soft dies the light, part three of five

When you were younger, your brother told you that there's always a chance the sun has gone out and these are our last eight seconds of light before a darkness that would freeze the earth into extinction. 

One day you met a boy who reoriented your universe and became your sun. Your mother would cry if she knew how hard you loved him because it was as if you have found home in the riverswift touch of his skin but 

you are talking about your favourite tv show the first time he pulls out his phone in the middle of a conversation. It is dark in the room and the white light frames his face. You blink in the brightness. Your words slow down. You don't know why, but this moment in particular feels like a handshake with the end, feels like the first meeting before how bad things would get. Feels like the moment he no longer felt you were worth his full attention. 

You forgive him because you know there's no reason for your discomfort. Besides, you do tend to chatter a lot when you get excited. Besides, this is karma for all the times you had to text your little sister back in the middle of a conversation because you always put family before him. Besides, when the sun goes out, there will be light for about eight seconds.

The drowning is slow. You blame yourself because even though you've never wrung out your bones for the want of a boy, this one has a something-special that ties you with barbed wire. Maybe if you just make this relationship all about him, you'll get him to smile at you in that way again. Maybe if you scrape yourself into nothing, he'll think you're of so little substance that you're no longer a burden. You begin to trim back the wild braces of your body and soul.

You're not like this. You're not. If your friend was in a relationship like this, you would have advised her to leave him a long time ago. You would have egged his house and refused to let him break her. You would have told her that human beings are not cigarette smoke, that there is no way to truly be addicted to someone who can kill you, that even if her memories of his kindness are the things she built her childhood dreams from - even  if he's her prince charming, she was born for more than a knight who has kept his armour shinning, she is better needing saving, she is the dragon, the castle, the thicket of thorns, she is wind and fire and fiercely strong, you'd say. But you are not your friend, you are alone. 

You watch him slowly fall out of love with you and you stand there with empty palms, feeling your heart hammer in your chest, feeling empty, feeling the cold blade of space threatening to take away any form of life inside of your blood vessels. You don't know how exactly, but there's a moment while the two of you are driving that you realise he is completely gone for you. Maybe it's the angle of the sun off of his cheekbones or the way he holds the steering wheel or the downturn of his lips, some part of you says, "this is it. the last of it has left."

Your sun has swallowed itself and these are the last eight seconds of light. You use them to beg him back to you in ways that break your own heart. You aren't the dragon or the fire or the forest. You're only a little girl with hands that shake and khobby knees and you are standing there in the wind and you feel like crying, watching him as the sky goes dark in his eyes. 

You are alone and good god, good god, but is it cold, cold, cold. -inkskinned