She ran out into the intensifying drizzle and spun around with arms outstretched.
“What are you doing?” he cried from the roofed porch. He grabbed and umbrella and pushed it open, coming after her.
She didn’t answer but stopped spinning, face upturned and eyes closed with a smile of pure bliss. “Isn’t being in the rain fine? It makes you feel like you’re being pelted with quick, wet kisses all over. Momentary, chaste kisses.”
“How would you know what that feels like?” he snorted. “You’ve never even been kissed. It feels nothing like standing in the middle of a downpour.”
She turned to look at him with a glint in her eyes. “Exactly. And for as long as it isn’t tainted with all the attachments and strings of human culture, I will relish in the purity my imagination and nature can lend it.”
“For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.” - Simon Van Booy
With the little flicks off the ends of the letters.
With the way certain curves had varying gradients of thickness.
With the geometrical symmetry of each shape.
With how imperfect it all seemed.
Even if this was what the rest of the world called standard, formal and boring; even if they saw nothing special in it. To them it may have been common, low, crudely basal even but to her as she stared at each slope, each slant, each unfaltering line of black against white, she saw that it was not as perfect as it was assumed or pretended to be, that it had emotion. And that because those qualities were overlooked, it had been overlooked or even frowned upon altogether. And she remembered having done so once, thinking it was like something or rather someone Wilde had called “pitiless in perfection”, but now realizing that she had been wrong…
She had fallen in love with a typeface.
I would like to believe that some day I will be able to live a life as pretty as the pictures I see. But I’ve come to realize that day is every day. And that real life, real fabric, real food and real people hold just as much beauty as the ones on the screen. But instead of making me feel content, it makes me feel sad. Because here are our lives, as spectacular as we would want it to be, but we cannot, will not believe it.
I want to fall head over heels in love…but only if you want to, too.
But I want to make you smile.
I don’t even know your name.
It was like he had his hands tied behind his back, he could do nothing but rasp,
“Please don’t…please don’t go.”
She looked at him solemnly, and she looked over into bone-chilling gaze of the monster-man on the other side. “Come,” he said, with a voice as smooth and thick, as trapping and consuming as honey.
The choice was hers. The unearthly voices of her internal consciences chanted in their hollow voices,
“Oh, were are we, where shall we go?”
In front of the lift. In the lift. Alone in the lobby. At the library. On the front steps.
Everywhere.
They should have said something, but they didn’t.
They sat next to each other at the train station. Well, not exactly next to each other. He sat on one side of the stone bench, she put her bag down just around the corner. She did not look at him, but turned her face to his side just a little. He glanced over his shoulder once in a while. They were strangers, perfect strangers.
She had just missed a train, he was still waiting, what for she did not know. She sat there with her earphones plugged in and her eyes on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Perhaps she should have taken them off. Perhaps it would have been more polite, and enhanced the meekly calling opportunity. But she didn’t. She stayed though, and missed the next train. So did he, although again, for what he waited she did not know. They just sat, he in silence, she to the steady throb of her music.
Eventually she sighed, and as the next train passed gazed contemplatively at it. She decided it was not too full for her and that her mother would be waiting so she got up to leave. As she did he turned towards her - one last look, perhaps one last chance.
But she turned and walked away.
And as she passed through the train, she looked out its window ans saw him sitting there still and felt just the smallest, tiniest tinge of regret.
She jolted awake. The bud of anxiousness blossomed with the speed of light within her. Her panicky fingers flew instantaneously to her forearms, scrabbling and the skin as if it was on fire. Eyes no longer squinting in bleary disorder, she stared hard at the pale inside of her arms. Against the indigo hue of daybreak, stubby brown markings could barely be made out. She let them fall into her lap. This assurance that her limbs were flameless did nothing to calm her. It had been a year. A long year. Much had happened since the first mark had been inflicted, much to make her forget. But despite not having such urges any longer, forget was something she would not be able to as long as her arms were attached to her. Despite the fact that it was rarely on her mind, were she to merely glance downwards she’d remember it all. She could not have helped it. And despite the fact that it was not exactly a nagging issue, to her it felt unfinished and unresolved. Had she overcome it? Had she overcome herself? It appeared so. But should someone ask how she’d done it she would have lied. It was better, she supposed, than saying she was not sure because she couldn’t remember exactly what she had done. And that was only if anything had actually been done. For the life of her, she was sure nothing substantial had convinced her not to cut. Not even, through endless internal struggles and strife, herself. The resolution, she felt was on the middle of a bump on the road, hanging off a cliff. True, she was not methodically blueprinting her own passing anymore. But that did not make her feel any safer. If something were to threaten her at that very point, she wasn’t too sure she could be safe from herself. She pulled her knees up to her chest and pressed her arms against them so she could not see the gross disfigurements they carried. She was scared to face them and all their uncertainty. She was scared to assume that they might not be the last. But perhaps in all honesty, she was terrified of the possible truth that she was afraid to let it go.
