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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A year passed.
Then another.
The seasons came and went, blurring into another all thanks to New York's microclimate, but time passed. Even for Iris, even when she'd spent a considerable portion of it believing it never would, even when she'd almost fallen victim to the voice in her head insisting she'd forever be stuck in the past.
Albeit torturously slow at first, time passed. It picked up the pace at some point, not constant, but it had been a welcome change; by keeping herself busy, by setting strict deadlines for herself instead of procrastinating and returning to her old doomscrolling ways, Iris gave herself the grace and the space to be kind to herself.
She took breaks when she needed them. She started taking Pilates classes, agreeing to meet up for coffee every morning with a group of friendly girls she'd grown close to. She'd started therapy—for real this time. She'd started picking up the phone, forcing herself to take calls and reply to text messages and emails within a reasonable time frame.
Most importantly, she no longer turned her back on butterflies.
It wasn't to say everything had been easy, or that the journey from the previous two years had been linear or simple. The urge to rewind time to an easier moment, one where she could easily pinpoint what exactly had gone wrong and how she could fix it, was there, an itch buried underneath her skin; sometimes, she barely resisted the compulsion to scratch it.
It was just one mistake, one small mistake she couldn't stop berating herself for, and it would be that easy to go and undo the whole thing after knowing better.
Lyra, still dead, still held enough power over her to make her desperately wish there was a single thing she could have done to prevent it all from ending like it had, but that was the thing about endings—that was all they were. A full stop. No continuation, no redos. Even if you chose to go back to the start of the book and hope for a change, you weren't the author, and the manuscript wasn't your story anymore.
Perhaps it had never been.
There were no magical solutions, no way of pretending nothing had happened. Sometimes, there was just calling your dad when you knew he wouldn't, bridging a gap neither of you had been courageous enough to cross before. Sometimes, there was just calling Coraline and Mike Sinclair to catch up and ask them about their new life in sunny Florida. Sometimes, there was just spring in New York City, the bright sun peeking through the spaces between the skyscrapers and drowning the city in delicate warmth.
Sometimes, all it took was the blossoming of flowers. Sometimes, all it took was remembering to open the window, just in case there was a butterfly trapped inside your apartment.
Sometimes, all it took was the present. Sometimes, that was more than enough.
THE END
ଓ༉‧.⭒ֶָ֢⋆.
it's a wrap, y'all. thank you immensely for sticking along. a proper author's note will follow.
wc: 561 (docs) // 551 (wattpad)
total wc: 39625 (docs) // 39151 (wattpad)
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