Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

I look at Parks and she looks at me and the same thing that happens every night happens again. We stare at each other. My eyes nearly as round as hers, both of us frozen in what we used to be as everything we’ve done in this room floats off the walls and dances around us like ghosts from another time.

The lights go off and she stares at me through the darkness a few seconds longer, and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.

He is a beautiful part of life, I suppose. Painful things can still be beautiful things, in case you didn’t know.

I remember wondering if this was it, if that was the last time I’d ever see him. Him with the starry eyes and the hair I loved to knot my hands up in. The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life—how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that. How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole goddamn universe.

how much I loved him. Really loved him. To the bone, loved him. Cut me and I’d bleed him.

So, it doesn’t matter if I love him—which I don’t—but if I did, it doesn’t matter, even now. Because loving him is the same thing as tossing the keys to my heart to a valet without a driver’s licence. He’ll drive me off a cliff.

It wasn’t just what happened, it was an absence of him and the way my life had grown around him, like ribs around a heart.

Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him. And I hate him for that.

She gives me a small smile, and then looks back out the window. “How’s the weather, Parks?” I ask, staring straight ahead. It’s a toasty 21°. Barely a cloud in the sky. She peeks over at me out of the corner of her eye. “It’s quite lovely right now—but I heard it might rain later.”

if being with her was heroin, what we have now is methadone.

And in retrospect, when I’ll look back at this moment some time from now, this is when I’ll mark it—write it down, dog-ear the moment in my mind that this—right here, is when the molecular structure of who Tom England is to me will begin to change.

And I know that he smells like a Sunday morning. Slow, easy, uncomplicated. Like fresh coffee. New towels and a light-flooded room. Oak moss, patchouli, bergamot, lavender. And if Tom smells like a Sunday morning, then BJ smells like a Saturday night spent in the emergency room—don’t think of BJ—and I just would love not to be in the emergency room anymore.

I yell and it feels like a thunder-clap…Echoes all through the ancient mountains around us and the Greek philosophers who waxed lyrical about true love and soulmates roll in their graves as I try for the billionth time to sever myself from mine.

Oh my God! this writing is so beautiful.

How’s the weather, Parks. Fucked.

He’s the moon, and I’m the tides.

it doesn’t seem to matter that we love each other how we do, which is with a fullness—kind of like those animals that will eat themselves to death if they’re left to their own devices. I’ll love him till I die, love him till it consumes me whole and kills me dead—so maybe love doesn’t conquer all but just some. Because all is vast and love is so varied, like light in a prism; if you move it around a room, depending on how it catches, it changes. It means different things and there are so many different things love can be to people. I know that some love is beautiful, and some is freeing, some unravels you, some love poisons you, some blinds you, some betters you, and some loves break you in invisible ways that no one else knows about until you have to stand up and the weight of your love crushes your bones.

At the altar of the tree, I make a thousand soundless prayers and offerings, beg whoever’s listening to align our stars and

let him be who I thought he was. If he can’t be that, I pray, may I be free of him and not have it kill me. But he is worth dying over and that’s the part that gets me, I guess.

It’s strange, don’t you think, the way we attach to people. The way our best intentions are cast aside, and the seed gets deeper into the soil of us than we planned and their place in our lives grow roots. I don’t think we’re supposed to love people lightly. I don’t think we’re supposed to love them a little

Can you die from a broken heart, do you know? And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

I’m afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go? I’m letting it go.