The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

Love, as most know, follows its own timeline, disregarding our intentions or well-rehearsed plans.

She worried she couldn’t protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, pain and love. Most especially from love.

how love arrived when you least expected it, how someone who said he didn’t want to hurt you eventually would.

Years later the lights of the growing city would erase the stars from the sky, but back then they shone through the branches like jailed fireflies.

“Just because love don’t look the way you think it should don’t mean you don’t have it.”

But while the thought of being dead seemed appealing, the actual act of dying did not. Dying required too much action. And if recent events proved anything, my body wasn’t going to give over to death without a fierce fight; so if I were to kill myself, I’d have to make sure I could do it. That I’d be good and dead once it was all over and not mutilated or half deranged but still dreadfully alive. I thought of collecting handfuls of those chalky white pills, of hiding them in my cheek and stuffing them under the mattress, later washing them down in one gulp with a glass of cold tap water. I thought of sneaking into the kitchen for a steak knife sharp enough that a single slice to just one wrist would suffice — I wasn’t sure I could try to kill myself twice.

“Love makes us such fools,”