"Kids, here's a question," I break alluringly, as Daisy rests her delicate head against my collarbones, Nigel placing his elbows on my lap in a manner that sends irrepressible tickles through my system, "Which is more stubborn: the love or the two arguing people caught within it?"
They blink quizzically at me, and I wonder how many times I've managed to evoke that look of infantile blankness from them throughout my story. Cinnamon cloves of confusion dotting their gingerbread faces.
I chuckle inwardly, silently chastising myself for posing such an impossible question for my innocent angels. I decide to abandon the question, tucking it away under the cushions of the hunter green sofa – maybe, even now, I still don't have the answer.
"You can't treat love like a battlefield," I acquiesce, a lesson that I had learned the hard way permanently ingrained into my brain, "These are the kind of fights that can never be won. Even if you're the victor, you've hurt the other person. And there has to be some loss associated with that."
"Did you hurt him, Mommy?" Daisy enquires, thick concern dripping on the leaves of her gentle spring voice.
"We hurt each other," I admit, acceptance and renouncement coming to settle over my shoulders like a fleece cloak, "We didn't mean to, but that's what we ended up doing."
"Why?" Nigel ponders aloud, impish grin traversing the width of his angulated cheeks, remnants of baby fat still lounging happily along the tapered bones.
"Because we loved one another in very different ways."
"You loved him?" he continues, unintentionally digging his roughened elbow deeper into the flesh of my thigh, inciting barely muffled giggles from my coral lips.
"Of course," I affirm fondly. I let the words roll over my tongue once more, and I know that he believes me, "I loved him."
Recounting our war of a relationship to my children throws me right back into the rollercoaster seat, living through the exhilarating highs and the soul crushing lows all over again. Hands raised in the air. No safety belts to strap on. Exultant yells pouring from our lungs and feeling so unmistakably alive.
I stared intently at my ceiling, boards upon boards of seasoned oak painting it with variant shades of cocoa beige and latte brown. My bobbed chestnut locks splayed against my cream pillow, crosshatched with creases from my heavy thoughts.
I remembered how your peach strands used to graze along the ivory sheets in the same way; I would run secret fingers through the honey mess.
Clutching a glass in my idling hand, I swirled the silky wine around in its crystal flute, observing how the zinfandel colour clung desperately onto the glistening surface. Pressing grape kisses against the solid clarity.
I wondered what you were doing at this very moment. If I stepped out of my house and lifted my eyes to the heavens, maybe we would be looking up at the same sky.
Missing you was an ache that would never go away.
I set my glass down, going to stare out an open window, leaning my drowsy head against the sturdy frame. I remembered how we once sat by the sill, legs dangling over the chocolate edge. My knee nestled comfortably under yours, and I confessed to you that I was the one who'd stolen a handful of orange cookies from your baking batch seventeen years ago. You gently knocked your knuckles against my forehead and told me you already knew that. We had laughed and clinked our coffee-filled Mason jars.
The faintest autumn breeze blew past my eyelashes, the fleeting graze of a fresh butterfly's wings. I sighed. How are things in France? I asked the wind, almost believing that it would carry my syllables over to you.
Wrecking guilt played on my mind, Gill's scowling, blushing face manifesting behind my eyelids.
But even if I fell in love again, with someone new.
I exhaled, wondering why everything always came back to you. Indolent smirk and laughing amethyst eyes and svelte fingers that had spent lifetimes laced between mine.
It could never be the way I love you.
"What do you think of autumn?"
"Overrated."
I tittered at Gill's expected reply, drawing imaginary circles on the truffle tabletop as my attention span reached its maximum and decided to forsake the book spread open in front of me. Paragraphs about Castanet's history inked themselves across the yellowing pages, immersed in a century-long slumber.
"Guessed as much."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You probably invented winter, Great Ice Queen," I elucidated, mockingly curtseying in embellished performance.
"Ice King, you mean," he retorted fierily, burnt ice cream in all its glory. "You would be the lowly peasant."
"Peasant?" I echoed in offense, "If anything, I should be your ruling partner."
Gill and I sat in a musky corner of Town Hall, languorously flipping through mottled books. The mid-autumn sunlight shone through the paneled window, pirouetting specks of chalky dust visible in the beaming rays.
We had officially been together for a season – a season peppered with fighting and making up, kissing and bickering, caresses and syrupy insults. Even at our best moments, we never knew true peace. There was always sticky pride or cautious apprehension riding on our backs.
I think that was how we liked it.
"I thought I already had the position as Ice Queen."
"You just want it all, don't you?" I attacked Gill, poking a particularly jagged fingernail into his arm, clad in a crisp oxford blue shirt; recently donned to battle the increasingly frigid autumn winds.
His slender fingers encircled my pointed one, his skin like cool metal against mine. "Everything belongs to me," he simpered evilly.
"Even me?"
"Especially you."
My wild heart fluttered against my enclosed ribcage, hammering to be let out. I sniffed haughtily, reciting the verse my mother used to chant in my ears, "People don't belong to people."
"Well, too bad," he dismissed, ice blue eyes gleaming behind their glass veil. Flames scorched against his porcelain skin, the juxtaposition striking in the incandescent light, "If I love someone, I'm going to be possessive of them."
Surprise flooded through my chest, shockwaves jolting through me like lightning. Delight swirled in my heart, melting into caramel ribbons so thick, I was afraid that the thumping organ would overflow.
"You love me?" I dared to venture, barely believing the stardust that had just fallen from between his pallid cherry lips.
He rolled his piercing eyes, dropping his book and coyly wrapping me up in his arms, "Unfortunately, I think I do."
We smiled, and basked in our fragile bliss.
"You're late."
Stopping just before Ocarina Inn's doors, I clutched a blistered hand to my chest, attempting to speak through laboured wheezes. Perspiration dripped freely from my brow, as I hunched over and prayed that my bent knees wouldn't give out. My erratic lungs threatened to either shrivel up, like wrinkled raisins, or implode, mucous walls caving in on themselves.
"Sorry," I panted, wiping the back of my palm across my slimy forehead. Grimy soot and dirt smeared across my pores. Catching a whiff of my own odour, I grimaced at how I smelled of the wrenching combination between iron and copper; the taste of the unrefined metals bled onto my dry tongue.
"You look terrible," Gill remarked, unimpressed. Evident annoyance slunk along his furrowed brows. His thin lips contorted downwards on the left, signaling his unconcealed displeasure with my tardiness and slovenly appearance.
I struggled to disguise a scowl. Every time he gave me that withering look, it certainly didn't make me want to live up to his expectations.
"Don't you know the way to a woman's heart," I muttered passive-aggressively, giving up all hope of trying to tame the straw-like frizz that the humidity of Garmon Mine had bestowed upon my chopped hair.
"Want to explain why you made me wait an entire hour?" he demanded, arms folded neatly at the elbows, cold standoffishness radiating from the stiff ninety-degree angles. Rigidity etched into the harsh lines.
I bristled in instinctive response. "Firstly, I'm not late because I forgot or anything, okay?" I defended myself, a little too hostilely, "I was doing some mining, but somehow the ground gave way and I took a free trip five levels down." The fresh memory of eerie dimness permeating my eyesight and feeling like I would keep falling forever washed over me. When I had landed, despite the jolt of torturous pain, all that had prevailed was the joyous knowledge that I was still alive. It had taken me an hour or so to find my way back up to the surface, after which I had promptly raced to the inn to find Gill's sulking figure. "So forgive me for being late for our date, but I pretty much nearly died today," I huffed sullenly, placing my charcoal-stained hands on my hips with lofty indignation.
Before I knew what was happening, Gill's lips were on mine, anger and remorse and relief surging through his fiery kiss. I let myself melt into his embrace, wrapping my mucky hands around his warm neck as his pristine fingers snaked around my waist; newly-tattered apricot shirt fluttering against his velvety fingertips.
"Idiot," he finally whispered when we broke apart, pulling my body against his pounding chest. The quivering reverberations of his heart said everything my pride-filled boyfriend – boyfriend, I still wasn't used to calling him that – could never say: he had been worried about me.
Gill's irritation, before words had been spoken and explanations expressed, remained running through my veins. Something jerked discordantly within my heart.
In that split moment, when I was free falling for all I was worth, when I was ethereal for a transient second, the crushing thought had crossed my mind: I was going to die.
In that blinking instant, only one face had flashed behind my eyelids.
It wasn't Gill.
Pyrrhic. That was a word I learned a long time ago. That was a word I had come to rediscover over the course of our relationship.
Pyrrhic: won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor.
"I wrote a poem for you," Gill's low, ice-flaked voice rang into the opulent air. We sat on his merlot couch, plush velour scratchy against our skin. My foot lazed underneath his knee, which was positioned at a forty-five degree angle towards the ceiling. On trajectories towards one another but never touching, always missing by a sliced hair.
"Yeah, right," I snorted.
"It's titled moronic farm girl."
A sharpened needle jabbed into my heart, expelling the fluid of insecurity and hurt; of having heard that insult one too many times. "Do you mean it?" my tone shivered with anxiety, wounds slowly pulling open on my stretched arms; revealing glistening ruby flesh.
"What?"
"Every time you call me a simpleton or a stupid farm girl, do you mean it?" I questioned again, louder this time. Saline tears sprung behind my waterline, burning the creased skin.
You cannot have love and keep your pride. You cannot enter the tranquil temple of love and bring your rifle with you.
"You're being an idiot," he dismissed frostily, stamping a foot onto the marble ground and turning the temple into a warzone. Disappointment panged in the cavity between my optic nerves and brain, smarting behind my forehead. Pain chafed the walls of my pounding vessel, sandpapering away the pillowed membrane.
Gill only knew how to wrap his true feelings up in spikes, and present them to me in bloodied cloth. If I tried to unwrap the magenta-stained fabric, I would pierce myself on the menacing spears.
"Right," I muttered lowly in response, dropping my hazel eyes to focus on a lone fingernail, chipping away at the keratin edges. We lapsed into a protracted muteness, falling through the shattered floor and spiraling into the battlefield abyss.
"You never said it back." His sentence lobbed volatile mines throughout the room; one step in the wrong direction and we would explode. I stood completely frozen in the centre, barely daring to breathe, for fear that even the slightest wisp of air would blast us into irreparability.
"Said what back?" I ricocheted, residual soreness still stinging in my heart.
He exhaled in obvious vexation, bristling along his curved nape. "I told you I loved you. You didn't say it back."
I should have been honest.
I should have just buried my weapons and presented him my muddy, trembling, naked hands and told him the truth.
Of course I love you. If I didn't, I wouldn't still be here.
Instead, I let my filthy pride get in the way. I aimed my gun at the explosives and fired, letting us both rupture.
"You're being an idiot."
I would always regret it.
The minefield detonated, sending shrapnel of hurt into our jugular veins, lacerating our palms with wounds that could never be completely healed. Silence raked its shredding claws through our quaking bodies, and I wondered how it was possible for two people in love to damage the other so badly.
Pyrrhic: won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor.
The full moon glimmered down upon us, coating Flute Fields in its luminescent glacé light. I imagined that if I could lick the tender illumination, it would taste like powdery sugar on my lips. I traced the contours of the gleaming orb with my eyes, admiring how it feathered out into ephemeral softness at its infinite edges.
"What are you thinking?"
Gill liked to ask that question: what are you thinking? And I would ask it back. I suppose it was in an effort to understand the other – a perpetual struggle that would ultimately prove futile. We existed on separate planes; one living in the Arctic while the other sprinted through flames. Heaven and Hell. Different books and different pages: never falling into the ever-elusive synchronization.
No matter how many times I asked that question, it never worked the way I wanted it to.
We couldn't love one another the way the other wanted.
"I'm wondering whether it's possible for two people to ever truly understand one another," I breathed, glancing over at Gill's silhouette. The autumn evening breeze blew biting chills against my rough skin.
"It's very rare," he replied simply, ice blonde hair dazzling in the moon's brilliant luminosity. What he meant was: we weren't one of the exceptions. "Besides, understanding one another is neither here nor there."
"What does that mean, oh old wise granny?" I teased, mocking tones picking up a skip rope and jumping on my notes.
"Simpleton," he grumbled below his cool breath, before continuing, "It means the point isn't complete understanding of the other. It's to share some piece of yourself, and hope it's remembered."
"Hope you meant something to someone," I affixed onto the dangling end of his sentence.
"Right." We gazed at one another, and for a moment, it kind of felt like we had achieved the harmony that always slipped right past our outspread fingers; leading us to land, teeth-first, on the concrete pavement, smooth enamel breaking off and skidding along serrated gravel.
We smiled at each other, and right then, I could've sworn that it really felt like love.
I stacked clay bricks within my chest, building up the nerve to tell Gill the words I should have told him weeks ago.
Courage, dear heart.
"I hope you remember me."
Even if this all turned to dust – as it so often threatened to – I wanted him to remember me.
"Trust me, it'll be hard to forget you," he smirked back, sardonic mischief and heartfelt truth ringing through his pitch in equal volumes.
"So will you remember me in a good or bad way?" I interrogated playfully, already anticipating his answer.
"Worst way possible, obviously," he grinned, lacing his lean fingers through mine. My heart glowed in its bone cage, knowing that Gill had the bad habit of always uttering the exact opposite of what he truly wanted to say.
"You're such an arrogant jerk," I jeered, cheeks plump from my upturned lips, dusky mauve blush settling restfully on my cheekbones. My heart threatened to leap out of my throat, landing and flopping around on the meadow canvas; a fish out of water. I let the words spill out of my mouth before they got lost, again, "I love you."
Stillness encapsulated us in its cradling cocoon. The world held its breath, pinching crickets' wings and shushing their idyllic love songs. Gill's translucent glass eyes fixed themselves squarely on me; determination and disbelief embedded into his folded lids.
"Say it again."
"Do I have to?" I whined, furious embarrassment scorching my entire face. I jutted my bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout, emitting a groan from deep within my diaphragm, "I love you, you awful snob."
His slim digits went to cup my cheek, calming against my blazing skin. His usually pale lips were painted deep plum by the shadowiness of night. Just before he leaned in, his lips parted to whisper, "Okay."
My chestnut brows furrowed, forming a miniature mountain in between the two angulated arches. I pressed my calloused hands against his vest-clad chest, pulling my head away from his. "Okay?" I repeated irately, tilting my head for added effect.
"What?"
"What do you mean, 'what,'" I sneered, creating a cavernous gap between us; him on his knees, body poised above mine, me curving my back so my figure formed a neat concavity against the space, "You know full well what I want to hear."
"To be fair, you didn't say it back when I first said it either," he countered indignantly, long bangs tickling his frail eyelashes. That was the instant I realised how terrible an ache expectation could leave in your heart.
"Well, then, technically, I just said it back."
"So if I said it back now, it'd just be silly."
"Pompous ass."
He chucked snidely, letting me in on the fact that he was just playing an elaborate, drawn-out game. His crystal eyes twinkled like the gleaming stars in the illumined sky. "Ignoramus."
"I don't care, you're going to say it back," I demanded childishly, pounding balled up fists against his chest, in a manner just light enough not to bruise him. The sudden exertion of force caused him to lose his balance, falling onto his back. I tumbled on top of him, both of us wheezing with laughter.
His limber fingers wrapped around my wrists, suspending them in the indigo air. "Fine, fine," he conceded, catching his breath, "I love you too."
"I love you too," I reverberated, whitened teeth revealed in my wide grin.
"What're you doing? I just said it back."
"And I'm saying it back to you saying it back."
"You're such a dunce."
"But you love me," I sang goadingly, pressing cadenced kisses to his lips.
"Unfortunately," he specified once again.
"I love you too."
He beamed gently, in an extremely extraordinary moment of bared vulnerability. "I love you too."
"I'm not a jealous person."
I eyed my severe boyfriend up and down, amusement twirling along my tongue. A groomed eyebrow cocked itself upwards. "I didn't say that you were."
"Well, I'm not," he reiterated, with the same offended demeanour as if I'd accused him of murder.
"What're you getting at, Frosty?"
"I don't like seeing you talk to other guys," he admitted reticently, arms crossed over his chest, as if constructing a barrier to compensate for his detested weakness.
We trudged along Celesta Church Grounds, taking a leisurely walk as autumn began its yearly withering. Maple-glazed leaves dotted the cobblestone pavement, crunching deliciously beneath our shoes. The barest sheen of frost had begun to varnish the fawn ledges. Wild animals fluffed their down blankets and prepared to enter into their tranquil winter hibernation.
"Oh," I sounded back, unsure of how to react, "Why?"
"I hate losing."
"I think everyone on Castanet knows that," I guffawed unattractively, not unlike the grunting noises of a pig.
"I hate the idea that some other guy might be making you happier than I am, or that you'd rather spend time with him than me," he mumbled in agonising aggravation, "And more than anything, I hate losing control. When I imagine all that, I can barely think straight because I get so riled up."
"You need to relax."
That was one of our fatal flaws: we dismissed one another's feelings. We were so vastly different, that it was almost impossible for us to empathise with each other. Maybe we brushed it off because it was easier that way, because it was easier to say you're being silly than your feelings are irrational but they are still valid. That's why, in the long run, it would eventually come back to coil its sturdy vines around our throats; choking us with its thorny convolutions, until we could no longer say anything at all.
"I can't help the way I feel," he admonished defensively, scowling at my lack of sensitivity.
"But you don't have the feel that way," I clarified, blatantly oblivious to how I was disdaining his emotions, which was a very dangerous thing to do, "Besides, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to just stop interacting with all members of the male race?"
"Yes, that's what I want, okay?" he almost bellowed, running an incensed hand over his pleated forehead.
"Gill," I started, astonishment and crossness muddling inside me, "that's insane. I can't do that."
"I know," he groaned, resentment radiating from both our stances, "But in an ideal world, that's what I'd want. I'd want you all to myself."
"You don't own me," I glared in response.
"You're my girlfriend," he stated, voice slowly rising in decibel.
"That doesn't mean I belong to you," I growled, begrudging the fact that he wanted to control me. The tormenting thought niggled in my mind: I wasn't enough for him.
We both held our weaponries clasped between our hands, loaded with ammunition, fingers hovering just before the triggers.
"Forget it," Gill finally disparaged, dropping his gun, but not before firing a bullet straight into my leg, tearing open the tawny flesh, "I shouldn't have said anything. You don't get it."
"It's a good thing you're not a jealous person, then," I pretended, in an attempt to lighten the viscous mood, soaking into our lungs and stopping our breathing in its tracks.
Suffocating.
"Exactly," he agreed, joining in on the little charade.
We built our façade, and lived in the veneer.
That day, happiness and sadness swished around inside me like water, flowing in equal parts.
I was overjoyed that he cared about me enough to fear losing me; I was caught in the sweet imbibing nectar of knowing that I meant that much to him.
But I was also devastated.
Because I knew, at that moment, a clock had come to tick over our heads.
And it had just begun its countdown.
Our relationship wasn't perfect. Far, far from it. And we weren't perfect for each other either.
Our relationship was riddled with potholes and rattraps and barbed wire that would slash your ankles, berry blood oozing from the torn gashes. It was decorated with time bombs that could ignite at any given time. If a word was said too harshly or an action performed too thoughtlessly, they would erupt before you could even blink.
Our relationship came with a humongous expiration date printed on its name, in bold, black lettering. It was just up to us how prolonged a goodbye we wanted to have.
And still, with all this knowledge, realising that there was no way this could last; we both held on.
That is love: in its beautifully grotesque and most valiant form.
I liked to call him my casino, my gamble – because against all odds, I still wanted all in.
Disclaimer: I do not own 'The Lover's Dictionary' by David Levithan, 'The Way I Loved You' or Shane Koyczan's work.