Chapter Eight
Rosetta spent the next day preparing for Luka's arrival. She knew she had a whole week to make a place ready for him, but impulse commanded her to act as expeditiously as possible. She was not sure where Luka planned to stay, but just in case he had nowhere to go at first, she made a comfortable bedded area in her spare room. The idea that she could possibly stand for him eking by out on the street, living a woefully inadequate life in the smoggiest, muckiest, most grotesque corners of the city, was the absolute least of her intentions. She was nothing if not nurturing to those she loved, and Luka had undeniably made his way into that admittedly short list of people.
She could not find words to describe the elation she felt at the thought of seeing him in person. Occasionally, she would see a pair of lovebirds strolling by on the cracked sidewalk beside the bustling street with their hands interlocked, laughing and smiling and cherishing the whole world because they were fortunate enough to experience it together. She watched them pass by and, for the first time in her life, smiled in understanding. She now saw the joy in loving, the way that the butterflies urged one to let go and laugh, to let fairy tales take over for a while.
As she bustled back and forth throughout her home, tidying here and there along the way, she debated time and again whether or not she should call Lily. She decided against it. Imagining the surprise on her friend's face when she showed up on campus with Luka in tow would be worth the wait, she reasoned. Rosetta could not help but laugh to herself about how Lily's mouth would hang agape as Luka and Rosetta would tell all the stories of their romantic meetings and philosophical debates. They would tell about how it all had led to a remarkably book-ended story, how Rosetta had recognized him at the heart of the crowd in the airport and he had swept her off her feet as their lips crashed together, united after months of waiting—months that were beginning to feel more like lifetimes.
Rosetta could not help but think the mental image should embarrass her—she had not fantasized so much about kissing a boy since grade school, and she could not ever remember a time she had ever imagined it in such vivid detail. Her imagination left no small aspect of the long awaited kiss unexplored. She found herself thinking of the softness of his lips against hers, how they would match the unassuming nature of his personality in the same way that faded blue jeans seemed to match up with every outfit. She wondered if her own lips were adequate for kissing and bit her bottom lip as she did. She hoped they were. She hoped she was good at kissing in the first place. In all actuality, she had never kissed anyone before, save her mother.
Rosetta paused in the doorway between her dining room and kitchen, pressing to fingers to her lips. She had heard people describe love as explosive and fiery, and she could not stop herself from feeling a bit worried about getting caught in the blast somehow. She supposed it was natural. When one was on the verge of seeing what once felt like nothing but a figment of one's imagination, it was nothing short of impossible to keep from feeling a bit nervous as one hopes that everything would be perfect, that everything would be correct.
All worry aside, it was undeniable that Luka was the only thing on her mind. She was glad he had broken such news on a weekend, and that Rachel had been understanding enough to let her take a day away from the shop. Whenever she saw a plane pass by in the sky, she would smile to herself and wonder if it were the very same steel miracle that would transport him from being nothing but an astral projection to a physical human being.
When she tucked herself into bed that night, she found it difficult to decide where to travel as she peeled her soul from her body and stood up, nothing more than a spirit once again. It was her turn to choose a meeting place, but nowhere felt right. Instead, she opted to wander as a soul around her house for a while and wait for Luka to appear. Perhaps it would ease his mind somewhat to see that there truly was a welcoming place being prepared for him here. She knew that deciding to travel must have been an enormous undertaking, and she wanted to ease as many qualms as she could.
It took her a while to realize that something was wrong. Once she became aware of the fact that she had memorized the patterns of the cracks on the bathroom floor tiles and had named all the discolored patches of wallpaper in the living room, her emotions took a nosedive. She had been waiting for what must have been at least a couple of hours. Concern sank to the pit of her stomach like an anchor dropping into the black depths of the ocean. What's taking him so long?
She had never had to wait long for him before. He was always so eager to see her, to spend time in their little shared fantasy. Being late had never been an issue whatsoever. Not to mention that, to put it bluntly, it was now apparent that he had little to do aside from explore the world via what was essentially soul travel. Rosetta felt uneasiness start to creep under her skin, causing goosebumps to raise and hair to stand on end. Something felt wrong. It was as if the tilt of the earth had been nudged askew, and everything was just slightly pushed out of place. Rosetta's heart pounded in her chest as she tried to appear before her, alleviate it all, and assure her that it was all an accident or misunderstanding. She wanted to be told that the growing sensation of suffocation in her chest was unjustified.
Why did she suddenly feel so empty?
Was she just being dramatic?
Surely nothing could possibly be so bad that it would leave a permanent crevasse in their relationship. Surely everything would be okay.
Why did the world feel so quiet?
The wind had gone silent. The whole world was hushed, as if in focused prayer. Nighttime creatures like crickets and owls seemed too preoccupied with other things to bother breaking the unbearable silence that felt as heavy and gruesome as a corpse.
Rosetta's breathing was rapidly growing heavier. "You forgot it was my turn to pick a spot," she told the space where she imagined Luka would stand if he were there with her. "You're out there somewhere, waiting for me. Of course you are." Even the silver cord joining Rosetta to her physical form seemed to be paling and quivering with anxiety. "I'll come find you."
She closed her eyes and searched her mind for him. She searched for the angular, chiseled outline of his cheekbones, the thick shadows his eyelashes cast in the right lighting, and the soft, shapely nature of his lips. She searched for the creases in his forehead that formed when he was thinking particularly hard about something, the woebegone look his features adopted when he spoke of the past, and the exuberant expression he wore when pairing his future with hers. She searched for the way he had only tried tea on a few rare occasions but always filled it with copious amounts of sugar, the way his voice could mimic the most timid swallow or the boldest songbird, and the way that he looked at her, a look that was unlike one she had been given from any other person. He always looked at her as if it were the very first time he was seeing her properly, as if every piece of information about her that he gleaned from her mannerisms set her in a whole new light and made her that much more beautiful. She searched for all the little reasons why she loved him.
When she opened her eyes, she had not moved. She had not travelled to him as she had every other time she had sought his soul in the astral plane. She was still standing forlornly in a dark corner of her house, looking frantically in every direction, hoping to find an answer written on the wall or hidden somewhere in her own head. Where could he be? Why was she incapable of finding him? Was he sleeping and had merely been too tired to meet her tonight? How was that possible when she was so alive with nervous, excited energy?
A strange mix of anger, confusion, and, most prominently of all, loneliness, roiled within her very core as she allowed herself to be pulled back to her body. Who am I supposed to blame? she thought exasperatedly as her eyelids flew open to stare at the ceiling. Whatever the reason was behind Luka's uncharacteristic failure to show up was far beyond anything she could fathom. A small, self-loathing part of her whispered that perhaps he had just gotten bored of her and had decided that she was not enough for him. She shoved
that voice from her head as quickly as she could. The idea was ludicrous. The love she had felt between them was not one-sided. I could not have been so.
As she stared up at the ceiling, dimly aware that hour after hour of the evening was slipping away like water between fingertips, she felt something strange building up inside, clawing its way up her throat. Maybe it was a scream or a cry, an accusation or an inquiry, but Rosetta did her best to shove it down. All she knew was that it hurt like a dagger pressing threateningly at the soft spot just below her ribs, prepared to slice her open and take her happiness from her alongside the blood it would inevitably draw.
For those first few hours Rosetta did her very best to convince herself that things were not as bad as they seemed. She was painfully reminded of a younger, more innocent version of herself sitting at the side of the bed, knees bent and hands folded in desperate prayer. Even back then she had been prone to attempting to rationalize situations that made her feel like she was drowning in the very air she breathed. Luka just forgot. Or fell asleep. Or maybe he had something he needed to do tonight and just forgot to mention it. Her thoughts were fearful and small, and they were not enough comfort to dispel worry and a sense of abandonment from her mind. At a certain point, her mentality shifted from hopeful to defensive, and rage borne of reopened scars overcame her.
"Why didn't you come back?" she rasped, turning over onto her side and gripping the bedsheets for all she was worth. It distracted her from the growing hurt inside. Suddenly, more than anything, she wanted it all to be a nightmare. She wanted to wake up and find that this whole day, every moment since Luka had told her that he was coming to see her, to be nothing but falsity. As she delivered an unforgiving punch to her pillow in an attempt to alleviate some of the hurt she felt, she realized she was crying. "Come back. Come back!"
She tried to astrally project for the second time that night, stripping away skin and bones and muscles and walking away a freer, lighter being. However, as she rose up from her body, she noted that even her soul felt heavier than usual, and the pain in her chest that was slowly and methodically squeezing the breath from her lungs was not gone. She searched for Luka once again, ravaging every corner of her brain in an attempt to find all the meager scraps of him that were there and piece them all together so she could see him once more. It was like trying to remake him with scraps of cloth—she could only produce a distorted rag-doll imitation in her mind, a perception flawed and tainted with bias. How had such a marred perception been enough to bring them together before?
The answer to that question hit her in the stomach like a brick, and she staggered backward as though she had physically been struck. Because he was looking for me, too. All the warm tears of gratitude and joy she had shed the last time she had seen him had grown cold with fear and pain and now felt like a growing avalanche behind her eyes.
A grief-stricken cry of frustration tore through her throat without her consent as every ounce of her existence stretched out in hopes of finding him. It was like thrusting one's arms into darkness as pitch-black as the pupil of an eye in hopes of finding a light switch or, at the very least, something to hold onto. All at once she felt herself begin to travel, and a wave of relief surged through her. The reprieve was as short as a flash of lightning, however, because that relief quickly gave way to how cold everything suddenly felt. Rosetta had never experienced temperature in the astral plane before, but now, all she could think of was how bitterly cold the dark, shapeless, intangible space around her was. She was still caught between one place and the next, in the midst of travel, and trapped, as far as she could tell. She could see nothing but endless darkness and feel nothing but a cold more intense and more chilling than anything she had ever felt before. It was the sort of frigid temperature Rosetta associated with raw fear, with the most abysmal depths of the ocean, and with death itself. It felt like she was a corpse. Lifeless. Numb. Paralyzed. So, so cold. She might have screamed, but it was hard to tell—the sound was muffled, as if concealed by a thick sheet of ice. As if she were trapped beneath a pond that was now frozen over.
Her silver cord, the beautiful lifeline that it was, yanked her from the horrible void she had been cast into, and she could see once more. Her vision was blurred for a moment, and everything looked fuzzy, as if stained glass had all melded together, leaving no straight edges and defined boundaries. When she blinked away the impediment, she realized she was in Vogogna. Her head whipped around so quickly she suspected she might get whiplash as she searched for Luka's face. Bright midday light was enveloping his town, making everything appear somewhat golden and inherently alive. It would have been beautiful, had Rosetta not turned to admire the shine of the light reflecting in the river and seen something she would not forget for as long as she lived.
Down by the shore of the river she had once admired with Luka at her side, sitting in a crumpled heap, was a familiar plaid shirt. It was faded and stretched in the sleeves from muscles built by months of what little paying manual labor Luka could manage to find. It was half-drenched in water from the river, and full of sand. Its pattern looked wrong, because there was no Luka for it to adorn; it was alone. Its wearer, as far as she could tell, was nowhere in sight. Taken by the river, it appeared. The shirt looked as empty as she felt. It was like she was being choked, as if the coarse rope of loss had enacted a steely grip around her neck. Every breath she managed to take in quickly rushed out of her lungs—the crushing weight of reality forced each inhalation from her. She could not think straight. Her head was a hurricane, and her heart was taking all the damage.
A glimpse was all it took for her to feel every single cell in her body freeze in absolute horror, and the shock of it all sent her reeling back. She was not even aware that she had been pulled back into her body until she was curled up with her knees pressed against her chest, trying to remember how to breathe.
She tried to convince herself, for a few moments, that it meant nothing. But it was always the small things that sent one collapsing into insurmountable grief, when one really thought about it. She felt the same sort of mind-numbing emptiness that came from setting out two cups of tea when only one was needed anymore, from yelling something to the other room only to remember that no one was there to hear it, or from looking at an old photograph and feeling compelled to wish one could believe in ghosts just to feel the presence of someone dear for one last time.
She wanted to believe that it was just some random shirt that happened to look like one of his, but she knew the look of it too well. And trying to label it as a stranger's property was like trying to misname the Big Dipper constellation on purpose. She knew it was wrong.
She wanted to believe it was all just a misunderstanding, that Luka had left his shirt by the side of the river for some bizarre reason, and that they could laugh about it together later. Tragically, the memory of the bone-chilling, blood-curdling, silent darkness that had taken his place in the world refuted that notion entirely. There was only one explanation for such a vacant, frozen space in reality: it was a mere placeholder for where Luka's life was meant to be, and that precious life was no longer there to fill the space with warmth and sound and lovely thoughts.
Stifled sobs shook her frame like earthquakes stemming from a volcanic eruption. Everything within her was on fire, but every inch of her skin was unbearably cold. Her insides yearned to be free of the love she felt for her beautiful, broken daydream. Her outer shell, thin as it was, yearned for the touch of his calloused hands. Her mind yearned to be unburdened with the knowledge that such a touch was not coming, would never be coming.
How was she supposed to come to terms with this?
As the first threads of daylight began to filter through the blinds on her window, she half-leapt out of bed and slammed them shut. Then she retreated back under the covers, feeling exhausted and utterly defeated and sad. It was finally beginning to sink in. The fragmented pieces of worry she had stumbled upon throughout the night were finally falling into place, and
she hated the picture they made. It was a picture of a watery grave, no funeral, no family to miss him. Only her. It occurred to her that she, an insignificant girl from Albany, cared more for this man who was thousands of miles away, might care more than his entire city that he was gone.
Time stopped as those words ran through her head again.
He is gone.
It did not feel real. It had to be a nightmare, the most terrible nightmare she had ever experienced. How could this possibly have happened? How could Luka have vanished so suddenly, without even an inkling of explanation? Her head spun with a million questions, none of which had answers. She felt detached, as if she were watching life pass over her head from high up above and could not bring herself to join the waking world. Rosetta squeezed her eyes shut, and a few tears slipped out. Had it been physical exhaustion that had caused him to collapse at the edge of the river he was so fond of, the river that had lapped at his feet when he was a child and seemed no more dangerous than a family pet? Or had it been exhaustion of a different sort? Had he simply given up? On life? On her? On the future?
A thought whizzed between her ears—a thought so repulsive to her that she sat upright. Was any of this real?
She hated herself for wondering it. She had never harbored such doubt before. But now things were very different. Something inside her snapped. Perhaps Lily had been right all along: what Rosetta had called astral projections were simply vivid dreams, her brain's attempt to bring a spark of carefree adventure to a life infested with responsibility. Perhaps Luka was no more tangible than an imaginary friend and disappeared once she had learned that she was capable of love and trust, hope and healing. Or perhaps she wanted it to be a dream so she could shake it from her head as easily as any other rose-hued, intoxicating fantasy. She was excellent at leaving impossibilities in the past, but she was rapidly learning that she had no such talent for abandoning things that once felt impossible and then proved otherwise. There had been a day—it felt like lifetimes ago now—when she would have laughed in the face of anyone who told her she would fall in love in a place that was not technically reality, and with someone she could not even touch, but would come to love every part of, both the light and the dark, the special and the ordinary, the precious parts and the broken bits alike. Where had that day gone? How much must she have changed?
What if that's the reality behind the illusion?
If Luka had been nothing but a character her mind had conjured up to help her believe in the sorts of dreams that could be realized once again, surely it would make sense for him to disappear the moment everything fell into place and she was stolidly confident in matters of both the head and heart. Surely it would make sense for him to vanish with no trace, save an empty scrap of clothing that once might have served as the stitches which held him together, animating him, making him like a marionette for her to dance with.
She was not sure which would be crueler: to write everything off as nothing but a dream, or to cling to the slim chance that it was all as real as she had believed it to be when she was standing with him. As waves of grief, sorrow, and confusion battered her body, it occurred to her that the infinity she had felt with him was not interconnected, as she had once thought it to be. Slowly, it dawned on her that some infinities, lines that would span the entire length of the universe, would never touch, just because they had one debilitating flaw—they were parallel lines. They could be so close—mere inches apart, in fact—but they would never, ever touch, because their paths ran beside one another and were doomed never to intersect. That's what we are, or were. Parallel. We could never have touched. Whether he was real or not, no force in the universe is strong enough to push parallel infinities together.
Rosetta wanted to vomit, and she suddenly wished she had paid less attention in geometry class.
Moving with more caution than she ever had before, fearful that the slightest wrong move could send all her fragmented, crystalline pieces of skin and bone and soul scattering across the floor like sand from a broken hourglass, Rosetta dragged herself to her feet. She trudged robotically from her room into the hallway, nearly tripping on a rug as she went. She could not bring herself to watch her step or look at the ground beneath her, because it made her sick to think that these halls would never shake at the majestic sound of Luka's voice and the gentle strums of his harp. She retrieved a permanent marker from her backpack and proceeded to the living room. She took a step. Then a breath. Then another step. It was the only routine she could bring herself to focus on, so she stepped and breathed her way to the couch and collapsed onto it like the survivor of a shipwreck would collapse on the shore. The sound of the marker's cap when she tore it from the marker and cast it onto the floor echoed in her head for an entire minute. The sound of the marker's tip as it pressed just a little too hard into her flesh and drew swirling patterns onto her arms was like ghostly, haunted whispers. It pierced the silence like a rock shattering a window. The tiny sounds of those small strokes of one small pen were so loud to Rosetta that she thought she might go deaf if she kept drawing. But she kept drawing.
She spent hours adorning her skin, and when she was finished, she set the utensil aside, still without a cap. That was how she wanted it—no inexplicable forgetfulness caused her to leave it in the open air. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was her utmost desire for marker to dry up, for it never to draw another line again, for it to be as shriveled and dead as the person who inspired the designs it had created. She looked down and admired her handiwork. Floral patterns covered her arms, all the way from her wrists to her shoulders. Black outlines sketched out petals, stems, thorns, and the blood those thorns drew, wrapping around both of her arms like thick, green vines, like wide, scarlet arteries. On her inner forearms were the most crucial aspects of the beautiful impermanence that stemmed from a marker that claimed it could withstand a forever: on the left she had written the word "Fiore" in big, bold, cursive lettering, and on the right, she had drawn an infinity sign with two parallel lines skimming its top and bottom. The lines extended from the tips of her fingers to the peak of her shoulder. She would have drawn them into the air if she had been able, but the marks would not stay. It served as more proof that it was impossible to make emptiness look pretty. She was not sure what drove her to draw such lovely things. Perhaps it was her own memorial service to the man who would not have one, regardless of whether he was real. Or perhaps it was a symbolic gesture to express that her belief in his permanence would wash off with time. Or perhaps it was just grief. Horrible, painful, seemingly endless grief. The kind that made people do strange things and think terrible, destructive thoughts.
For a brief moment, Rosetta felt like she was in control. It was a fraction of a second wherein the clouds seemed to part and make way for some semblance of sunlight. She knew it would last no longer than the scent of smoky wax lasted after a candle was extinguished, but she sighed in relief nonetheless. Her head felt clear. Her eyes stopped burning, if only for a second. Her throat loosened. She wondered if this was how feeling normal again would be. She had somehow already forgotten exactly what feeling normal meant. Pain was good at causing one to forget such things.
She rose to her feet once again, a bit quicker than when she had yanked herself from the warm comfort (if she could call anything comfortable at a time like the present) of her bedsheets. Numbly, robotically, she trudged her way toward the bathroom. Her gaze flickered like weak candlelight between the doodles on her arms and the ceiling. She was not really looking at the ceiling, though. She was searching for heaven, searching for him. She wished the sky would burst open, spilling light and healing and an end to desperation into the most depraved corners of the earth, and she wished the heavens would swallow her up, too. No such thing happened, no matter how hard she wished. When she made it to the bathroom, once again feeling so drained that she might collapse at any moment, she quietly closed the door behind her so as not to disturb the shadows on the walls. She turned on both the light and th
e fan in one sweeping motion. The noise from the fan nearly drowned out the noise in her own head. It had been a bit broken since she had moved in, and much louder than it was meant to be, to be sure. She liked it that way.
She still felt numb and chilled to the bone. She was hoping a hot shower would fix that. She shed the sleepwear that had been hugging her slender frame and turned on the water. She did not bother to wait for the water to heat up before stepping under the man-made rain. It was not that cold, anyway, compared to the blizzard raging just below the surface of her scalp. The tiny droplets of water hit her skin; they felt like hail at first, hitting her hard and with painful precision, but eventually she grew accustomed to the pinprick agony of every little drop. She wondered why everything hurt so much now. She guessed it was because when all one felt on the inside was pain, sensory input from the outside followed suit.
Rosetta's eyes, which were dull and dim, latched onto the bright bottles of nail polish that had somehow ended up next to the shampoo, courtesy of her careless, cluttered tendencies with beauty products at home. Scarlet and ocean blue—that was what the labels said. The colors were so bright they hurt her eyes.
When the water warmed up, slowly starting to send tendrils of steam climbing into the air and fogging up the bathroom mirror, it felt scalding hot on her spine and shoulder blades. She was surprised that burns and scars did not follow the paths the rivulets of liquid drew upon her. The designs she had so elegantly crafted smudged a bit, but they did not fade or go away. Beautiful impermanence—that was what they showed. Marred, weathered with wear-and-tear, and a bit damaged, but still beautiful, and they would fade slowly, like a seashore succumbing to the tide. Like lungs clinging to oxygen before the water inevitably snatched up their final breath. They would be forced to fade slowly, like Luka had, and yet, she knew she would be just as surprised to wake up one morning and realize they were gone for good.
It was in that moment, as she shivered at her core from frozen grief inside and burned at the surface under the steady stream of scalding water, that everything came crashing down. She could only compare it to being crushed under a falling building and somehow remaining alive to feel all of the weight shatter every part of her body, crush every bone, and fill her mouth with the taste of debris, metal, and destruction. She collapsed onto her knees, and stinging pain shot up as soon as they hit the snow-white floor of the shower. Her hands flew outward in an attempt to grasp something, anything, just so she could steady herself, but she was ultimately only successful in knocking the impossibly bright bottles of nail polish onto the floor. Their glassy containers shattered, and their contents spilled out into the river of water that was headed for the drain. Scarlet and ocean blue, intertwining and mixing and becoming more diluted by the second, and then washing down the drain. Rosetta's entire body convulsed with the force of a single sob that sounded like mayhem and misery when it worked its way out of her throat.
He's gone. He's gone. He's gone. He's gone.
The thoughts tolled through her mind like church bells, and they sounded as lonely as the tones they emitted in honor of a funeral procession. All at once it did not matter whether Luka was real or not, because everything she had felt during the time she had known him had been just as real to her as any other memory. All the initial confusion, the slow, dawning realization that she was falling in love with him like ink bleeding into a tissue, the fluttery thoughts of kisses and hugs and nights spent under the stars with hands and hearts interlocked, the pain—all of that was real. Dreams were not content just to let one observe them from the outside, Rosetta realized. They were only happy when the dreamer was sucked in, immersed, and able to be destroyed if the façade dissolved. And she, in a woeful, bitter twist, had fallen head over heels, not just for her dream, but for the act of dreaming itself, and now the dream that had shown her the way to that sort of exhilaration was dead.
The worst part of it was that every ache inside her was beginning to seem more like a bruise than pierced, bleeding flesh, and oh, what a tragedy that was. When a person bled and everyone could see the wound, when someone cheated or did something unforgivable, the world cried with the victim and moved to bandage the wound with all the speed of a caring mother, tears and blood all mopped up with the same cloth, which was made of sympathetic words and compassion. However, the unlucky souls with their cheeks reddened by the back of fate's hand were bruised. Their wounds pooled beneath the surface of their skin, painful and sore, but passers-by did not look on with the same sympathy they granted to open wounds. "It's just a bruise," they would quip. "It will heal." And yes, it would, but it would hurt first. It would hurt indescribably, because bruises to the heart were nothing but the quiet, gaping absence of closure. 'Nevers’ and 'almosts’ that battered one's body again and again until it was more bruised than pure. Tainted, it would seem, by an unfortunate and unforgiving reality, and no prettier to look at for it.
There was Rosetta, bruised and broken, holding herself together with the few threads she had left. Perhaps the bruises she could feel growing and consuming her insides would heal with time, falling in step with the decrescendo of the designs on her arms, but first she would have to come to terms with the fact that some dreams and stories did not have happy endings. Some, in fact, did not even have good endings. Far too often, when reality mingled with fantasy, just enough things got switched, remixed—or perhaps tainted was the right word—that the dream simply could not survive with poisoned blood. Sometimes it could; but other times, it never would, and it was inevitable for it all to fade away. There would be no closure, no proper goodbye, no pristine message drenched in clarity. Each person would have to decide whether that was a good reason to give up dreaming, but it would not change the fact that some stories did not have good endings.
Some stories just stopped.