Goodbye

Page 33

The next morning I wanted to surprise Emilia by making breakfast for her all by myself. I got up a bit earlier than her, hoping that I would not wake her but I failed miserably. The moment I sat my feet down on the floor, Emilia opened her eyes.

"You still have trouble sleeping, don't you?"

Emilia turned around so that I could not see her face. Silence was enough of an answer to me. I shyly smiled at her, as she rolled herself into the blanket like a spring roll.

"It's alright. Don't worry about it princess. Some wounds take time to heal." I looked at my hands. Soft, childlike skin. There was a weird sensation, when my own hands touched. It felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar. These were my own hands. The hands I had been born with. Still, they felt so strange to me.

Emilia did not fall asleep but she did not get up either. Instead she watched me, as I was almost burning our breakfast. Once she had seen enough, she hid underneath the blanket again. Somehow all of this just seemed so casual. It was as if we had done this a thousand of times already. I wondered if being married felt this way.

After eating breakfast, I took care of the dishes. Emilia curiously looked around my room, before she finally found something that caught her attention. At first I could not tell what it was bun soon it realised that this was the letter Esra had given me. Emilia suddenly stared at me curiously. She handed me the letter.

"It's just something Esra gave me. I was actually planing on throwing it away." I explained hesitantly.

"Why?" Emilia asked all of a sudden. I did not really know what to say. Her eyes were capturing me with their beauty. Sometimes I thought that they were too gorgeous to be true. Those eyes could see through every lie.

"I don't plan on going to university. I'm not really smart to begin with. There's no way I could pass the entrance exam."

It was not that I was too lazy or that I had no trust in myself. I knew exactly what I was capable of and well, studying was not really one of my strong points. I used to have plenty of time to study. It was just that I had a lot of trouble understanding the stuff that I was learning.

Emilia was not the smartest one either but at least she never struggled to pass her classes. Emilia was going to university just like everyone else. I was left behind. The thing that I wanted to do was not the thing that I was capable of doing.

"You can... do... it. You're... good. I will... support... you."

My heart skipped a beat. The way Emilia looked at me intensely trigger something inside of me. It was unfamiliar and yet it felt warm. A breeze of calming spring wind. Time stood still around us. The moment was caught in a beautiful picture.

I thought about what I wanted for the rest of the day. Did I want to go to university? It had always been my dream to study astronomy. There was just something about it that pulled me in just like a magnet. When I asked Emilia about it, she just told me that stars were kind of beautiful. She did not know anything else about astronomy. I mean, she was not wrong. Stars were really kind of beautiful.

Lucy-Ann was excited to meet Emilia. I had never seen her that intrigued as in the moment she set eyes on Emilia. The first thing she did was comment on how cute Emilia looked. She also asked Emilia if I had payed her to pretend being my girlfriend. I had to interrupt Lucy-Ann in that moment.

I had already told Lucy-Ann about Emilia not being one to talk a whole lot. Nevertheless Lucy-Ann just would not shut up. She told Emilia about quite literally everything. Emilia just sat next to her and listened to every word Lucy-Ann had to say. Sometimes she nodded but most of the time I figured she was dead. At some point Lucy-Ann just randomly grabbed Emilia by the wrist and pulled her away. I am not sure where she ran off to with Emilia but I was quite sure that they would come back soon. Neither one of them was wearing any shoes.

Seconds turned into minutes and minutes turned into hours. The two of them came back somewhere around six o' clock. I questioned if Lucy-Ann had gone insane but then I realised that smile on Emilia's face. I could not really tell what the two of them had been up to but at least it seemed as if they had fun, even though their socks were as dirts as they could have been.

Lucy-Ann apologised for suddenly disappearing and excitedly told me that she and Emilia had wandered around the entire time. She did not really tell me what they were talking about, when I asked her about it. All she said was that the two of them had been badmouthing me. What a great friend I had.

Lucy-Ann left about an hour later. Emilia and I played a little game before getting ready for bed. As I lay awake right next to her and embraced the moment of us looking at each other, I asked her if she had fun with Lucy-Ann. Emilia nodded. She told me that she really liked Lucy-Ann.

My fingers traced the pattern of Emilia's soft cheeks. It was as if an unspoken truth lay in the air. It hurt me to know that Emilia had to leave again. Somehow it felt as if the two of us were just not meant to be together. The more I breathed in her sweet scent, the more I was reminded of the misery I was put through.