The Moth

Chapter Fifty-Five: Rooftops// Broken Or Whole, You'll Move On

Chapter Fifty-Five: Rooftops// Broken Or Whole, You'll Move On

She laughed and tossed her hair in the moonlight. "Stop doing that. It's giving you anxiety."

"Stop doing what?"

"All that negativity. You keep your head down too much. Stuff happens 'if this other thing happens,' or that thing 'might' work. Learn to trust the universe a bit more." She jumped up and spun around.

I yelped and reached out to grab her. She laughed and slid to the edge of the rooftop, dangling her legs over the side.

"Come back, you'll fall over the edge."

She giggled, holding the edges of the building and throwing her head back to look at me. "It's 2 a.m, in case you haven't noticed."

"And? That doesn't mean you won't fall, you know."

She nodded slowly, then got up to come over to me, reaching out a hand. "Get up."

"No. It's steep."

She squatted, hands crossed over her knees as she smiled at me. "Aye, I told you. It's 2 a.m. The only ones awake now are the dreamers. You can't die in dreams."

"No, but you can die in real life." I defensively crossed my arms and turned away from her.

"And? Some people die early, but aren't buried 'till their old and gray. You don't have to die to die inside either." She shrugged at me and walked back towards the edge of the roof.

"Oh God, stop doing that. You'll fall."

She laughed. "No I won't. You can't spend your whole life being afraid." She lifted up one foot and spun around. "Learn to live a little, Noel." She turned back to me and smiled, her whole face lighting up as the wind ruffled her hair. She balanced on the edge of the roof and turned back to me.

"Come back! You'll fall!"

"Life was meant to be lived freely. The beauty of it lies in the motion. The movement. There's time to be still when you're dead." She spread out her arms and smiled again, the wind picking up. "So live."

And she jumped off.

"NO!"

I woke up trembling. No no no. No. She didn't fall off the roof that day. She's ... I closed my eyes to the crushing waterfall of emptiness. Damn this.

Getting up, I wiped my eyes and slid out a shoebox from under my bed, dumping out the index cards and notes. I'm leaving tomorrow.

Opening up my dresser drawer, I dumped all the contents into the box. A single kidney bean, another pressed flower, the picture of the rainbow I'd printed out earlier, a leaf shaped like a heart, her camera. Necklace. Lyon's cracked glasses.

I paused and picked up the glasses. I never even knew him. But it felt like I did. Never saw him. But his existence somehow still reached me. The boy I never knew.

After a moment, I dropped them back in the box.

Taking out a piece of paper, I started writing down everything I remembered. Everything that mattered.

I needed to leave tomorrow. But I couldn't keep carrying this with me.

It's my responsibility to tell the story. I'm the only one left to tell it. But I can't hold onto it forever.

Let them know of the boy who saw the world as his oyster, and the girl with flushed colors in her cheeks and photographs bleeding from her fingertips.

The boy who never knew color and the girl who breathed it in.

Let their story live on, on the lips of others. I wrote it all down, jumping from occurrence to occurrence. My story mixing with hers and Lyon's.

Because the broken stories of broken people can only be told through a broken timeline. 

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-Autumn