things i remember ; wilbur soot

the one she deserves

The first thing I remember was a bed that wasn't my own. Red and white tartan duvet, dried lavender bags on the bedside table. Morning light shines through the thin voile curtains. Singing from downstairs, and some wondrous smell. Fresh bread. The room seems to echo some sort of warm safeness and I am in love, in love with the world. Tulips are coming to bud in the small garden outside my window.

I come downstairs on light feet, eyes still weary from sleep. Niki, Niki, Niki. She smiles at me as I open the kitchen door, bare-faced, her hair tied up in a messy ponytail. The lights seem to dim around her. Imagine being that bright, I think. Being that bright that everything seems faded in comparison.

She grabs my hand, or perhaps I offer it, I can't quite recall. We sway in the early morning silence. I remember the odd desire for the world to end right then and there, for us to be buried under layers and layers of soot and stone—a fossilised moment. That millions of years from now, people would come across our bones in the shell of a broken bakery. But I shake the image from my mind. She looks up at me, her eyes full and wide and blue, the morning light haloing her blonde hair, and I'm certain she's an angel. "Let's stay here forever," I whisper, kissing her nose.

She laughs at me, wiping floury hands on her apron. "Okay."

She feeds me glace cherries straight from the container, sticky and red, and I laugh and laugh and we spin around the kitchen, holding each other always, until we are dizzy and stupid and the oven pinger goes off. Let me keep her, I think, pink-cheeked and breathless. Let me be the one she deserves.

Then she leads me to the wizened apple tree in her garden and tells me to close my eyes. She kisses me gently, and I place my hands around her waist as though I might break her. As though she were some small, fragile thing that might blow around in the wind. We stand barefoot in the rain-damp grass. The sun has barely risen but I am here, raw and scratching with life.

"Will?"

"Yeah?" She's running her hands through my hair, and I close my eyes. I can feel her breath on my face as she talks, sweet from the cherries and the bread. I kiss her nose, pink from with cold. All I want is you. You in your perfect self, and me in mine. (Perhaps I'm perfect to you too?) I don't know how to love you the best, or even particularly well. But I know that with you, it's easy. With you, I don't even have to think.

And I will try to love you, in my incompetence and my lips sticky with cherries and legs weary with dancing and your eyes, oh your eyes, white-blue like a November sky. "You hold me like the world is burning," you said once, laughing, your palm soft under my chin. (I was so afraid of it. Of the flames in my dreams, that incessant crackling in my ears, the smoky smell that seemed to follow wherever I would go.)

"Do you think—do you think everything will be alright? In the future?"

I fiddle with her apron ties, wondering. A large orange leaf lands on her forehead, and we laugh, and she kisses me again, and I don't know anything.

I hope so, love. I hope so.