I love you, Lucy, like hydrogen loves oxygen. A totally different kind of love. An elemental kind.” And when he said that, I laughed through my tears because only my brother could explain love using the periodic table.
We were a binary star. We orbited around each other. When you decided not to tell me, you changed that, you weren’t orbiting around me anymore, you were circling someone else, something else.
We’ve known each other for almost half our lives. I’ve seen you smiling, confident, blissfully happy. I’ve seen you broken, wounded, lost. But I’ve never seen you like this. You taught me to look for beauty. In darkness, in destruction, you always found light. I don’t know what beauty I’ll find here, what light. But I’ll try. I’ll do it for you. Because I know you would do it for me. There was so much beauty in our life together. Maybe that’s where I should start.
She wanted to stay caught in that moment of time, stretch it even more so she wouldn’t have to deal with everything that came next. But time wasn’t like that. You couldn’t get lost in it forever. It marched onward, pulling you with it, a leash around your neck.
Lying next to you was intoxicating – I felt the euphoria of that Gabe high; the addiction was back. I’d have to go back to day one, kick the habit all over again.
I’d like to think that it is karma. Hindu karma. That maybe in a past life I did something wonderful for someone and my reward is you in this life. I.
But there are no referees in real life, no true do-overs.
All decisions were affected by the time in which they were made.
What makes a life well spent?” you asked. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I told you, my mind turning as I was talking. “I think it might have something to do with making a mark – in a positive way. Leaving the world a little bit better than it was when you found it.
I’m sorry his demons became yours. Because they did, didn’t they? You’ve lived so much of your life in response to his, trying not to become him, that you ended up battling both his demons and your own.
You reached over Violet’s head to put your arms around me. I hugged you back, and so did Violet, her little arms wrapping as far as they could around your rib cage. “You’re okay,” Violet said to you. “There’s no blood or anything.
I wanted to love only you. And I couldn’t imagine anything could be better than that.
Something like this,” he said, slowly, “it makes you see the world through a different lens. I think it’s hard not to fall apart when your view of life is shifting.
Did my heartbeat comfort you? Does it still?
Everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen.
I hated the idea that someone else had taken my place in yours.
You taught me to look for beauty. In darkness, in destruction, you always found light. I don’t know what beauty I’ll find here, what light. But I’ll try. I’ll do it for you. Because I know you would do it for me.
Sometimes I love you so much that I don’t even know how my heart can stand it.
Of course, neither one of us slept. I relived the conversation we’d just had over and over in my mind. As much as I hated you just then, I still wanted to walk across the studio and slide in next to you on the couch, to feel the solidity of your body next to mine. You were my comfort and my pain all at once.
And what it was about me that made you keep secrets. I wondered if you would have acted differently if you were dating someone else.
Was I infatuated with you? Were we infatuated with each other? can infatuation last this long? Or has it always been love between us? I’d like to think it has.