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“Well, we’re almost at the end, and I want to ask you the same question as when we started. Are you ready?”
She shook her head, and I suppressed my desire to hold her and protect her from her own thoughts, the harmful ones, the fucked-up ones. I kept going despite her silent plea.
“You want to be happy again? With everything that implies. Assimilating the past, learning to leave it behind, smiling when you get up every morning without feeling guilty for doing it when they’re no longer here. Look at me, Leah.”
She did. Her eyes peered into mine while she nodded slowly, and my chest swelled with pride.
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Leah
I looked away. i couldn’t keep staring at him.
A soft quiver overcame me. A quiver with his name, because I knew it too well, so many years, so many moments… I took a deep breath, telling myself, You can control this. You can. I stood up.
Did I want to be happy? Yes, a part of me did.
I looked around. We were on a peak that seemed to be the furthest edge of the world, under a midday sun. The cape’s form looked like the tail of a green dragon on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, with sugarcane and macadamias. I looked at the turquoise water, the shapes of the sparse clouds.
“Leah, watch out!” Axel shouted, but I didn’t have time to react before a gigantic wave soaked me from head to toe. “Are you okay?”
“Are you laughing?” I shouted.
“Shit…yeah.” He laughed harder.
“You’re…you’re…” The words got stuck in my throat while I squeezed out my T-shirt, walking away from the edge of the promontory.
“Incredible? Amazing? The best?” He was following me.
“Shut up,” I said, smiling, and shoved him.
“Hey, don’t touch me. Not all of us feel like getting all wet in the middle of the day.”
I looked at his perfect smile, the one I had recreated so many times, drawing a waning moon, and the sparkle of his eyes, which were dark blue like the deep sea, like a stormy sky.
I shivered, not from the cold, but because of Axel.
Because of what he had always been for me. Because of the memories.
39
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Leah
Platonic friendships are like that; they stay with you forever. The years pass, and while you forget kisses and people stroking your face, you do keep on remembering that smile from that boy who was so special to you. Sometimes I thought that was what I felt, because it was platonic, because it was never requited, was like a question left floating in the air: What would it be like to kiss him? Years back, before I fell asleep, I used to imagine his kisses. In my mind, Axel’s kisses were warm, overwhelming, intense. Like him. Like his every gesture, his soft way of moving, his vivid expression full of unsaid words, his serene face with its clear lines…
I asked myself if the rest of the world saw him this way too, if those girls who turned around to watch when he passed had noticed all the things that made him special. How direct he could be, how hard he was beneath that easygoing appearance, how afraid he was to hold a brush in his hands if no one had told him what to paint…
Why was it so hard to forget a love that was never even real, that never existed?
Maybe because for my heart…it just was.
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