So, you’ve fallen in love with a girl composed of stardust? This was your first mistake.
When your friends ask you about her, you describe how her hair smells like sunshine, how her eyes are as clear as the Dead Sea, how the scar beneath her bottom lip is shaped precisely like the crescent moon. You neglect to mention the size of her chest, her hips—the important bits that are supposed to matter to boys with their heads above sea-level and their heels planted firmly on the ground.
But you have always been able to hold your breath longer.
So, you think you’re happy sharing a second-hand mattress with this stardust girl? I regret to inform you that you are wrong.
One day you’ll neglect to wash the sheets. One day the milk in the fridge will go sour without being touched. One day you will not have enough to pay for rent or food or your medication. One day she will stop smiling when you come home and kiss her in honour of every hour you’ve spent apart.
One day she will remember that she could have fallen in love with the boy down the street and could have had more than a drafty window and a wobbly coffee table.
So, she says that she loves you back; that she’ll never leave you? I wish I could tell you that she’s lying; that stardust girls don’t make boys like you her world, but that’d just be cruel.
She will love you with every ounce of feeling she can squeeze out from between her bones. She will lie for you, live for you, bleed red for you until she’s a pale replica of the star hurtling towards the atmosphere. And she will burn out before she gets there—explode into a measly pile of dust devoid of any of the light she had pressed between her lungs.
She will crash into the ground at a thousand miles an hour just to make you smile.
So, you’re thinking about leaving her? Good choice.
You will leave her with a chest-full of heartache and enough money to survive the next month and she will cry. She will lie on your bare mattress in nothing but your t-shirt and wonder which part of herself to hate until she realizes that you are the evil here. And that’s okay.
Remember this: one day she will thank you for being the boy her mother never wanted for her. One day she will thank you for not planting your roots next to hers, for not tattooing her name in a place where strangers might see.
One day she will realize that girls composed of stardust deserve better than boys who taste like asphalt.
