Once upon a time, there was a boy with pink-dusted cheeks that waited for Skylar outside class every morning to walk her to her next one.
Breathless laughter echoed in her room after he would climb in through her window every evening, eyes crinkled...
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"Whatever can go wrong," my aunt would incessantly quote in that eerily calm voice every time it got hard for me to cope, and it never failed to raise every single hair on my body up in fear, "will go wrong."
She had a habit of saying it too close to my face; breath minty and words rotten, the stench of her resentment so strong, it would bring tears to my eyes.
I was seventeen when my parents had shipped me away to stay with her against my wishes, leaving me to live like I was nothing but a tiny meteor fragment forced to survive its flight through the atmosphere all alone, left in Earth's gravity to fall apart under its own weight.
And even today, when I think about it after no less than a decade, the second my head falls back against the stiff seat of the train, the heaviness seeps through my skin and settles inside my bones like it never left. The distant tinnitus of 'none of this would have happened if you weren't born in the wrong body' becomes louder the wearier I grow, until my hands lay limply on my lap and it gets hard to swallow back the lump in my throat.
With no fight left in me today, I'm helplessly, hopelessly reminded of how falling in love with Finch had come to me as easy as breathing does. Like an involuntary response on its own.
I was convinced that you could not be anywhere around Finch Lawson for more than twenty-four hours and not get attached to the kind of person he was. Coming to terms with the feeling, though, had taken me thirteen years. Then another four to admit it to him, and merely three days of getting to call him mine before everything fell apart.
The problem with falling in love with someone since the beginning of time and then being abruptly pulled apart from them means that you never quite learn how to fall out.
I loved him when I finally managed to write to him amidst all that misery, and I loved him when I never got a response.
It's not that I didn't think about him a year later or two. I still think about him every time my eyes fall on the bird charm hanging from the thin silver chain around my wrist. Except my mind has learned to keep the memories fleeting, so I wouldn't be left feeling like an open wound every second that I spent reminiscing about him.
Maybe I should thank my subconscious. Because if this is how it feels to indulge in the memoirs of my life before I started living with River, I'm not sure how many times I can survive this particular bundle of emotions.
And maybe I have spent entirely too long running away from giving in to the feeling, because it won't stop growing right in the center of my chest.
Now that there's no class full of teenagers here ready to purposely but lightheartedly interrupt my lectures with silly little observations, no Meera to talk enough for the both of us, and certainly no River to wrap his arm around my back and give my shoulder a comforting squeeze, I long for the closely-acquainted detachment that usually clings to my consciousness every minute I spend on this train.
