Bloom

Give Me Your Attention

When I wake up the next morning, the diary is laying open on my chest and a headache from my lamp being left on all night. I close the diary and tuck it away, far from my eyes. It feels wrong to have read what I did. It was so personal and obviously very secret. As soon as I read it, I felt like I shouldn't have like it wasn't meant for anybody else's eyes. Probably because it wasn't. But still, I couldn't stop myself. I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth, comb my hair, and think about the dreams I had.

I dreamt of H and L. Aside from the photos, I imagined H to be a bit like James Dean with his sharp features and interesting personality. Soft and harsh at the same time, that sounds like H from his diary. And I dreamed L to look like Grace Kelly or maybe Jackie Kennedy. I don't know, someone strong, personality-wise. In the diary, H said that L would take her shirt off before bed. I'm not a confident person as is, but that seems like a wildly confident thing for someone to do back in the 50s, especially before they were married. I don't know why H didn't dare write L's name down, maybe she was supposed to marry someone else, maybe their families hated each other like Romeo and Juliet. Whatever the issue was, this is a story I needed to know more about.

I dreamt of H and L and how their lives would have been like back then. I dreamt of how they would have walked down the streets of Manchester together. I dreamt of their quiet nights at H's house together, maybe a glass of wine and albums playing on repeat and dancing around the kitchen. It was a beautiful dream, to be honest. But it felt like it didn't belong to me, and I felt guilty for dreaming it.

I know I should go and find H, give him back his things. But I want just to keep these a little bit longer. I won't read anymore, I tell myself, but I just want to have them... just for now. I box up the diary and the photo albums and shove them in the tallest, deepest shelf of my closet.

"What are you doing?" Reign's voice in my doorway makes me jump.

"Nothing!" I say and quickly shut my closet door like I'm hiding something.

"Were you reading the diary?" Reign twists a piece of her pretty brown hair around her finger.

For being twins, Reign and I couldn't be more different. She has the most perfect dark, wavy, brown hair; it always curls into perfect little ringlets; her eyes are bright green. Grammy always says she was the baby that was supposed to go to another family, but God gave her to us anyway. We never knew what she meant by that.

I, on the other hand, had light brown hair, very straight, very fine, and feathery. My eyes are blue, bright like Reign's, but blue. Grammy told me I look like someone she knew when she was a young woman. She never elaborates, always the same wistful look in her eye. I wish I looked more like Reign sometimes. I always felt like Grammy thought she was special, like she saw something in Reign, or someone, that she couldn't see in me. I wished we looked more like twins, acted more like twins. But we didn't and that's that, really.

"Of course not!" I defend. "Why would you say that?"

"I saw you reading it last night when I walked by your room," she says with a smirk.

"Piss off," I roll my eyes at her.

"Tell me then," She walks in and plops down on my bed. "What did it say?"

I hesitate before going to sit down across from her. I like having these things to myself, it felt like my corner of the world last night. Those stories were between H, L, and me. 

"The diary entries are about someone H loved, they're about L," I say.

"Who do you think L is?" she asks.

"I think H is the taller boy in the photo I showed you, the one where they're on the beach, and I think that L is the girl running toward the camera," I say.