cerasus (n.)
Latin
A cherry.
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When Max isn't looking, Ari writes about him.
Not in so many words, that'd just be obvious. And Ari was obvious about everything in his life, from his CAPITALISM IS A PRO-DEATH CULT socks to the matching kitchenware and countertops. If he could be overly vague, metaphorical, ostentatious, and metaphysical anywhere, it was in writing.
He wrote about him somewhere in his first novel in a paragraph about anglerfish. Deep sea creatures. Makes light because there's none there for them. Relatively blind. Open-mouthed. Always swimming. Max never asked about it.
He wrote him in somewhere in an anonymous column, too, and that one was more intentional. Somewhere out there, someone cares too much about something you care only just enough about. Find them. They stress you out enough to start living.
He wrote him unintentionally into a conversation two people had in his second novel about something unimportant to the story, but important to the readers. "I like that coat." "It's old, actually." "What's old and liking got to do with each other?" "Old is bored. Who likes being bored?" "It's on you. I'm bored with you. Does you and liking have something to do with each other?" "Ah." And that one was harder to overlook because Max had said something similar to that anyway.
He wrote him on a sticky note when he got so angry he thought the world would explode right then and there in his bedroom window. Teeth. Neck. Blood. Pleh. That was self-explanatory.
He wrote him on a napkin when waiting for their double espresso, almond and oat milk, five dollar lattes, too. 5000 milligrams of caffeine can kill you. Let's drink 4999 and swim to Mars. It's a long trip, what with the stars, what with the oxygen. I wouldn't mind. Only the lattes knew about that one, though.
He wrote him on the margins of his calculus notebook at 9AM without much remorse for both the derivatives and 9AM. Blue fingers, rock salt, Phoebe, and bruising. No one ever figured out what that exactly meant, including Ari. They all just sounded like Max.
He wrote him in his third novel, between the lines of a page-long explanation about a nice hillside and why there was someone dying on it. If there was green and no red, how would anyone know if there were flowers? Blood or flowers, veins or petals; it's only important that at a distance, they look the same. Stop looking so closely at everything or you'll miss it. And maybe he was angry or infatuated then. Your twenties were unpredictable like that.
And he wrote about him now, in drafts of things the world would never see, in one-off lines no one would read, in poetry he always forgot to publish for fear it didn't sound poetic enough. By the saints and in front of God, I tell you the truth: I write you like I love you.
Wholeheartedly, fervently, and without him knowing a thing.
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They met boringly, through a friend.
Max was knee-deep in chromatographs and pretending he knew what chemical engineers did after college when it happened. Ari was neck-deep in F. Scott Fitzgerald pieces and pretending he knew what a vector was when it happened. In a way, they were both set up to fail.
"Ari." Becca Jane, friend of all marine animals and a sleepwalker, beckoned him to her side, presenting him under the amber glow of the house's kitchen. It smelled of poinsettias and apple cider. "This is Max, he's the photographer I told you about."
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And/Of/Or
Cerita Pendek"There's a theory in the world that explains second chances." ----- When a couple goes on a camping trip in a last attempt to fix their broken marriage, they go off trail and end up falling through a seemingly-bottomless hole. Within it, they come t...
