Let Us Fall

My laptop smells like goodwill and success and glass doored studios with plush fur carpets. Do laptops smell like that? Or is it just my uncanny obsession with smells and justifying them with people and places? People, mostly. Like, he smells like a baby just bathed in lukewarm water, like round tears begging for clarity, like lush meadows of happiness. He smells like daisies, I decide. That, and babies. This is not a monologue on him. I try not to break my day into pieces, each one a monologue about him. They are my days, aren’t they? But what about when I’m flying around like embers, soaring, soaring around him? Is he the phoenix, and I the embers he is going to emerge from again? Or is it just us being young and hopeful? Dylan would have said the answer is blowing in the wind. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. My friend. Weird how people become friends over songs. Beautiful, in fact. Beautiful is my favourite word. A week ago I cheated on ‘beautiful’ with ‘obelisk’. I did not cheat on Sebastian though. His name is not really Sebastian. I just needed a similar name. But this is not about him either, not about how he looks at me longingly and I feel nothing other than emptiness anymore. But not with Park, that doesn’t happen. (Again, I just needed a name. And some resemblance, perhaps.) With Park, it always like under the mistletoe, only it’s not Christmas, and I don’t feel like kissing him. Not in a bad way, though. Just don’t feel like kissing him all the while that we’re under the mistletoe. With Park, it’s like he is not constantly at the back of my mind, but he is the back of my mind, instead. Or the front. Or all of it. Nobody waits for his explanations, people just assume. Assume he is guilty, assume he should be punished, assume he has wronged her, assume he should be left alone. I never feel like leaving anybody alone is ever the answer, and I feel him thinking in the same way. We make a good pair. He a sinner, I a sinner. The Lumineers would have asked us to forget what Father Brennan said we were not born in sin. We are all sinners, no point denying that. Some of us just hide the sins behind lullabys and baby’s breath and full, wide eyes with more black and less iris. More fear and less confidence. More innocence and brown rings under the eyes. Brown rings like the ones left in some of the books at the library. I haven’t visited the library in a while now. Long, white tables. Books smelling like school and cardboard boxes. The books my sister passed on to me smelled like her. Like friendship bands and slam books and cream biscuits shaped like cottages and a blue shirt I remember she used to wear. I remember her long, straight hair, always tied up in buns and braids before she left for Guelf University. Guelf is in Canada, the land of leaves the colour of pomegranate red and a happy, calm yellow, in the fall. It’s not true that Park does not know much about me. A lot, he knows. A lot, I intend to tell him, if we breathe long enough together like the embers and the phoenix. I am standing in front of the sea, and learning how to swim for the first time in my life. That is what it feels like when he is not around. If that is what it keeps feeling like, leaving an era behind in school ain’t gonna be easy. I always feel like we are leaving an era behind at the school. Like the presence of all of those new kids, with their new hopes and new raising the eyebrows, and new trios sipping into tetra packs at the ground at fifteen past two. Something about their leisurely way tells me to leave. It falls so perfectly and imperfectly into place altogether.

As my eyes drift to the rack of overflowing books by my bed, all of them holding my soul, my words, my heaves, my sighs together for the past seventeen years, I remember his head full of soft black curls. His skin, the colour of honey and winter dawn and lazy sunrays, his bottomless eyes, all of it float into my mind. My Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect. And I do not know anymore. Let us fall into the labyrinth.