he breaks her heart when they're eight. he doesn't do it on purpose, but it happens all the same. his little boy hands aren't enough when she asks him to hold on to her heart for her. he doesn't do it on purpose. her heart slips and falls through his fingers and her eyes go wide. she scrambles to catch it, but gets tangled up in all her feathers. the air shudders with the impact of a silent boom of thunder, and then everything cracks. when she collects herself enough to look, her heart lies broken on the floor. he babbles apologies, but she just smiles, small and detached, and tells him it's not his fault. she kneels down and carefully picks up the broken pieces of her heart. she tries as best as she can to mend it, but nothing works.
in the end, she's left with two halves of a beating heart that she doesn't know what to do with.
--
he thinks about splashing, smearing, clogging up dirty alley walls with vivid, sharp paint. he thinks about swirling leaves and gang leader faces, petty, childish flirtations, and deeper, lasting, bonding friendships. he thinks about fires and ambulances, newspapers and life support; breaking, crying over his girl looking fragile and drowning in white cotton and hearing that she might make it. she might. he thinks about how he clung to that hope that she'd survive, and hearing that a clumsy doctor tripped the cord.
he thinks about suffocating funerals and dying in the dirt, and future promises that changed from i will to we will that broke.
--
her hair is this impossible shade of red. it's this shaded, jaded, glorious amaranth that makes him want to rip the petals out of the flowers that she's carrying. it's a colour that is so achingly familiar that, for a moment, he forgets how to breathe. it's morbidly fascinating, watching this girl frisk along in dark ribbons and lace and silk that she has no right to be wearing. the leaves flutter up around her as she totters down the sidewalk, kicking at the piles. her feet aren't broken in for these clunky heels and he locks his eyes on her ankles, brittle and wobbling and threatening to snap and collapse under her. he can't look her in the eyes, because her eyes are just as wide and just as artificial candy blue as he remembers, but the difference is that the last time he remembers seeing her, her eyes had learned how to hold back the burn of tears. these eyes look like they're always crying.
do you remember? he wants to ask but doesn't because if he does, she'll look at him and ask, who are you?
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