What if we've never met, but our souls align just right?
A tale of two people finding their way through this world. They don't know it, but the hardest part is finding each other.
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The story should end here.
It certainly appears to end—it certainly appears as if Bee's fears of a mundane existence are realised when she blows out her candles each year in a dorm only fifteen minutes from home: eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and no epic adventure.
She finds that she doesn't mind, though. She finds that sometimes, sitting atop her favourite hill on campus is enough. Curling up during a snowstorm with her favorite book is enough. Running outside at the turn of winter to spring while the air is still delightfully crisp and piercing is enough.
Bee has come to the quiet, quiet realisation that her life can be precious without being dramatic. She doesn't know why this conclusion took so much time to broil before floating to the surface; she doesn't know why it took so many years and too many nights laying awake in the dark, but gradually—gradually she sees the truth.
She becomes a college graduate with tragedy in her heart, a heavy sort that tells her she'll never be someone seeking the great unknown with wolves at her heels and a timekeeper screaming between her ears, but it is also a sort that lifts her high, a sort that fills her with a strange sort of curiosity for being plain, because willingly, she has seen how insignificant she is in the grand scheme of the universe, and she's just fine with it.
Bee takes it upon herself to build the rest of her life with her own hands, even if it petrifies her. Armed with all the bravado she can summon while her stomach rebels in knots, it starts with a trip to the place she was born, to a memory she can barely recall, with naught but a small suitcase in her hand.
It just so happens that the country she returns to is where Matty has relocated.
The sky is bluer here. That was the first thing Matty noticed upon exiting his aircraft two months ago, and there hasn't been a single day since then that he doesn't think it, his eyes constantly drawn to the single, small window in the high-rise office.
Not the plain, baby's breath blue of midday. During the day, the sky is sooty and gray and reminds him of slick, industrial ash coating the dome above. No, the sky is bluer in that time when the sun has already set, in that time referred to as night, yet clearly, residue rays refuse to slink below the horizon. A time of debauchery, Matty almost wants to say, that turn of atmosphere when the night-prowlers come alive but the day-breakers are still holding on.
It is so blue.
Matty doesn't belong here, and yet there is no place he belongs more. What did he work for in those four years as a legacy if not for his father's approval? He wants to say he doesn't care anymore, not like he did as a teenager, but it will always be an urge itching away at the back of his hand. He has no energy for leading this foreign division of his father's company, among people far more qualified, people who eye him begrudgingly at the break table overflowing with sugary menace, but he must continue—one, because he doesn't know what else he would do, two, because this city has blown its allure all over him.
