Catch and Cradle

by Katia Rose

There are no sounds except the birds and the rumble of a few distant cars downtown. This is my favourite time of day to be outside. It feels like I’m watching the city shake off the last of its dreams, smiling down at it the way you do when you’re waiting for someone you love to roll over in bed beside you and open their eyes.

Reading on paper has always been easier for me than reading on a screen. Just one of my many dyslexia quirks. I usually can’t even resell my textbooks because I mark them up too much with ridiculous amounts of highlighter, underlines, and little hand drawn diagrams that clue me in to what the paragraph is about.

“Such math. Much economics. Very money.”

Everyone starts screaming and stomping around, doing the weird lobster-inspired dance we made up on one of our road trips.

I didn’t just want to kiss her. I wanted to be with her.

“I’m not a ghost,” she says when it’s clear I can’t come up with anything else. “I’m not floating around haunting you. You don’t have to run in the other direction when you see me.”

She’s a whole universe slowly unfolding itself in front of me, and there’s something humbling and precious about that.

Her house never felt like home, even after I didn’t have anywhere else to call home.”

side-eye

I don’t want to pull Hope into the mess of my past without being able to offer her some glimpse of a solution.

Is it the most important thing in your life, or the only thing in your life?

I’ve never loved out loud.

“I love capybaras!”

I will admit that accidentally showing up to practice in a shirt with Becca’s name on the back instead of mine was asking for it.

Maybe sometimes you just need to take the damn shot and stop worrying about what everyone else will say.