can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars,
I could really use a wish right now;
She cannot remember if things had been simple back then. She cannot remember if the rose-colored illusion she saw her mother in had already been shattered. The last few years felt blurred at the edges, until she couldn’t tell where one thing ended and another began. And so she isn’t sure if that day on the island had already been tainted by her crumbling fantasy of the world, but she doesn’t think it had. She doesn’t think it had, because when she looks back on it, it is one of the few things that can still ignite a warmth at her core. A warmth that spreads through her veins, a warmth that fills her with a melancholy sort of nostalgia, but she doesn’t want to let it go.
He says that he remembers, and she can’t help but to smile back at him. It is a broken image, but one that echoes with the ghost of the vibrant, albeit shy girl she used to be. She laughs when he says that she had been beautiful that night, and she wishes that it didn’t sound so sorrowful when it left her mouth, and she wishes that it didn’t taste like the tears she can’t seem to shed. “There was a lot that was beautiful about that night, that I feel like I paled in comparison to.” Like you, she wants to say, but for some reason the words become stuck in her throat.
But everything around them suddenly seems to shimmer and fade, and in its wake he built a new image. Only it wasn’t so new; it was a memory, just as she had remembered it. Her breath catches in her throat as the ground glitters with snow, and the warm amber glow of the lights reflect off the darkness of her eyes. “It looks just the same,” she whispers, and for a moment she forgets that she is scarred and ruined.
But when his eyes catch hers, when he tells her that she is just as beautiful as she had been back then, she wonders if he can hear the way another crack splits across her heart. “No,” she says with a shake of her head, her white forelock cascading over the vibrant star on her forehead. “Maybe I was beautiful, once. I don’t know. But now…” Her ribs ache with the release of a sigh that shudders forward, and she hardly realizes that she has come to let her shoulder rest against his, or that her lips were idly toying with the wisps of his mane. “They could have killed me, so I suppose I should be grateful that it’s just a few ugly scars.”
I'm praying that this stairway leads somewhere like Heaven's door,
and when you get there don't look down
