Will You Wilt With Me?

[WLW] [ENGLISH]

I am not Caroline. Caroline is dead.

But grief is a selfish, gaping thing.

To everyone else, Caroline is alive, and Celestine is the one in the dirt.

I was fine surrendering to the earth.

Until that 2:00 AM smoke break where everything in the world was bleeding orange-the streetlamp, the bench, the flickering spark of almost-but-never-red between us.

Until a girl with trembling hands, a pack of Marlboro Reds, and greedy, moon-like eyes looked right through the grave I had dug for myself.

She introduced herself as Romance.

"Romance. As in, the death of."

A gaunt, half-dead stranger who starved the feral hunger out of her own eyes just to teach me how to crave the world again.

I should have known right then and there.

I should have known better than to build cathedrals out of cigarette smoke.

I should have known better than to beg a deaf universe for a thirty-second day in December, or trust the moon to stay still when the sun is ruthlessly rising.

She asked me to wilt with her.

So why am I the one left breathing, forced to bloom in a world where Romance is dead?