a history in rust // h.s. au

The thing about your first love is that even after it destroys you and you hide it away in the back of your closet, behind your old high school yearbooks and your winter sweaters, you can't quite forget about it. You pull it out every once in a while and turn it over in your hands and let it take you back to another time and place, Kensington Gardens in a thunderstorm, Oxford Circus at Christmas, the hottest spring day the city's ever seen.

And you feel it. Frozen fingers and a sunburned nose and wet hair sticking to your face, and you know that being over it is harder than it seems.