The Stars are on Our Side

by Jennifer Hartmann

The thing is, hope can be a savior, or it can be an executioner. There’s no way to know which way the cards will fall. Only time will tell, and time is just as unpredictable as hope.

“If you think for a second that I don’t have all the time in the world for you, then you’ve got me all wrong.”

She set me on fire, leaving me nothing but a pile of ashes come sunrise. And I guess that’s the trouble with fire. It only knows how to burn.

Butterflies burst to life with dizzied wings inside my belly.

He’d looked at me like he was staring at some prized piece of art hanging in a gallery. Awe-struck. There was a heated curiosity in his eyes, as if he’d been trying to uncover exactly what the artist had envisioned when they’d dipped their paintbrush into the colors and made careful strokes. He was smitten.

“It's not death itself I'm scared of—I’ve already faced it, head-on, day after day, expecting it to come. Accepting it,” I tell him. Finding his eyes, I hold for a beat before continuing. “It's the last day that scares me.”

I’d rather scoop my eyeballs out with a melon baller

The weight of painful, one-sided love. It will forever be the heaviest thing I carry.

He makes my soul seem salvageable.

Birds start small. They hatch, and they grow, and they flap their wings until those wings are strong enough to fly. It’s instinct. It happens when their wings are ready. They never doubt that they will fly one day. They just know.

“I’m broken, Gabe. I’m damaged. I’m—” He grabs my face between his hands, forcing me to look at him. “You’ve got it all mixed up, Tabs,” he tells me, our eyes locking together as his thumbs stroke the sensitive skin below my ears. “With you in the world, how can there be anyone else?”

And I suppose it’s as they say: what goes up must come down. But it’s a shame they don't tell you about the crash. They don't mention how hard you'll hit, or how much it will hurt. There’s no talk of the bones cracking, the lungs wheezing, the heart bleeding and bruised. Even worse, the look in your lover’s eyes when he watches you plummet to the pavement and rupture into a thousand grisly pieces at his feet. It’s a bloodbath, a massacre, a catastrophe. It’s inevitable, though; there’s always a crash. And I think if I’d have known… I never would have tried to fly.

think it does us a disservice to look at the stars and believe that they are only stars. There is too much we don’t understand and too much we can’t see to remain boxed into simplicities.”