Stardust Scattered in the Silence
Honnah Patnode, 10th grade
They tell you to expect heartbreak.
Olivia wasn't fond of favoring anyone in the cliché way most people expect of cheesy romance novels and Valentine's Day movies. It marred her capability of rational thought. Though she hoped to settle down someday, it was hard to picture herself doing so. She disliked the way such strong and sometimes agonizing yearnings could steal her ability to distinguish reality. Whoever decided that love is like a fire clearly didn't realize that it isn't nearly as easy to smother, Olivia thought, fondness bubbling up inside of her as she stole a glance at him in algebra class.
She found it was impossible to see his radiance, the sunlight trapped beneath his skin, without seeing his personality as well. He was sweet, confident, kind, understanding, and had a depth of personality that stretched down like a great crevasse; she could just tell by the expression he wore when he thought no one was looking--the strange, barely-there nostalgia that pooled into his eyes. Olivia couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to venture closer and observe his thoughts, his beliefs, the ideas and concepts that spun through his head on the nights he couldn't fall asleep. Whatever was branded to the backs of his eyelids, whatever wishes he made when he saw a falling star, those were the things she wanted to know.
Naturally, for a while, she blamed him. "If he weren't so perfect," she told her friends, taking care to include a spark of zealous conviction, "life would be a lot easier." The trouble with that statement was, as a small voice in her head never missed a chance to remind her, that he wasn't perfect in the slightest. He was inherently clumsy, and there was a scar on his right forearm from a biking accident he had been involved in three years before she had met him. His imperfections were a constant reminder of how human, how tangible, he was, and they only made him stronger. If his frailties were his strengths, what on earth was Olivia to do?
They tell you to keep yourself jaded, that you could easily get hurt if you care too much.
"I'd be honored," West told her on the night of their high school's homecoming dance, "if you would call me your boyfriend."
Olivia stared at him, appalled, though not for the reason one might expect. It wasn't the fact that he had asked her--she was not the type of girl who believed she would never be desired or wanted; that idea seemed ludicrous, since it was not her main focus or intent to find someone to date, nor was it her desire to exist solely to please someone else. It was the nature of his request. He asked almost nothing of her, not her number, not for her to be “his,” not anything of the sort. Her mind wandered to the people practically chained to their partners' wishes, subjected to being a "hot babe" accessory to be objectified and shown off, a picture of superiority over others rather than a gesture of affection. Those relationships had always unsettled her because they seemed forced and cold.
West was not cold, quite the opposite, in fact. He seemed to radiate warmth and mystique. His eyes were a rich, dark hickory color with sparks in them that mimicked the hue of sunbeams if the light hit them at just the right angle when he smiled. His hair was like melted gold. His skin was pale like the color of parchment with a faint glow like that of the stars, and the freckles scattered on his eyelids and forearms were etchings of constellations.
Perhaps it was just irony that, after all the trouble Olivia had gone through to keep herself from noticing him, she agreed to play the game she had always been taught love was; perhaps it was fate; perhaps it was part of a plan beyond what she could see. Perhaps it didn't matter.
Her own voice sounded far-off when she accepted; thus, they danced, him clad in dress pants and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her in a floor-length, light coral dress with a neckline that almost grazed her throat. One was casual and assured, one was warded by her own uncertainties, but both were caught in the same tune and dancing to the same notes. Such is the rhythm of love.
They tell you love is one of the most amazing things you'll ever experience.
Olivia drank in the scene around her, the quiet chirps of birds in the tall oak trees, the laughter of children in the playground that was just out of sight, the scent of moss and petrichor from the waning traces of the early morning dew. It was the sort of place you never wanted to forget, with branches hanging low to kiss the soft earth and reaching high to scrape the clouds. West's voice dipped and rose in harmony with the faint gusts of wind rushing around them, telling her in a tone that was bitter sweetly reminiscent about his childhood memories there: games of hide and seek with his brother, long walks on beaten-down paths with silence as his companion, imaginary adventures by himself during which he would climb the trees and listen to the soft breathing of the forest.
"My dog came with me when I was really young," he added.
"Why not when you were older?"
"Well," West's voice lowered, hushed as though he were revealing some sort of great secret, "I decided he was just there for white noise, to make me feel less alone, and that's not really what I wanted. I wanted freedom. A lack of interaction so intense that I could hear my thoughts. Really hear them."
"So you came alone," Olivia said.
"Yes."
"That sounds like an awfully lonely childhood, if you ask me." The words escaped her before she had time to restrain them.
"It was," West nodded, "but there was no one to drown me out, and that was worth the cost of having no one to listen."
Olivia glanced down. "I'm listening now."
Everything went oddly silent. The sunbeams fell through the canopy of leaves and made his eyes shine with life and memory, over a decade of hopes and dreams both discarded and gained. There was little else to glean from thoughts of childhood, but it was enough.
The cool morning breeze caught Olivia's onyx hair, pulling strands from her bun and making her entire hairdo look like a haphazard mess. When she went to fix it, she saw West looking at her like she was the pure picture of elegance. She drew her hands away from herself and toward him. Her fingers connected with his, and their hands interlocked, her olive skin brushing over his bronzed hands. He clung to her very gently, almost as though he were afraid she might be as fragile as a piece of valuable china, breathtakingly beautiful and as intricate as the patterns of waves upon the sea, just on the verge of breaking.
"May I," he began, his voice, for the first time she could recall, sounding hesitant, "kiss you, Olivia?"
She stared at him. His eyes were not pleading but curious, uncertain instead of demanding.
"You may," she replied quietly. They kissed. It was not necessarily perfect, as they may have expected, but it felt real. Neither one’s head turned so their noses hit before their lips, and neither of them was exactly sure of what to do when their lips did connect. So they just sat, bound by something greater than just a kiss. Even when they pulled away, Olivia could still sense his closeness and his affection for her. It was neither physical contact that defined them nor the feelings between them; there was an emotional bond that outshone any amount of physical closeness they were brave enough to instigate.
"I love you," West said, his confidence returning.
"I love you, too," Olivia answered, her lips quirking upward after she let out a shaky breath. Her eyes pooled with the emotions she previously had kept guarded, sometimes even from herself: excitement, anticipation, happiness, and the most delightful feeling of starting something new and unknown. Those feelings gave her a sense of purpose less nondescript than tumbling through space clinging to the skin of a rock in a life that was so very temporary that it was almost painful. And really, isn't that what we're all searching for?
In the same breath, they tell you it's grueling and messy.
"Give me a reason."
Olivia felt her heart wrench in her chest at the words. The emptiness in West’s voice and the shaky tremor of his breath were not signs unknown to her. It was one of those nights, a night where ugly thoughts seemed to come and dan
ce in his mind to the slow, mournful tune of a violin.
"I failed every exam. Every single one."
Olivia heard the sound of glass shattering into a hundred shards. Grades had never been too much of a concern for her; with her two older siblings being dropouts, the bar wasn't set too high by her family's standards. However, West was surrounded by people with full-ride scholarships who had a spot on the honor roll practically before they were born.
"What kind of engineer fails every exam?"
"You can retake them," Olivia reminded. "You're still learning. This is high school. It's okay to make mistakes."
"I just want to drive," West barely seemed to hear her, "and go somewhere. Somewhere far away."
For a moment, there was dead silence, and Olivia could only hear the beating of her heart. "Reason?"
"Winter," she told him. "So you can see your breath in the cold air and let it remind you that you're alive."
Another moment of absolute quiet. Then, "That's a good one."
"Don't be so hard on yourself," she requested meekly. "You always beat down on yourself too much with these things; you'll lose your motivation if you keep at it, and then you'll feel worse, and all the while you'll be putting yourself through a nightmare."
"I've never really been into self-preservation."
It was the truth. Olivia knew West had a habit of believing no harm would come to him. He wouldn't study until the hour before a test, convinced he would pass on sheer luck. He took on impossible odds without a second thought. He climbed trees assured that he would not fall, lit matches without even the slightest notion that he could get burned. It appeared to her that thoughts for himself rarely, if ever, crossed his mind, and consequently, those who would be caught in the crossfire of his actions were forgotten.
"I know," West finally continued, so quietly Olivia almost did not hear, "that everything is temporary, and that's why I don't cling to things the way some people do. My forest will wilt, and so will my life. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Even the stars fall from the sky as death makes them crumble. I was born wrong, Olivia. I was born different. I'm an heir to a monarchy I can't be part of without trampling everything the people around me believe in."
How strange it was, to hear someone who seemed not to care in the slightest about anything most of the time, speak of life and death and stars and how the illusion of permanence is nothing but a thin curtain masking the reality of a world that will one day fall to pieces.
"Everyone's born different. I like to think it's what makes us human. And don't be so pretentious; some temporary things are great," Olivia reminded him, "like pizza. Want to go out and order an extra-pepperoni at the pub on Main Street?"
West actually laughed. "It won't change anything."
"Neither will sitting by yourself, Mr. The-End-Is-Nigh. I'll be there in ten."
"I love you."
Olivia smiled, wiping the remnants of tears from her eyes. "Yeah. I love you, too."
They tell you love conquers all.
"Olivia! Olivia!"
The excitement in West's voice was clear, his expression bursting with good news. He ran to her through the school hallway, nearly passing her by before catching her arm. He was beaming happily. "We did it!"
"Did what?" she laughed as he hugged her more tightly than anyone had in her life, as far as she could remember.
"The colleges I applied to," he explained hurriedly, "accepted me. Well, three of them, at least. I can go study whatever I want. Anything. Everything."
Olivia gasped and hugged him again. "I'm so proud of you. I knew you could do it. Congratulations!"
West smiled at her, color flushing his cheeks. "Thanks," he said, "but like I said, we did it."
"What do you mean?" she chuckled fondly, folding her hands in front of her. "I didn't do anything."
He brushed his thumb over Olivia's cheek. "You believed in me when no one else cared. You're the first person that's told me I don't have to follow in my family's footsteps, the first person that made me feel okay about what I really want to do--even about not knowing what I want to do. You're the reason I even applied, and you've made me good enough to be accepted with all of those lectures for me during study hall," he teased. "You believed in me. That was all I really needed."
"Of course I did. You're worth believing in," Olivia said, glancing toward the ground and thinking to herself that holding such belief could be dangerous and foolish. But if it were, she didn't care; that didn't make it any less true.
They tell you you're meant for each other.
"Do you really think we can do it?" Olivia's thoughts knotted and twisted, winding deeper and deeper into a dark ravine she wasn't sure she dared to venture. Graduation caps and gowns had been one thing--they marked a new beginning, the start of something exciting with diplomas marking the gateway to bright futures. It was pats on the back from a cacophonous group of high school graduates for winning the cutest couple superlative and for surviving the four years of early mornings and all-nighters. This was different; this felt like something ending—the death of an era—and it was as cold as a tomb.
They had reached a fork in the road of sorts; their intertwining paths, once as tightly-wound as barbed wire, were splitting apart in new and uncertain directions. As they sat together in the bed of the old, beaten-down truck, a new universe of possibilities, opportunities, and failures seemed to stretch out before them like a dark, shadowy staircase.
"Stay in love from opposite sides of the country?" she continued, shivering even under the warmth of the hoodie West had offered her; it was about two sizes too big. "Is that even possible?"
"I pride myself in having a knack for doing impossible things," West said with a smile, gazing up at the stars that canopied the sky. Tall buildings pierced the horizon somewhere far away, but if Olivia tilted her head at just the right angle they vanished from her view, and she could pretend, if only for a second, that they were completely alone with no roads or cars or destinies to separate them. "After all, I got you to date me."
"That's not funny, West," Olivia said, though on another occasion she might have laughed. "I know we have to go our own ways, but I can't just sit here and ignore that this is the last time I'm going to see you for who knows how long and that I honestly don't even know where I'm going past college and I really want to end up somewhere close to you but how are we supposed to know--"
"We don't know," West interrupted. "In fact, I like to think that's what makes us human."
"Yeah. You're really funny," Olivia grumbled tersely. Her jaw clenched and her eyes flashed with misdirected anger under the faint light of the rising moon.
"I wasn't trying to be," he said, his tone finally becoming more sincere. "I mean it. We don't know. We can't know." Olivia sighed sadly in unspoken agreement. "But that doesn't mean there's no point in trying to figure it out, because someday, maybe we will know. We can't predict the ending, but we can keep turning the pages, can't we?"
"Yeah," she mused, her voice choked with a sudden wave of emotion that crashed over her in a flurry of ice-cold curiosities regarding where she would be in less than a decade's time. The coldest shards of thought were always reminders that she might not be with West, and though she knew she could live without him, she didn't know if she wanted to, not to mention the fact that picturing him with someone else felt wrong and uncomfortably foreign, and to consider herself in that situation was even more bizarre.
"Besides," he said, turning to her and giving her a peck on the cheek, "you've never been one to put down a good book, so maybe you can have a little faith in our story."
Olivia nodded. "Maybe," she said. "I can try, at the very least. After all, it's one of the most interesting stories I've ever read."
West raised an eyebrow. "One of the most interesting?"
"Oh, don't get so defensive," she snarked. "It's second only to the brilliant Harry Potter series, which will forever be immortalized in greatness."
"Who's to say
I won't?" he challenged with a grin.
"You always say your greatest achievement was catching forty fireflies in one night when you were twelve. Defeating the embodiment of evil may outrank you by a few points. Or a few billion," she shrugged.
"Or maybe Harry just had too much time on his hands as a kid and had to become an overachiever," West chuckled.
"Says the guy who won't stop talking about the time he caught forty fireflies."
"Oh, shut up," he said, grasping her hand.
With a small smile, Olivia pressed up against him and tried to get comfortable in the bed of the old truck. It was almost a comfort to know another person with such familiarity, but when indefinite departure from that person is mere days away, it's as nightmarish as the shadows cast by the low-hanging moon and feels as lonely as a wolf's howl somewhere in the distance.
They tell you fairy tale stories with happy endings.
"Hey, how do you think you did on that history final?"
"Alright. It was better than I thought," Olivia said.
"It was awful for me. Though I did like the bits about queens in the monarchies," her roommate said, sounding very pleased. "What are you looking at?"
"Memories," Olivia sighed, smiling down at one of her favorite photographs.
"Oh, you look like a princess!" Destiny squealed as Olivia turned her scrapbook to the page featuring the night of senior prom. "And your date," Destiny raised her eyebrows, her gaze slowly taking in every ounce of his appearance. It didn't surprise Olivia much; the two of them had made a stunning pair. She had been adorned in heavy golden jewelry and an azure dress that swept just past her knees in a gentle wave with a gossamer white sweater covering her shoulders down to her elbows. She truly looked graceful, elegant in a way she had never really gotten used to, eyes illuminated with excitement, and a bright smile on her lips.
Where she looked graceful, however, West looked positively radiant. The light from the setting sun brought his eyes to life, and even in the still image, they seemed to flicker like candles. His hair gave one the impression of strands of gold intertwining with pure sunlight, and his smile illuminated the whole room. The brightness of his features and expression contrasted drastically with his black suit that reminded Olivia of the accidental notes on a piano.
"Yeah, that's West," Olivia said, smiling faintly and not bothering to hide the reminiscent tone in her voice.
"Aw," Destiny crooned and ran one of her red-nailed fingers over the cutout hearts surrounding the photo. "That's so sweet. And you're still together?"
Olivia's face flushed. "Yes--well--not literally, but we're still dating. We decided to give a long distance relationship the good old college try. Pun intended," she added.
"You're perfect for each other!" Destiny said.
Olivia closed the scrapbook with a solid thud. A puff of dust erupted from the rustling pages, collected over the few months of lying untouched. She was never sure if viewing all the hard copies of such memories would help or hurt her.
"If I were you, I would've just eloped with the dude. Forget college, you have to pursue true love!"
"That is painfully cliché."
"Oh yeah, you and your weird hatred of ideals. Come on, you found the perfect guy! Couldn't you give a fairy tale ending the good old college try? Who's to say magic slippers and flying carpets are so wrong to believe in?"
"Did you just hear yourself?" Olivia laughed, pulling a bathrobe around her bare shoulders. The dorm room she and Destiny shared always managed to be a few degrees too cold, especially on snowy nights like that particular one, which rendered the room freezing no matter how many times they filed complaints about the heater. "Magic slippers. Flying carpets. You're a physicist, Destiny!"
"And you're a music theory major," she said, not missing a beat, "yet you can't dance to the rhythm of love."
Olivia rolled her eyes and leaned against the shabby, uninteresting brown wall and picked at a spot where the paint was peeling. "He's not perfect, for the record," she said, her expression laden with what felt like a lifetime of knowledge and inside jokes. "He's broken his arm every year since sixth grade. And he bites his nails."
"Details, details," Destiny dismissed with a wave of her hand. "He's one beautiful man. I'd say put a ring on it, but that doesn't really follow fairy tale style, does it? When's he going to pop the question, do you think?"
Those inquiries roused an odd array of images in Olivia's mind. A home: a large patio with spotless glass panes serving as walls, luscious leather couches and throw rugs around the room, a stone hearth and a splendorous staircase with shiny marble steps and mahogany railing leading up to a second floor. If she listened to even the faintest of noises in the symphony of her thoughts, she could hear a baby cooing. They were concepts she had not concerned herself with before, a life beyond the reckless, spontaneous dates and nights spent under the stars drinking soda and talking about anything until they both were as close to falling asleep as they dared to get with curfews to shepherd them both back to their houses, a stability she wasn't sure she had found in the slow dances and meaningless fights followed by meaningful apologies, a consistency and sense of peace that she hadn't known since she was a child watching--fancy that--fairy tales.
"I…I don't know," she sputtered indignantly, straightening up her posture, which had gone slack as her mind drifted.
"Ah, but see," Destiny said, "you didn't deny that he's going to. Maybe you believe in true love after all."
They don't tell you to expect the worst.
"Hi, who's this? Mrs. Samson?"
Olivia's heart jumped to her throat and picked up its pace so rapidly that she had to sit down. This voice was unfamiliar. West's contact had shown up on her phone’s screen, but this was not someone she could recall ever meeting. The voice was urgent, cracking every few words. Heavy breaths accompanied the end of each sentence. There was an odd wailing in the background somewhere, morphed by white noise.
"Hello? Hello?"
"Hi, hi, I'm here," Olivia finally forced the words out. "I'm not Mrs. Samson, I'm Olivia. Olivia Lee."
"Oh. Oh, maybe I dialed the wrong number," the voice said nervously. The wailing got louder. "Do you know West Samson?"
"Yes," she couldn't speak louder than a whisper. "Why? What's going on?"
"He listed this number as an emergency contact," the voice explained. The word emergency caused alarm bells to start ringing full-force in Olivia's head. Her blood ran cold when she realized the odd wailing she could hear was the telltale sound of sirens. "I'm Barry, a friend of his. Um, I'm so sorry, this is going to come as quite a shock..."
"What? What happened? What's going on?" Olivia suddenly felt lost, alone, and very frightened, her voice rising in pitch with every syllable. "What's wrong with West?"
"There's been an accident," Barry sighed, his voice shaky. "West is hurt pretty bad. He's getting loaded into the ambulance now. There's a chance he'll be okay, but the two other guys in the car are dead..."
Olivia felt sick to her stomach and tasted something metallic in her mouth. "What happened?" she whispered.
"He was riding with a driver that had a couple too many drinks, I guess," Barry said, and Olivia thought she heard him sniffle at the end. The world seemed to be spinning around her, and she was so dizzy she thought she might faint. "It was a head-on collision, and the car is totaled. I'm so sorry, Olivia. He mentioned you a lot."
"I'm flying over there," Olivia choked out decisively, reaching for her car keys and purse. "Thanks for calling. If you see him, tell him I'm coming. I'll be there as soon as I can. Tell him I love him."
"You can tell him yourself if he wakes up," Barry said morosely. He gave her the name of the hospital West was being taken to, and shortly after, the line went dead.
Olivia sat shaking on the arm of the smelly gray couch for what could have been minutes or hours. With a trembling hand, she scrawled a note to Destiny, packed a small suitcase, and headed for the airport, tears burning he
r eyes all the way. Mascara smeared over her cheeks. Her lips were pursed in an attempt to hold back the scream building up inside, viciously clawing its way up her throat.
There were so many things she still had to tell him. So many things he didn't know. So many silent thoughts she'd catalogued in her mind, ready to be shared whenever the time came. So many little moments they still had to spend together, and so many big moments, too. She had to tell him all of that, and so much more.
If he woke up.
They don't tell you you'll want to carve out the part of you that hurts, but you can't because there would be nothing left.
She called West's phone. No answer. Called again. No answer. Nothing, not even Barry's uncertain, wavering words to make her even more unsteady. As she shouldered the heavy bag, Olivia could only focus on the pounding of her heart and the thuds of her steps on the cracked sidewalk.
The streets were bleak, puddles gathering in black pools against the curbs and wisps of wind murmuring that a storm was approaching. What Olivia thought was a raindrop on her cheek turned out to be a tear, something that became perfectly apparent when several more slid down her cheeks. She didn't bother swiping them away. The lively fire in her eyes was gone, replaced by raindrops. The hospital rose up among streets bustling with activity, little businesses and shops unique to the community with people hurrying to and fro beneath black umbrellas that shone under the streetlights, ominous and cold-looking.
Olivia sucked in a breath despite the tightness in her chest. She found herself wondering what the last thing he had said to her had been. That was supposed to be important. It was supposed to matter. She was supposed to recall those words without hesitation. But whenever she tried to call his voice to her mind, it sounded different than it had before: monotone, distant, and crackling with white noise. His face was faded in her mind's eye as well, like an old black and white photograph, bent and torn at the corners, certainly not the crisp, clean image she expected to see. She could not even try to picture his smile. His laugh was gone, wiped clean from her memories, it seemed, and replaced with a sad, breathy sigh.
She steeled herself as much as she could and entered the automatic glass doors. It was like stepping into another world; the far-from-extraordinary pavement and generic brick walls were replaced by floor tiles and walls, so brilliantly white that they were almost painful to look at. People in masks, white coats, and green gloves walked briskly down the maze of hallways, not stopping to look down a path other than the one they were walking and rarely saying a word aside from the occasional "hello" to another passerby. A few young and rather bored-looking people stood behind a front desk. The most interesting, and, to be frank, human sight in the room was in the corner where a burgundy rug and a few plush gray chairs stood, occupied by men and women and a small child playing with a toy set that appeared to have been built decades ago. Those people weren't like the nurses, doctors, and interns, led by their purposeful determination and business-like dealings with life and death. Those people had bags beneath their eyes and rested their hands on their chins, likely only half-conscious from sleep deprivation, as they stared at nothing in particular. They were waiting. They were drifting.
Olivia tried to push down the sick feeling rising up in her stomach and approached the front desk. A young woman greeted her with a curt smile that Olivia wholly ignored. "I'm here to see West? West Samson?" She wanted the words to come out as confident statements, but instead they surfaced as desperate pleas.
"West, okay, let's see, dear," the young woman said, squinting her hazel eyes as she typed the name onto a keyboard that sat in front of her.
Olivia exhaled slowly and tried her very best to ignore the gold flecks in them.
"Oh, oh, I'm so sorry."
Olivia blinked in shock. "Sorry," she repeated. "Sorry?"
"I'm so sorry, the patient you're here to see...he's gone. He's brain-dead, honey."
Olivia stared, feeling a burning pain erupt from her midsection and spread through her body like a hurricane.
"They haven't pulled the plug yet," the young woman said sympathetically, putting a hand over one of Olivia's. Olivia realized that she was holding the edge of the countertop so tightly that her knuckles were white. "You can go see him. Room one-thirty-one."
Olivia swallowed the lump in her throat and took off in the direction the woman pointed. What she found was not a sight she had been prepared for: West, pale and as fragile as stained glass, on a bed with machines and tubes and monitors attached to him on all sides. A boy she did not recognize as Barry until he spoke stood on one side of the bed, and West's parents stood on the other, clutching each other and saying nothing.
Olivia felt like she was seeing a nightmare: gauze patched wounds where shards of glass and metal must have pierced him. A thin sheet covered him from his feet to his chest, which rose and fell to the rhythm of one of the machines. His eyes were closed, and his skin was bruised in numerous places.
West's mother was the first to take notice of Olivia, who was frozen, standing mortified in the doorway. "Olivia," she gasped.
"Oh," Barry's lips were pressed into a thin line. "Hey."
She hesitantly stepped forward, her mouth twitching as anguish built up inside of her. "West," she whispered, approaching him more cautiously than she ever had before. She remembered putting her guard up around him, building her walls higher than ever before, and keeping herself jaded as she had been taught. But then, as she stared down at his lifeless form, she realized she had been taught wrong. A breakup was tolerable. This was heartbreak. This, the unending and unchangeable separation, standing on a planet without West Samson, hearing him breathe and knowing he was gone in the same forsaken second, kept apart for the duration of her life, sealed off by the wall of a death that came too quickly.
Her fingers stretched out to meet his, splayed across the side of the bed. As she lifted his hand, she could not help but take note of how limp it was. As soon as their hands touched, she remembered the last words he had said to her, the last words she would ever hear from his lips, the last sounds of his melodious voice to grace her ears.
"I really can't wait until I see you again."
They don't tell you how it feels to see a box that holds the promise of death instead of a ring that holds the promise of a future.
For the first time, West and Olivia matched at a formal event. Her long black dress and shawl would have gone perfectly with West's suit, if he could stand beside her. She cast a sideways glance at the coffin near the front of the long room. He can't.
It was odd to see him lying there, resting so peacefully and yet completely devoid of the lively spark she had not realized she was so fond of in his eyes. Maybe, she thought, he's the sort of person that can only be at peace when there's nothing left to do or see or feel. Maybe we all are. The thought would have been jarring, had Olivia not felt so terribly numb.
At first, it had been white-hot pain erupting at random, leaving her shuddering and whimpering, grasping whatever was closest to her for dear life. Flashbacks playing out on the backs of her eyelids, unsteady breathing, shaking, and tears, all accompanied by a wound that ran so deep into her soul that it felt like more of her essence was darkness than light, the source of the agony that seemed to flow through her veins. Gradually, it digressed to a cold numbness that Olivia could not quite define. Her mind grasped for something to hold on to, a feeling or thought or unbridled emotion, but more often than not she was reaching for shadows that she knew she could never catch.
She had lost count of how many people had offered their condolences. None of their words really mattered. They could not undo what had been done. They could not bring West back. Olivia felt a surge of anger, the desire to scream at them all to go away, that they did not really care, that they could never understand what she had lost, but it was gone as quickly as it had come over her. The visions of a lovely place to call home and a future of togetherness were long gone, as unreachable as he was, and just as dead, t
oo. She felt as though she had lost them, though they had never really existed.
West's parents stood over the smooth wooden box. His mother looked lost and confused, occasionally burying her face into her husband's chest. She had West's golden hair, and her lips were the same shape as his. Olivia wondered if mother and son possessed the same crooked smile. She imagined the sight of it would make her nauseous. West's father looked crushed.
In the end, the same question was etched over all of their faces: Where do we go from here? The answer, of course, eluded Olivia. What was she supposed to do? Go on with her life and forget the boy with the hickory eyes and the soft voice that could cut like a razor when it yelled?
To leave the funeral was to leave West. To bury him was to bury his memory. As much as Olivia wanted to shove it all down, it was borderline impossible to let anything go, to let even the smallest of memories be put into the ground, like the scar on his arm and the cuts on his skin that mimicked chips in old, fine china. His mind was trapped in death, but his life was written over his skin like a book. Her gaze fell on him for as long as she could stand until she tore it away, trying in vain to commit every detail to memory. When he was alive, looking at him was like looking at the sun, dangerous and yet so beautifully bright. Now it was like looking at a far-away star, twinkling from so many miles away it was barely there at all. So far away that she could never reach him.
They don't tell you that instead of just your heart breaking, you'll feel every part of you shatter into a thousand fragments that, try as you might, you can't piece back together.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Olivia often visited the forest where West had grown up. Whenever she was home from college, she took a trip to the place that was so familiar to him and so unknown to her. She wondered what secrets were put to rest further in the forest--childhood pacts and stories lost in the wind.
The breathing of the forest, that soft rise and fall of the wind through the trees and the plodding footsteps of woodland creatures somewhere nearby, almost sounded like West's voice. The sun in patches on the tall tree trunks reminded her of the color of his eyes. To imagine that a place and a person could be so intertwined was strange, almost frightening.
Olivia stared at the earthy ground with hollow eyes, trying to fix her gaze on the tall, soft patch of grass where she had once deposited a fresh, crimson-red rose. It had felt more proper, more correct, to imagine he rested here, among the roots of the trees he once scaled and conquered with the bright eyes and ideas only children have. The rose, incidentally, was long gone, wilted and blown away as easily as chaff. No matter how beautiful something is, Olivia thought absently, it still can be torn to shreds and taken far out of reach, too far to imagine.
It felt like something he would think.
She visited the forest in her dreams, as well. He would sit beside her for hours and tell her all the little details she had failed to take note of, the scuff of a particular tree or the way the moss grew in certain clearings. It began to occur to her that perhaps, just as West had become intertwined with that forest, she and West were bound similarly. Perhaps tiny threads of him were wound up inside of her, clinging to the fabric of her life and accompanying her. Perhaps she had not truly lost all of him.
But as the visits and dreams grew less and less frequent, it became clear that he was, in fact, gone, scattered as dust across the canvas of the universe, his voice lost as the wind grew silent and the sun dipped out of sight behind the trees. Perhaps that was for the best.
They tell you to follow your heart, but what do you do when your heart seeks him even after his soul has left you and is scattered throughout the universe as stardust?
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