Forgetting Sylva

Flutter

Dad's lips thin slightly, and he looks at me shrewdly for a moment. "Was there a certain reason you asked me that question, a while ago?" he asks quietly. "About love?"

I glance over my shoulder, and my neck hurts but I don't care. I see his tall frame spilling from the chair, and the sight makes me smile. I look back at dad. I don't answer. But this, to him, is as much an answer as any words would be.

His lips pull into a smile, almost reluctantly. He stands and smooths back my hair, and presses a kiss to my forehead. "Do I have to tell you to be careful, Syl?" he asks.

I frown. "Of what?"

He looks at me seriously, as if in the process of deciding to say what he really means, or to smooth it over. I know the expression, because he uses it with mum, sometimes, when he doesn't want to hurt her.

He kisses my forehead again, and sighs heavily. "Don't break yourself, Syl." He looks behind me, over my head and into the room. "And try not to break him."

And I am speechless. Wordless. So that when he pushes my chair into the room, I have nothing to say. When he closes the door behind me, I am quiet.

Lance shifts with the click of the door, but Tatiana remains motionless, curled on her side, her chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly beneath the sheets. Lance leans back in the chair and looks at me for a moment, eyes tired and barely awake. And then he stretches his hand out towards me, and I slowly stand from my chair and walk towards him. No safety barriers. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing to help me.

When I reach him, he pulls me down into his lap and cradles me against his chest, and I curl up my legs and settle against him. His breathing falls into an easy rhythm, and he is asleep again, just like that. And I wonder how it feels, to be so safe and easy in the presence of another person, that he could just fall asleep like that, trust me so willingly and so readily. And then I realise that I know how it feels, because I am feeling it now. And I am warm and safe and comfortable and perfectly at ease. Because he is my friend and he cares about me and I care about him and this is so simple that I can hardly believe it. I feel as if I shouldn't believe it. I feel like this should feel wrong, strange, being held so close by a person I have not known for very long, for as long as I have known Marcus. A person I have been disagreeing with. A person for whom I have unresolved feelings. But it feels right, and it seems like I have known him forever; I cannot remember a time when I did not know Lance. When I did not know the perfectly controlled feel of him at my side. And it is almost as if everything that went wrong between us has been dissolved in this moment. Like we are what we were always meant to be.

And I think about what dad said, just before. About not hurting myself, but also not hurting Lance. And I think I know what he meant. I think he meant not to hold back what I want, what I need, because soon I will not want or need anything anymore. And I think he meant that not reaching for what I want will hurt not just me, but Lance as well, because he feels the way that I feel. Because, apparently, according to some person whose name I don't know, it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. And if words that beautiful are wrong, than I don't know how I will live my life.

Of course, there is always the other side of dad's words, the other side of the argument. That he meant that Lance will feel the same way as I do. And we will be happy, and then I will die, which is inevitable, and he will be crushed. And I think of breaking him like that, and it makes me hurt in a place I never thought I could hurt, a place I cannot put a name to. And I feel his arms around me, strong and sure and perfectly controlled, even in sleep, and I think of losing this, because I know I should. But I don't want to.

So I close my eyes and make my thoughts into poems; into words; into butterflies with their wings made out of the soft curves and sharp points of letters; into creatures that flutter up, through the ceiling of my mind and into the air, and become invisible constellations in the day-time sky. I think of them like that, like stars. Grand and bright. Their light taking hundreds of thousands of years to shine down to the earth. So big and so bright and so full of life. And most of them already dead.