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When I see them I just want to pop on some latex gloves, hand them a shirt, give them a good shake and yell, “WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT YOUR JEANS ARE FROM H&M FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.”
you can bet your bottom dollar that the beast I’ve beaten, bound and buried for the better part of a year is so restrained and controlled and sedated that not even a whisker of emotion breezes across my poised little face.
He laughs and for some reason it sounds like I’m ringing the doorbell of the home I grew up in.
“Is that a tattoo of two dead bees?”
looking at photos of a girl who isn’t her. That she looks okay — and I want her to be — but she looks okay without me.
My eyes trace the tree, find our initials carved into it. All three of ours. And then my eyes fall down the trunk to the stone we lay to remember the tiny baby girl we lost that no one even knows we had, and there are magnolias laying there and I know he was here. He was here and now he’s gone.
I hadn’t learned an exceptional amount about labour but I knew enough about it to know that I didn’t want to go through that to have no baby at the end. The women who can do that are braver than I was.
Our parents stood at the doorway watching us, so completely baffled at what was happening and why — how we started the week as two separate people then came back at the end of it fused as one.
mean, you know me, man. I don’t believe in that true love bullshit, okay?” He shakes his head. “That fucking Brontë, Shakespearean soulmates shit, I think it’s a thing we say to girls to get laid… But whatever you and Parks have, it’s what those fuckwits were writing about.” I glance at him. “By ‘fuckwits’ you mean Shakespeare and Brontë?” “Yeah.” He nods. “Right.”
“You’ve loved him since you were fourteen,” he tells me. “Magnolia, you never stopped.”
I wrapped the thoughts of him around my lost heart like a blanket, let them warm me up, let them tear me to pieces, let myself feel the weight of losing him. And for all the pain and all the sadness, for all the shitty things that happened, I still find myself not regretting it at all because he loved me. It’ll be what they put on my tombstone, I think.
Touching Parks is like touching no one else. It’s like coming home.
My eyes go dark and if there were curtains, they’d be flapping. The water would be choppy and the animals would start behaving all peculiar, frantically searching for cover.
“Beej,” he sighs. “You fucked up. You’re not a fuck up.”
Verona
I’ve always been like this. I don’t know how to be alone.
I am Shakespeareanly in love with another man
“We’re in the stars, Parks.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
It was more like the undertow of the universe pulling me back to her.
She thinks we’re in the stars but I just think she’s the current of everything and I’m always just drifting… Floating home to her.
But then I wonder if things now are exactly as they’re meant to me to be. Because we’re meant to be.
