Pulse

beat eighteen

Nobody expected for it to happen so fast.

It was one little part of a fast second that flew by them without even grazing their cheeks. I guess you could say that time beat them to it before they could even see it coming. And that can be strange about time. You could ask yourself what it is, really. It's one simple clock that ticks away, and it is your fault that you let it affect you. You think about time more than you use it.

Eden knew it wasn't only time, but life took part of the mess as well. Those two never seemed to leave her alone, and they always combined to cause extraordinary troubles in her life.

Time and life were like two forces. Life could be the gravitational, that always seems to drag you down, and try to pry you to the center of the Earth. Time, on the other hand, kept pushing you in all directions, and then when you realized you run out of time, you let life take you.

Eden was never good at physics. It was absurd for her to think of life and time as two forces, because they would and could be that if she let them, and in the same time, if she didn't, they could be just words.

And that's the problem. The words were the problem.

She had none left. No right words to say. And words were all she could think about.

She was sat in that same old, cold kitchen, on the same old wooden chair and her feet once again froze through the same ripped socks. Her hair was falling over her shoulders, and she looked at her split ends in disinterest. Ace insisted to wash her jeans, so they smelled fresh and clean. They were still a little torn and very worn out. Her jumper, that she had not taken off since Ace gave it to her, seemed to become a dull color her eyes avoided gazing over. Her fingertips were pink from the cold. The tip of her nose was frozen, and she could imagine icicles hanging from it.

Ace stood leaning on the empty fridge. His eyes were trained on her, taking in every detail of her appearance once again. He looked at her hair, disheveled and messy, surrounding her face. He took in her creased eyebrows and eyes cast down, and the scar from her hear to her jaw. He looked at her fingertips as she picked at her nails.

"I shouldn't know so much about coffin sizes," she whispered, crossing and uncrossing her legs. His lips were in a tight line, his cheeks still a little damn from the tears he previously shed. He never cried a lot. But now, he cried for the poor woman. And more than that, he cried for the girl who's tears were all she had left.

He walked over to her, sitting on his knees in front of her and kissing the palms of her hands. She sniffled. He rested his forehead on her hands, who rested on her knees, and he took a deep breath.

"Where do you want to go from here?" he asked. "You can go anywhere."

"I don't know," she admitted. She knew, per say, that she wanted to go home. But the problem was, she didn't know where that home was. She though she found it in Ace; but you cannot make homes out of humans, can you?

"I know I said we needed distance," he started, "but I can't leave you alone, especially with the cold and the winter already here."

"Ace," she sighed, "imagine reading a book. You are currently just around the seventeenth chapter, but everything else gets wiped out. That part of the book no more exists, but you somewhat remember it. Would you still want to read that book, even though it is completely different now?"

"Yes," he replied without missing a beat. She stared at him for a while longer, contemplating so many things that her brain felt like a junkyard full of useless thoughts, the right ones nowhere in sight. She took in every detail of his face, every curve and line, every perfect imperfection.

"Those eyes of yours," he said, "they could kill."

"How I wish," she joked quietly, and he squeezed her hand. He was there. He was real. He was alive. And then she realized how silly it was; she had wanted her heart to stop, but he was the one that got it beating even harder.

Minutes were hours. Long, everlasting, eternal, never ending hours. She stood in front of the crooked mirror, the scar on her face now not matching the one on her heart. She looked down at her pale hands, and then back up at her dark eyes. Her face was ghostly pale, but when was it not lately. She glanced then a little more downwards, and to the dress Ace borrowed from his sister, since she didn't possess a dress; though she hadn't known he had a sister.

It was warm, just what she needed. It reached the floor, covering her shaky knees. The sleeves were long and it was incredibly soft. If it were anyone else, the dress would be considered beautiful, she thought. A sad smile graced her lips as she fiddled with the ring on her pinkie finger. She had found it under Nana's pillow, when she was changing the sheets that morning. She had a hard time entering that room, but she had to. The ring was safely tucked there, a small golden thing big enough to fit on the finger of a child, hence why she kept it on her pinkie finger.

She traced her fingers down the familiar pattern of her scar, and sighed. Ace was somewhere in the apartment, and she knew he wanted to give her time to collect herself before the funeral, where she would fall apart. He had been a huge help over arranging it, he and his mother, whom she hadn't met yet.

The coffin sizes, the place to bury her, the church, the priest; there was so much about funerals that she now knew that she didn't want to know.

He entered the bathroom just as her thoughts turned from a hurricane of jumbled sentences to a peaceful lake. He took a few steps, the small distance from the doors to the sink now seeming even smaller since he was there. He pressed a kiss to her scarred cheek, and she sighed.

"I would ask if you were ready," he whispered, "but I know there is no such thing as ready." She hesitated, but took his hand in hers, looking down at their intertwined fingers.

"I will be okay as long as you hold my hand," she whispered, and he nodded.

"Don't let go," she said once again, her breath caught in her throat.

"Never," he assured her, squeezing her hand, his glance falling on the ring on her pinkie finger.

"I was told never to tell you anything, and you know that," he said, looking her straight in the eyes and through her soul.

"But I gave you this ring when we were seven, for our birthday," he smiled.

"Our birthday?" she asked.

"We were born on the same day," he smiled, and she smiled back. "I held your hand since I could walk. And I will hold it until my pulse no longer beats alongside yours."

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"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened."

― Douglas Coupland, Life After God

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