To Whom it May Concern (ON HOLD)

A Capturing of Chrome

It is with a scattered, yet joyous mindset with which I eventually collapsed into my bed. Stars peered through curtains with watchful eyes and I threw myself into the blankets with a thump. It was a lovely thump though. A nice, happy thump.

I was disoriented and befuddled. The ceiling was twisting above my head and I grinned. I didn't know if he was insanse, if he was different, or if I was.

I rolled over and pulled the comforter over my head before smiling into my pillow like a lunatic. His voice seemed to swim around me and I brought the feeling close to my chest, and held it.

There was something about it, the whole evening that seemed like it should be in a frame. Captured, and held and carried around like a chrome-plated memory. Something that would last forever, so you could look back at it years later and it would still make you feel the same way.

But it also felt like the complete opposite, fleeting, and spontaneous, and so overwhelmingly connected that it couldn't be pinned down. And every time you looked back at it, you noticed something else, something different.

I was wide-awake. I was wide-eyed. Exhausted and utterly, oh so very completely insane.

I wrapped myself in blankets then flung them away from me. Crossing in exaggerated tiptoe I made my way into the living room and grabbed my book, the one he had bought me, and brought it with me back into my bedroom.

My old copy lay on my side table and I traced a finger across the title. It was so familiar, so real. It was something I couldn't lose. I knew the story so well that I could go to when I needed it. No surprises, not for me. I knew their love story so well, it was a wonder I had so much trouble seeing any love played out when I knew every detail of another.

I had watched them fall in love a thousand times. Yet, this was new. I knew what it was supposed to feel like but I had never actually, felt it. It was like reading a book for the first time. Like turning pages and even it if someone else had read it before, this was my first time, and the story was happening for me, and it was happening for me right now.

I felt like I had fallen, or I had been falling and all of a sudden I hit the ground and while it seems like this is something I should have noticed, I hadn't yet. As if the shock of the impact needed time to absorb, now now for the first time I was beginning to feel it.
The thud, the way my heart began to pound, the explosion of the fall, I had finally hit the frikin ground.
I guess he and I had always been a possibilty, people always assumed we were a couple. They'd give us that aw-aren't-you-cute look that makes everyone smile. I suppose secretly, in the back of my mind I'd always loved the idea of us.

I'd always wanted us, him, him wanting me. Him waiting for me like some kind of fairy tale prince.

So much so, that this change, felt hazy. I almost couldn't accept that it had finally happened. I was stupified.
Like a fairy tale princess, off her head.
I was afraid too, I was so scared.
It scared me that I couldn't tell when I began to feel this way. When I began to want this, everything, all of it. The confusion, the rush, the sound of my heartbeat hard and loud against my skull. The butterflies, the tangled, wild mass of butterflies that circled around each other and perched against my bones.
I felt like I should have realized it when it happened.
Like the first moment, the first breath should have stayed with me, inside me somehow.
A beginning was supposed to be solid, and definite and memorable. I was supposed to know where it was, know where it happened, but I guess it doesn't always work like that.
Sometimes, maybe, things just happen and the beginnings happen too but we don't really notice it. It just begins and then its comes, and it's started and all we can do is keep going until the beginning is something we can take in.
The air around us, in this new place of beginning is finally something I am able to breathe.
I suppose beginnings just push themselves into our lives while we aren't looking. Then by the time we look back again they are just happening, and we have no idea where they came from or how long they've been there, but they are.
I realized now that he was important to me, so very, very important but I didn't know when it had happened. Though I felt like it had begun a long time ago, and for the first time I was finally looking back long enough to see it.
It was definetly there.
It was him and me.
It was real.
Love wasn't fast, love could be tested with time, and time had finally released us.
Though I had to wonder if you could fall out of love the same way.
Slowly, so carefully and quietly that you don't see it at first, can't accept what it is for a while. Even though it's there, even though it's growing. It doesn't exist because you won't let it, but time can slowly tear us away from ourselves, and who we were and what we felt, once. And if love could hide for such a long time, did empty hearts hide too? The falling out of love would be denied. It almost had to be honestly, if you really loved someone how could a lack of them not break your heart? I think people want to love each other.
I had to accept that I couldn't lose James, not now but also not before and not later.
He was something real, and you have to keep those things.
We find material and feeble feelings and we treat them like they're solid.
It's so rare that we find something really, actually real, something meant to last and stay with us. That I think those are the things we dispose of too quickly, because we're scared of loving something forever.
This is how it is before I fall asleep, my mind scattered and wild like a jungle of dysfunctional reality, or maybe it was clear.
He called me later, it was about 1:45, he knew I would still be awake.
"Good morning," he said quietly through the phone.
My voice was just above silence, "Hey James," There was a slow pause.
"I'm glad you're awake," he began and I smiled to myself. He couldn't sleep either, he could be exhausted without being tired at all.
"So I uh," his voice wavers and I smile again. The night outside my window is filled with frosty tingling stars. Shimmering like ice through sheets of glass, but his voice is groggy and warm so that it trickles across my skin in a half-awake haze. The noise if night are like lights, in their own way. Wafting, shining, glimmering out of silence instead of streets. An arrival of something through the darkness.
"I read Pride and Prejudice," he says and I shift so that I can see my own half smile in the mirror reflection. I feel good, happy.
I wait.
"It was really great Ella," his voice falls away and I can hear him shift through my faulty speakers.
"Actually is was pretty flipping fantastic and I thought it was brilliant,"
He laughs a little,
"But it took such a long time for them to see each other again,"
"I swear, they had fallen in love with each other and then what?" "Waiting for letters for a series of weeks, months?" He sounds exasperated and I want to kiss him. This is why I talk to him, because he tries so hard to love things for me, the things I need someone else to love.
" I don't know," I kind of whisper, kind of laugh.
" It's pretty romantic. The whole idea of letters, I mean she began to fall for him through that one he gave her, because he could explain himself and really talk to her." I was rambling, "And they're handwritten and people would wait forever to hold something. To look at the curve if a letter written by someone they loved..."
"It's incredible," I finished.
There was a long silence on his side and I just listened to the quiet sounds of his breathing as he thought. It was quiet.
"I like it," he said again, more softly so that the ends of his words were almost completely gone. He spoke to me the way he spoke to himself, trailing off slowly, changing his mind halfway through a sentence. To talk to him was to talk directly to him. There was no cover, no hiding. No figuring out what he was going to say before hand.
I could picture him, his hands beating on the outside of the phone, making the speakers beat out his soft rasps like a rythym. Like the sound of his heartbeat.
"James?" I asked through the phone, I hear the beating stop. "Ellouise?"
There was a pause, but no beat, just the silence of listening, of waiting.
I want to say something, I want to tell him something comforting about what has happened recently. With his mom, this is when we would talk, this is when I would make him being it up. Because I hear it, the tension in his voice, the little things he's hiding and I know I need to say something.
I want to talk to him like he talks to me, completely open. Yet something stops me, my heartbeat falters, the rythym breaking.
"Sorry, I just, there was silence," I sputter and I regret it. I dont mind silence, I never have.
Till I hear him laugh a little through the phone, and I begin laughing too, so that what starts out as a forced chuckle, becomes something high and alive. I hear him smiling in the way that his laugh can break every now and then, it makes me feel better.
You can tell we're both tired, but I will listen to him even when I had nothing to say.
I just want to talk to him, I don't know why I need to sometimes, I just do.
"Good night Ella," he says a little later, the end of a smile still audible in his voice.
"Night James," but the rest of my mind comes strung out as well, "are you, good night, is it, are we?" I have nothing to say but I still want to talk to him. I still have something else I want, I need, to tell him,
"Yes I am, good night Ella, it is, and we are," he says back to me and I listen to the sound of his fingers and his breath, high off of a late-night, mumbled conversation through the mouth of his flustered best friend.
"Good night," I force, "Good night," he presses softly.
I hang up and the good night dances against my eyes through a white rimmed window.
"Good night," I mumble, and something there, in that moments, settles timidly inside if me, like all the butterflies have found a way to finally settle, and breathe.
~***~
There is something insensitive about mornings. For they move and arrive like beginnings, so neccisary and predetermined they take away the memory of night with cooler air and the rushed bustle of traffic. Another loop in the cycle, it the turn, the beginning of the next day.
Intended to be used and over-used until they're gone, so that we miss the time we worked so hard to get to.
That alarm clock, I swear to God, would be the thing to push me over the edge.
It was slowly chipping away at my sanity.
But mornings can be nice sometimes, and sometimes they make you feel better with memories than with actual moments.
Sometimes, morning time, is the only time, you can think.
It comes up behind you, all these things that have happened, and they catch you, then just leave you there to realize what you've done. Mornings come whether you want them to or not. I was ready for morning though, I was ready for memory.
The days had been stacked recently, everything changing, everything arriving all at once. So suddenly, the one person that was meant to be my constant, became the one person that had changed the most. I now had everything, but I couldn't talk to my best friend about it, about the boy, and the feeling, and the first date.
Our first date after 16 years of knowing each other, and of being able to tell each everything...
Or maybe this was when I was supposed to be able to tell him even more.
The morning passed like it had to, pushing itself through me. Moving forward, working like time is meant to, continuing, always moving.
I could still picture him, James, my constant, while everything else changed around me. While people took new stories home from Estella's I sat behind the counter becoming content and giddy with my own.
It was amazing that I'd know him for such a long time and he still made me blush.
I suppose time can keep moving without changing everything.
I suppose sometimes endings are blatant and sometimes stories can keep going even after you thought they were over.

Dear James,
Strength and bravery are two different things, two different boundaries. Sometimes we need both and sometimes we need neither and sometimes we just wish we could have one.
Or enough of one to make the right decision.
Love, Ella

A/N
I'm sorry for the late updates, and the short chapters, and other things, such as things I'm forgetting to mention now. Thank you so much for reading this! Please comment and vote or just keep reading. Please and thank you, a lot, lots of thanks.