Admit It

13; broken cobblestones

Some days, Shawn felt like the clouds that cast shadows and light below his feet, scattered, weak, and tossed around by a force that was not his own. He tried to not meet the eyes that were so heavily staring at him, trying to catch his own even when he refused to look back. Only minutes ago he would've bathed in their sparkling kindness and smiling wonder, let himself be warmed with their encompassing glow, but he thought he might break then and there if he looked back. Their tower of shimmering, rose-tinted glass lay broken and shattered beneath his feet. 

Suddenly, he felt Camlia look away from him, and he wasn't quite sure whether the pent up breath that left his lips was a sigh of relief or an attempt to hide the sound of his heart falling to pieces in his chest. His last ounce of willpower slipped from his grasp, and his eyes snapped to her. 

Only a second ago, he was sitting with his arm around her and her body falling into his like she would trust him with anything, but he was staring at her, knees hugged to her chest and eyes pointed toward the hardwood, from across the room. The house, he knew, was always cold, chilled by the late night winds that snuck through the crack in the window, but when he was holding her, he could feel warm. Even if it was just a self-misleading thought, a type of trickery- or magic- that her touch brought to his skin. 

"I'm sorry," he whispered. There was a shake in his voice when he spoke low. 

He watched as she stayed frozen, as if by ice. Only when he glanced back as he walked away, each step seeming to send another flash of bright red light through his heart and into his unfocused vision, did he catch her hand shaking just slightly. He turned his eyes away as quickly, afraid of what he might see if she looked up. 

Pain traveled through him as he hurried the rest of the way down the hallway and the stairwell. It was heavy and made him sore and felt like a breath of smoke running through every inch of his being, thinning out as it spread through him but always the same agonizing amount. Though, the numbing weight of the consequences of his words did do rather well at making it more or less impossible to think anything. 

Shawn didn't notice where he was going until his foot met the surface of the misplaced half of a broken cobblestone, eyes too unfocused and mind too scattered like the clouds above to notice where he was walking. He slipped and instinctively caught himself before he hit the ground, but there wasn't anything left in him to hold himself up afterward. He sat on the freezing ground of cobblestones that he couldn't catch the color of and mindlessly watched as the streetlight above him flickered with a faint, yellow light, barely hearing a thing as the last cars that would pass through these streets tonight drove past him. 

She would've ruined me. Broke me to pieces, a voice said from inside his head. The voice was as he felt, weak and slow and speaking with a shake in its words. 

He bit his lip as a car drove past him and disappeared into the flickering streetlights that followed in an even line down the street. The world fell silent before him, the only sound the wind as it chilled him to his bones. He longed for her touch to make him feel a little less lonely in the world he would never be able to call his own, and longed for the dark library corners to make him feel safe and still once more. 

But I would've broken her first, Shawn thought after moments- or minutes- of silence. I would've broken every part of her. I would have destroyed her. 

If they were ever going to end, if whatever magic and surrealism and beauty they had had to come to an end, at least it was now. Because in those moments that were slowly slipping through his fingertips, he'd gotten to know her enough to be certain of one thing: that Camila was the type of girl he would fall for without warning and without want, like dropping down a cliff in the dark. 

And the worst thought was that she might've fallen for him the same. The possibility scared him. Shawn's heart raced with an unsteady pattern at the unwanted thoughts; Camila loving him, her sweet disposition, her touch quiet but gentle and caring and fluttering like small butterflies, and Shawn never being brave enough to love her back. It was that girl whose eyes were entrancing but words like daggers made of ice who he wanted to blame, but it was difficult to hate someone when you had to resist the urge to drop flowers at their grave every cold winter. 

Shawn narrowly missed cutting his finger on the edge of the broken cobblestone. He stood and dropped his eyes to the ground. He didn't want those thoughts anymore. The types of thoughts that invaded his consciousness, blurred his vision with blackened clouds, making him numb and weak and sore like he'd fallen into the ocean during the black of night. 

He traced his steps back to the two cars, parked in adjacent spots in an empty parking lot, and glanced up at the apartment building. It would be so simple to run up the stairwell and knock on her door and hold her and kiss her and tell her he wanted to be able to love her, but leading her on would be like rubbing salt in an open wound. The door slammed shut and he pressed on the gas pedal before he had the chance to reconsider a thing. Knowing him, a second more standing alone in the parking lot and he would've broken. 

 ✧✦✧ 

The time on the clock inside his room read 4:38 a.m. and the house was the type of silent he'd grown to love, but Shawn was still sitting alone on the freezing cold balcony, reading the book she'd given him under the sparse moonlight. He noticed how as the night dragged on, the clouds that didn't dare to touch the city skies an hour ago slowly gathered amongst the stars, shades of purple and grey and black as the hours emptied themselves. He wondered if by morning he would be able to taste the morning fog.

It became increasingly hard to read as more dark clouds gathered in the sky, but Shawn insisted on continuing the story. He would be lying if he said he knew the slightest bit of what was happening. The only thing he continued for was her half-cursive half-print notes in the margin of the pages, and the pencil drawings she made whenever she was visualizing something.

For the sake of him he should've stopped reading pages ago, but something like 30 pages in he found himself unable to stop, addicted to her words that he would get to conceal forever within the pages of the book. From the outside, it was simply a binding of paper and ink between two shiny covers, but to him, it was hours of lost and never found conversations, memories aging backward in his dreams until he could pretend everything would be better tomorrow.

Stupid, he thought absent-mindedly. but he didn't close the book. If you wanted her so badly you should've taken her.

Maybe in better times he would've laughed at that stupidity. Unlike what the late night 90s movies and weekend matinees made you believe, romance wasn't always about sacrificing the world for them, though with time, Shawn could see that option rather appealing. Sometimes it was better to keep yourself safe from another heartbreak, or more importantly, to keep yourself from breaking another's heart. 

So... how do you like it? Camila had scribbled in the margin. He checked the bottom-middle of the page- 256- and smiled as if answering her question. 

Before long, the sun began to rise again, the clouds falling, no, floating, from the sky as a thick fog upon the chilled October grounds. The ice cold winds that had blown themselves away during the past few hours came back in a sudden, numbing gust. But Shawn had already been numbed to the bones hours ago, after all. He wondered if he tried, he could maybe feel something again in those final hours of night. He wondered, if he tried, if he might have not slipped on that broken cobblestone. 

_________ 

my friend once told me i need to stop including so many metaphors and symbolisms into my writing because most of the time they're obscure as heck and no one but me actually understands them but it's my favorite thing to do so

hope everybody has just a lovely weekend! ✨

december 10, 2022

6:06 p.m.