9:15 am. Early February. Her soul is humming with heat.
She touches up her lipstick, adding a little more colour. She gathers her hair into a half-up style, but releases it again, finding it not quite perfect. Toners, blushes, eyeliners. Her fourteen-year-old self would be frightened and delighted in the same breath.
The woman in the mirror does not resemble the girl in her mind in the slightest way. The image she has of herself is still a child. An awkward, willowy thing in her bright, sparkly tops, oil-slicked hair, and disproportionate incisors. The not-so-pretty kid. Not crushed on, not confessed to, never quite noticeable. Too clever, too irritable, too difficult to love.
But the woman in the mirror is someone else. There is a confidence about her that she wears and sheds like her dresses. It is perhaps one of the many paradoxes of being twenty-one; sometimes she feels like a child inside the shell of a woman. And during those times, all of it returns. The insecurities, jealousies, and miseries that she spent years calming down. They’re loud now. Screaming, screeching, tearing at each other’s throats, and pulling out their hairs. Her mind is rarely silent.
But they don’t know that, so it’s okay.
She presses back her eyelashes with the pad of her finger. At twenty-one, she’s noticeable.
The eyes are the windows to the soul. Hence the first art of seduction is to command the gaze. To make them look. To make him look.
I’m doing this for me, she repeats to herself.
I’m doing this for me.
So that they would see me.
So that he would see me.
—
“Fickle, you are,” she said laughing.
“What is that?” he asked, placing a frangipani behind her ear.
“Someone who changes frequently. Especially as regards one’s loyalties or affections.”
He brushed her lower lip with his thumb and kissed her mouth. Once. Twice. Thrice. Four times, twin smiles. Wind and fingers caught in hair. There was a warmth between their bodies that wasn’t just from the beer.
“Is this real?” she breathed out.
His eyes glinted as he clasped his arms tighter around her back.
“Feels real to me, what do you mean?”
A pause.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I just dreamed you up.”
—
He is warm as the sun and he tastes like the ocean breeze, with a face she could paint for years and a mind she wishes to build a cabin in. She loves his saccharine smile and his impish eyes, whose colour she can never quite pinpoint. Are they blue like the night sea? A deep olive green? Grey like thunderclouds? Or a sweet shade of brown?
She doesn’t know. He has pulled her body into his and stripped her of her heart and skin. But she doesn’t know the colour of his eyes.
He used to grin at her every time they crossed paths on their way to classes. But there’s a shift in his smile now. What once showcased a full row of teeth has dwindled to mere lips pulled taut, failing to reach his eyes. Perhaps, it’s all in her head. Perhaps reading too much between the lines has made her mad.
Perhaps she thinks too much.
But she thinks for him. She reasons out his lack of effort. She has conversations in her head wherein she’s both herself and him. He is nowhere. Except, she sees him in an Instagram story of a faceless person. He’s laughing as he leads a girl towards the atrium.
And she’s fourteen again. In a dimly lit room that no one bothers to knock on, she cries silently, angrily; picking apart the perfectly pretty girl. Dissecting her limb by limb, only to compare the pretty pieces to her own broken parts.
But she’s radiant. She’s smart. She probably quickens his breath with just a glance.
He has time. He has all the goddamn time in the world.
Just not enough for her.
—
Was it all in my head? Will you tell me if it was all in my head? Was it all in my head? Will you tell me if it was all in my head? Was it all in my head? Will you tell me if it was all in my head? Was it all in my head? Will you tell me—
—
Friends with benefits. Friends with benefits.
But are we even friends?
Friends enjoy conversations over meals. Friends laugh until their sides ache. Friends share the unholiest secrets. Friends find comfort in silence. Friends hold each other close when the world threatens to cave in. Friends don’t hurt.
We aren’t friends.
We’re just strangers who share pieces of heaven in secrecy.
Strangers who trace the lines of each other’s palms and wrists. Strangers who find some kind of rest in keeping their heads close against the other’s ribs, in feeling them breathe, in feeling them alive, in feeling the realness of the steady, living rhythm. Strangers who play make-believe on a Thursday afternoon.
Not a friend. Not a lover. Just a stranger in whose idea of love, I shattered.
Perhaps it would’ve been better if he was in love with another. Or if he was a terrible man. She could’ve easily tolerated his disinterest, but his indifference makes her want to die.
—
She quickly touches up her lipstick and knocks on the door.
“Come in,” he calls out.
How many rosy-eyed girls have internally squealed at that?
—
She crushes the dried frangipani she had pressed in her journal months ago.
“Fickle, you are,” she muttered under her breath, “In every sense of the word.”