by Aster Ren Kivy
You meet her on the first day of uni.
Everyone’s waiting outside the door because they’re all too nervous to be the first to walk in. She glides by you like life hasn’t yet weighed her down, a few strands of her hair brushing past your arm as she goes. She holds the door open for you.
She’s wearing a sweater in the middle of February, and that’s the first thing you think about before you even thank her. She tells you that it’s no worry.
The second thing you think about is how well her face suits her smile. Not the other way around, because that’s too cliché, and you’ve convinced yourself that being in a writing degree now means pretentiousness should be woven into you.
She sits beside you as the class starts, and she tells you it’s because you’re the only person she knows. She says so with a twinkle in her eye you’ve only ever seen in children and fools. Somehow, she makes it something beautiful.
You can’t quite find the words to describe it, but you’re sure you’ll find them in time.
•
It doesn’t take you long to fall in love with her. She’s sunshine in a bottle that can barely hold her, and you’ve never been a fan of alcohol, but you revel in getting drunk off of her presence.
A semester has passed by in a blur of automatic 48-hour extensions and too much time spent on uQuiz. Your birthday is in a month, and winter hasn’t even officially started yet, but the temperature has dropped overnight.
She’s made for the summer, and has told you multiple times that she’d rather hibernate in the winter than be out and about. You, on the other hand, love the cold.
She’s already wearing a sweater, but she complains that it’s too cold. You’d offer her your jacket, but you never wear one. You’ve never needed to. But sitting in your backseat is one your aunt gave you years ago—an absurdly-oversized black hoodie with a dragon printed on the back. You hand it to her.
Despite being taller than you, it somehow seems bigger on her than it does you. She lets the sleeves hang all the way down and swings her arms around like a madman.
She pulls them up slightly and calls herself Ariana, and when you laugh at her singing impression, she tells you to shut up and slaps you with a sleeve.
By this point, you have a thousand pages written about her, and a thousand more floating in your head that you haven’t put into words yet. You still haven’t found the words to describe the twinkle you see in her eyes every time you look at them, and you’re not sure you ever will.
•
It’s June and you’ve just turned 19.
She bought you a journal to ‘scribble away in’. It’s made of leather and bound with string, its pages made of canvas rough to the touch. It matches well with the pen she gives you, a cherry red fountain pen with your initials engraved on the cap.
You leave the first page blank, because you always do.
You’re in her room at the stroke of midnight, and you’re definitely 19 now. She’s asleep in the bed across from where you sit at her desk, staring at a blank second page because you’ve found the right words, but you’re not sure if they do her justice.
By the time you can see orange flooding through the sheer white curtains over her windows, you’ve written four pages on that twinkle in her eye. Some of them might suffice.
You’ve found that your usual narrative doesn’t suit her—but prose in stanzas do. And you’re by no means a poet, but you think you could become one.
•
She sends you a photo of your hoodie on the back of her chair, chastising you for being forgetful all the time despite this being the first time you’ve left it at hers.
It’s followed by a photo of her in the mirror, wearing it like it was hers all along. It still hangs off her frame like it’s engulfing her, but she smiles at herself, and her face follows suit.
You’re not sure how she’s managed to transfer joy over a screen. It baffles you. You save the photo and tell her it’s because it makes you laugh.
She tells you she’s keeping your hoodie, and you tell her that’s fine. She wears it more often than you do, after all.
•
It’s 2am and she’s sitting in the passenger of your Toyota Yaris. Her Bluetooth is hooked to your speakers, and she’s blasting the Falsettos’ soundtrack with the windows down as you floor it down Diamond Jubilee Way.
Your Bachelor’s degrees sit in the backseat, hidden beneath takeaway Zarraffa’s bags still greasy from open clubs. Two High Distinctions that, if you’re being honest with yourself, you can’t see getting you anywhere beyond the academic validation.
But the future is a worry for the daylight, and while the sky is still dark and the road is still empty except for you and her, she tells you that nothing else matters.
And for the first time in your anxiety-riddled life, you’re willing to accept that.
•
It’s February, and she’ll be 21 in a week.
You’re alone in the annex of a church in Rothwell, and it’s cold. You have your hoodie draped over your arm. Just in case.
She’s wearing her favourite dress, a pink slip dress that lets the ‘714’ on her collarbone shine under the lights. You think she might be cold, but there are no goosebumps on her arms.
You don’t know what to do with your hands, so you pick at your skin. She usually tells you to stop, or even slaps your hands away. Not today. Today, she all but just barely exists in front of you, as you tell her all the secrets you swore you didn’t have.
You tell her that you’re sorry, and that you didn’t mean to lie. You tell her you’re in love with her, and that you’ve probably been in love with her since you saw a twinkle in her eye so beautiful that words failed to describe it. You tell her that it wasn’t her fault she never knew. You tell her that you were planning to take it to your grave. She doesn’t say anything.
They said you weren’t allowed to touch her. You reach out anyway. The tips of your fingers brush her forearm, the mole beside her elbow. She’s cold to the touch.
It takes you this long to tell her, and it’s too late.
You can tell her all you want, you can spend the hour listing off all the things you kept from her—how you’ve seen her in your dreams, soft beneath your fingers, tender against your lips—but it’ll all be too late.
She looks beautiful. You feel bad for thinking so. Nothing in a casket should be beautiful, but she is. She could be rotting, and you would still think so.
But her beauty is nothing without her smile, and that twinkle you’ve dedicated all your poems to is locked behind her eyelids.
There’s a chill in the church. She’s not even wearing a sweater. You tell her she can have your jacket, if she wants. She doesn’t answer, of course. But you know she’s cold. She’s always cold.
You leave it for her, draped over the edge of the cherry red coffin. It’s been hers for a while, anyway.
ARK (he/they/she) is a pronoun-having barista and aspiring writer fuelled by spite, maladaptive daydreaming, and D&D. Often found escaping reality, ARK’s writing is their means of learning how to be human, and roping everyone else into it with them.
