Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
*****
Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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Iris could tell something was amiss.
For starters, she always went to bed with her hair down, her mom's voice echoing in her head as a reminder of the disasters that could befall her if she didn't.
Though Iris was the furthest thing from vain (as evidenced by the lack of will to hop in the shower), her hair had always been one of the aspects of her appearance she made an effort to keep minimally presentable. She didn't want it to break, a curse her mom insisted would follow her around thanks to her genes and to a prolonged lack of proper nutrition, not to mention the damage caused to her scalp if she were to wear it up to bed.
(Plus, Lyra had always liked her long hair. Iris had chopped it all off when they stopped speaking, but had been growing it out for little less than a year in hope the universe would somehow get the hint she was reaching out to her soulmate. Needless to say, it didn't work.)
(Lyra was still buried six feet underground. It wouldn't be the length or the health of Iris's hair that would ever bring her back. Even in death, Lyra Sinclair still had her wrapped around her finger, was still so present in her life it felt as though she was physically present in the room.)
Iris felt pretty pathetic whenever she realized she was pining after the same girl after all those years. In spite of her recent—and unfortunately premature—death, Iris was still there, longing for her, awaiting her return, wishing she could turn back time to fix the unfixable, but it was all she knew how to do. She remembered, she waited, and she ached for Lyra Sinclair. It was no way to live, she knew that, but at least she was alive; Lyra wasn't fortunate enough to be able to say the same.
So, as Iris checked her email inbox with a furrowed brow (she was certain she'd already ignored and swiped away the notification regarding the meeting), there was no way of shaking off that gnawing feeling in the back of her head that something wasn't quite right. It was one of those uncanny situations, where you can't pinpoint exactly what feels strange about your current circumstances, but there was still a certain uneasiness in her stomach.
The notification sat there, taunting her. She opened it, albeit reluctantly, and, sure enough, it had just arrived, she hadn't replied to it (what did you reply to a Zoom link sent to you through someone's iPhone?), and there were no signs of any interactions on any folders of her inbox—not spam, not trash, not even in drafts.
Could she have imagined the whole thing? Had it been nothing but a prophetic dream, warning her about an oddly specific email, or was it just her overactive mind, powered up by anxiety, that had seen it coming?
Unless . . .
She remembered her wish—vividly so. Way too vividly for it to have been a figment of her imagination.
