"I want how it was before. I want it all with you in my life again... I'm asking you to stay."
Miles Cobain-Smith
An aloof and detached logician, he scrutinizes the simplest things through microscopic lenses. Academic validation, family expectations...
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"I heard that you're from Alexandria. That's so cool! Didn't Queen Cleopatra live there?" Maddie asks in an excited manner. Ayra nods with a smile.
"Yes."
"Just imagine living in a city like that. Who knows, you might be a descendant of the royal family!"
Juliet had been previously scanning the menu but looks up at Maddie. "If it was that easy, Shakespeare could be my great-great-one-light-year-distant grandpa too."
The whole table erupts into laughter before Maddie comments,
"You're so desperate to trace your ancestry back to some literary genius one way or another."
"And you're hell-bent on denying that there's indeed a little possibility that I could be related to Jane Austen or the Brontës. Or maybe not them, but perhaps there once lived another girl like me, a hopeless romantic in love with love a couple of centuries ago. She used to write poetry like me on the balcony of her small cottage by the heather field, waiting for someone to give her words of love meaning. But he never came around, and heartbroken, she spent her whole life only trying to put love into words."
Taking in the confusion on Ayra's face, Maddie shakes her head as she's used to this already and tells her, "Don't worry, Ayra. She's fine. It's just her own ghost from another life possessed her. It often does in the most random times, so yeah."
Juliet shrugs her off, not taking her seriously and still stuck in her bubble of fantasy. "I don't know, Maddie, but I just think there must be a reason why I'm so enthralled with that life and why I'm still stuck in the echoes of a past that no longer exists. There should be a secret connecting me to that bygone time and a reason for my foolish longing for a home I can't recall having, but it comes like a flashback from time to time."
"Wow," Ayra exclaims, "That legit sounds like a poem. I didn't guess you'd have a poetic side."
Juliet bows her head dramatically in the way artists do after finishing a performance. "Thank you so much. I try!"
Ayra laughs in amusement just as Maddie intervenes,
"That's the real Juliet. Romantic, always lost in daydreams, and quoting poetry at every chance she gets. The logical-minded computer science student is just a facade to show off. You will get it soon."
"Two-faced, huh?" Ayra jokes, raising an eyebrow at Juliet, who only shrugs nonchalantly.
"Hardly any of us shows the world what we really are from the inside. It's only make-believe going around."
"Why didn't you take literature as a major? You seem made for it."
"I have wanted to become a computer geek since I was a kid. It's that passion of mine that I can't pursue if I don't stay connected to it. But literature-that's the passion that makes me who I am, and even if I didn't pursue literature as a major, I'd have been able to go back to it either way."
