A revised story I wrote back in 2010!
Today
“And I know I may be too late, and that the train may have already left the station, that the clocks already chimed midnight, that…” He wasn’t quite sure where all of these cliche lines were coming from, and to be honest, he was surprised he even knew that many. Why was he even talking so much?
Maybe he was just caught in one of those awkward rambling cycles.
Maybe he didn’t know what to say.
Or maybe he was just wasting time so that he could find the courage to tell her what he had been waiting nearly a year to tell her.
“But…I love you.” He finally breathed out.
His lungs were constricting, slowly closing up as if trying to suffocate him from the inside out, knowing that if she didn’t say those tiny words back, that would be the end of him.
They had known each other for years, and through those years, he had lived nearly all of them blind.
She had loved him, you see, possibly from the very first moment she had seen him. And he had just been a boy, too wrapped up in his own life to care about the girl who had cared for him.
So he had lived his life, going through the seasons, through meaningless loves, through somewhat important ones too, all the while ignoring the one who held her heart out to him for so long.
But today was where it ended.
Today was the day he would give his heart to hers, and hope that she was still offering hers to him.
“…Why…Why now?” She asked quietly. He laughed a bit, breathing in deep, his lungs filling to the hilt with air and then gently relaxing within his chest.
Things would be okay.
“Because! Because…I know it took forever, I know that I just took my sweet time, but-“
“No.” She looked up from the sidewalk and to his eyes. He could see the water in them and his lungs instantly seized up again.
“…I waited for you…for years. Half of my life, I wasted sitting by the phone hoping you would call. The other half I spent dropping everything for you. When you needed me because some other girl broke your heart, I was there. I was always there. Because I honestly believed in you.”
There was something in her eyes that told him what he had always been afraid would come true.
His heart was going to end up broken.
“…If you had just told me this…just a few years ago…” She closed her eyes, a few tears sliding down her cheeks.
“I would be with you, truly with you.” She whispered.
“But that was years ago, and I’m not that little girl who doesn’t know her worth anymore. I’m not broken anymore.”
In that moment, he thought about the time he was fourteen, riding his bike down the stony path by the river. He had lost control and ended up skinning his knees to near bone.
Was it misplaced to think about that right now?
Maybe, but it was the only pain he could think of that would sum up just a mere fraction of what he was feeling now.
He watched her turn away and take a step after step further from him, his heart weighing down with each distancing click of her shoes.
He wondered briefly, if maybe he had been, in a way, right.
Today was the day it had ended.
| danielle
Streamers of Stardust 