carcasses of parts of their lives behind them, in trails on the ground. They were able to wholly expel the luggage from their bodies, shutting the suitcases and attaching them to balloons to float them out of their minds. Other people, however, like Kathy, carried entire lives with them: in her swift, deliberate movements, her mother breathed again. In Paolo's watery eyes, he carried the weight of his mother abandoning him, so that Ozzie didn't have to shoulder the burden alone.
For me, every feeling I ever experienced, every feeling that my heart ever swelled and surged to absorb the impact of, it was all for Chase. It was always for him. Some people had the astonishing ability to set fire to everything that was not a necessity, but I wasn't one of them. Or perhaps, maybe I was: I was never given the option. Chase was never a choice. He was a part of me. I couldn't abandon the person I used to be, so I carried him.
And this, this was the deepest secret that no one knew, the wonder that kept the stars in the sky apart: I carried him in my heart.
I rested my heavy head on Toby's shoulder. The sinking sun casted glowing caramel vermillion against our breathing silhouettes.
Dusk seemed to skip to dawn, as the submerging darkness broke into new life, faint, hopeful fiery clouds dotting the all-cried-out morning skies. The gravelled ground dried itself off, hanging its raincoat up to dry and folding its maroon umbrella. The tears the sky had shed for her lost love: going back to press kisses on her swollen eyelids.
Baby chicks broke out of their incubating shells, chirping for all their new lives were worth. In spite of everything, the earth still continued to spin. Flowers turned their heads to look.
Life went on.
Disclaimer: I do not own Shane Koyczan's work, the text from 'Good morning, I can't sleep', 'Wasteland' by Francesca Lia Block, 'The History of Love' by Nicole Krauss or 'i carry your heart' by E.E. Cummings.
