(This is like Parvati going back to day twenty eight - twenty nine. You'll see what happens in those days soon. I hope you guys don't get confused, homies.)
PARVATI'S POV
I had never experienced the joys and lows of love before this. I had always read about them. About how it felt to kiss the one you love. About how you notice every little impossible detail in their face, like their moles and incoherent freckles that you are impulsed to kiss whenever you see them. I had read about them. That was it. And somehow, reading it, reading about how a fake couple fell in love with a simple dramatic middle and almost perfect ending - I was content. I didn't need love. I didn't need companionship. I didn't need the joyous moment after you just made love or the wondrous feeling of having his arm perched around your waist when the sun woke you up the morning after. I didn't need it. So why did I feel like drowning? Why did I feel like a grain of sand on the beach in the Bahamas, the tide especially high that day? I didn't need love. I had gone eighteen years without the incompetent feeling, so why, why in god's name did I feel my heart twist and my stomach plummet when I saw his glistening body raveled into hers?
Because in real life, where an author isn't in the background discretely typing out the words of their latest bestseller, everything is well - real. I'm not a puppet. I don't have an author who can backspace and rearrange my feelings to their approval. It is all real. I fell in love. Real love, the kind Nicholas Sparks writes about. The kind where you memorize their scent and know how many moles decorate their face. And now that I know what love feels like, how can I ever love again after what he did? Unfortunately, not every one can have a best selling perfect ending where the guy sweeps you off your feet and pronounces his undying love for you.
Even if you wanted him too.
"Come with me, on tour, come with me and just be there with me, Parvati. I want you. More than thirty days."
Those words would forever be engraved in my mind. Like when your parents get you a specialized necklace with I love you engraved into the back. You never forget it. In the darkness, where my white walls mocked me in fours, I still replayed those words in my head. His raspy voice, raspy from the endless nights where singing was all he ever did, I go back to that moment and memorize the way his eyebrows clenched unevenly, desperate - his eyes riddling desperation. But even worse, I go back into the past and wonder why I wasn't outgoing like the main characters in every book I've ever read. Why didn't I jump at the chance of love? Why didn't I give up my whole future, the future I had established at six years old, for him? He was worth it, right? How do those girls do it - just give up everything in the name of love?
I couldn't do it. And he couldn't stand it.
