catch 22 :: m.clifford

seven

"Do you believe in love? Like, finding 'the one?'" It was the past summer. September was sitting next to Michael at the end of the dock, and in between licks of her strawberry popsicle, she'd asked him a series of questions, this one being the final question that really got him. He bit off the edge of his cone which had held his chocolate ice cream, and hummed in response, a mouthful of food still being chewed.

"I dunno." Michael had shrugged, and September had bonked him over the head with her snorkeling goggles, laughing and rolling her pretty eyes.

"I mean it. This is a serious question, Mike."

"Well," he swallowed the last of his dry waffle cone and cleared his throat, "I don't know if there's officially one person you'll find. What if you miss the opportunity to find that one person, that one person you're apparently going to spend the rest of your life with?"

"But--" September spoke up to try to contradict her best friend.

"Nope." Michael shook his head, chuckling, "What I'm trying to say is that I don't believe in 'the one,' but sure I believe in love about 25%, and I completely and truly believe that if you're 'in love' with someone, it'd be that you're theirs, and they're yours."

"In that case, I'm yours." September had said it so quietly that Michael almost didn't hear her. Only the small gust of wind which blew through the beach town made the sentence clear. Except Michael pretended not to have heard her because he knew that it couldn't be true. September Rivera couldn't love him. How absurd would that be?

"Do you remember that?" Michael had spoken the shortened version of last summer to thin air, thinking that September would be listening to him although he was completely off. Sort of like when he'd made a wrong turn while using his mom's GPS to get to his grandmother's house when he was first learning to drive, and the whole trip took about an hour instead of a half-hour because the entire tracking system had to reset and recalculate the route he tried to take. "Did you mean it, September?" Michael sighed, "Did you really love me, or was that my stupid imagination?" His stupid imagination which also was creating several hundred scenarios in which he'd responded, and where they'd be now, instead of in a hospital.

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dedicated to... marina! i really miss our groupchat :/ and ur feed on ig is amazing and i just miss u and love u :( hi.