breathing in stardust

everything and nothing

i fell in love with a girl who smelled like rain

 and  i always wondered if she was sad,

or if it was just her hair.

her hair was long, and she said it was a simple brown, 

but i saw a deep chestnut that gleamed red in the sun.

her hair was always bundled up when we grew up,

pigtails, ponytails, braids.

and she only cut it when i did.

i had ugly bangs and a horrible tendency to go days without brushing it,

but she would brush it for me.

 she had big, brown eyes. she would always curse the genes that had been given to her,

but i am sure i looked into her eyes more than she ever could have.

they were the color of the way i like my coffee on sunday mornings,

and the way ancient oaks soak up rain in late spring.

 her birthday was in late spring. well, so is mine, but i always said it was her day.

and she always said it was mine.

it was a blessing and a curse that we shared a birthday.

she was ecstatic, she bounced off the walls and put birthday hats on cats,

let the cake burn and put three layers too thick icing, but she still wrote our names sloppily in blue.

i smiled because she did. i laughed because she did. 

 looking back on it, i did a lot of things because she did.

 i remember staying up late at night because

she did.

 there were valleys underneath my eyes, static in my mind.

she laughed and loved like she had climbed the tallest mountain,

like she had conquered the sun.

and i remember thinking,

she is brighter than the sun,

 and oh how she burned me, through my flesh and bones.

because, in a sense,

this is how it was supposed to be.

 but that isn't the point of this.

the point, the reality of this, is that she will never love me.

not how i love her.

she is a lovely story, leaving stardust in her tracks.

i suppose i could best be described as the dirt that is kicked up in her tracks.

 but it's okay.

i'm a shadow, i am a secondary character.

i am a creaky stair on her way up in life.

it's okay.

 because i know that she's here

to be something bigger than me or you, or anyone else.

and i suppose i'm just here to breathe in her stardust the same way i breathe in cigarette smoke.

 and i don't mind in the least.