I would name the stars for you (I would take you there)

Chapter 1: Part One

Slowly counting down the days
'til I finally know your name
The way your hand feels round my waist
The way you laugh, the way your kisses taste
I've missed you but I haven't met you
Oh but I want to

1 year before

It is the strangest of feelings when love falls apart.

Strange in the sense that you hurt until you feel numb, until you feel nothing at all.

Hollywood lusts after drama; loves a violent end with screaming and cursing and crying in the rain and that one final plea for forgiveness. But the just-not-quite-right kind of love? The kind of love between two people who settle for one another, for comfort and familiarity over passion and risk? That love simply fades away, softly and slowly, like a shadow into the night.

At first, all you see is the sun, warm and comfortable and familiar. You let the false tendrils of hope wrap themselves around your heart, and ignore the impending darkness, the black spots that creep along the edges of your vision, the inevitable ending in which you both realize that your puzzle pieces were of a similar shape but never a perfect fit. And so, eventually the sun sets and you‒ blinded by the false light of a complacent love‒ don't feel the chill of dusk until it's much too late. And then it is dark and you are, all at once, completely alone.

You become a husk of your former self‒ empty and withering, roots yanked out by Fate's cruel hand‒ clinging onto something that is already gone. You ask yourself who you could possibly be in a world without them, and find the answer in the torn pieces of a photograph featuring your brilliant smile, but hollow unhappy eyes. You are incomplete, one-third of a whole instead of the perfect half you were meant to be... But eventually, you find your soul too weak to even grasp at those waning memories of love and bliss, and it is then that you are forced to let go.

You allow the remnants of what you once were to be tossed and turned in the winds of time, a little lost soul drifting aimlessly amongst a sea of people, almost dead but unfortunately not quite. And then you tell all of your friends that you've moved on, tell your mum that she needn't worry any longer, and trick yourself into pretending that everything's okay. You make them believe you, politely refuse their offers of help until eventually they stop coming. If you're destined to be alone, you reason, you ought to well and truly detach yourself from everyone you love.

Because what is real love if yours didn't turn out to be?

(You promise yourself you'll never get hurt again.)

And then you flock to the clubs and get shamelessly drunk, picking up anonymous fucks and pretending that they don't all bear an uncanny resemblance to... to... and you lie to yourself, say you forgot the name when it's burning like flames on the tip of your tongue. But the curls aren't curly enough or the eyes are the wrong shade of blue or the feel of those calloused fingertips against your skin is either too rough or not there at all. And you try to forget but you can't, try to love again but you won't, try to live again when you haven't got the heart to.

They are quick to teach you- just as soon as you depart from the seemingly endless fantasy of childhood- that the world is an inherently cruel place. There are drug dealers and thieves prowling the streets at night, hoping to plant the seeds of rebellion in your naïve adolescent brain. There are rapists around every corner waiting to steal your innocence and murderers plotting to end your life. They speak of terrorists and tyrants and nuclear weapons, of genocide and war and forced prostitution. News headlines flash with horrific tales of kidnappings and sexual abuse. But they never say a word about the tragedy of lost love.