“There are infinite possibilities for what our lives can be. But only one reality we can live in. Only one we’ll ever know” – ONE by Wong Fu Productions.
I could’ve tried counting every star I saw that night but I would be nothing more than a rotting skeleton before I finished a quarter of the way. Aside the few lamps that were around the house, the stars were the brightest of lights that night. The nippy March winds I was so used to, unlike most nights, didn’t plow through the neighborhood and I was happy for that: it had been an eternity or more since I was out on my porch to star gaze without either freezing or overheating. Much to my surprise, out of all those nights where I star gazed, I wasn’t alone to count them.
I promised her a long time ago that my porch had a spectacular view of the evening sky during the right time. That night was a total gamble; I had no idea. Whenever I looked at Lara, I saw starlight bounce off her beautiful blue eyes, easily becoming two pieces of glimmering sapphire as she gazed up into space mindlessly like a zombie. Those short brunette locks of hers were lit up like a Christmas tree, shimmering with the gentle breeze that flew by. She was warmer than the sun that wasn’t going to be up for another few hours, and in just a pair of black sweats, a t-shirt and a white hoodie that was once mine, I was baffled but comfortable by her warmth. She seemed so relaxed, so at home beside me. She didn’t mention it at all, then again she doesn’t tell me much anyway, but I didn’t need to hear her say that that night was a night she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than with me.
“I’m happy we’re here,” I muttered underneath the breeze, gently pecking the top of her head with a kiss. She wrestled a little bit to get comfortable, which I didn’t mind.
Just to make conversation, I raised my finger towards the sky. “Do you see that star over there, Lara? Look beyond that and there is a world where everything seems ordinary but the number one highest-paid job in any country is by doing absolutely nothing.” She giggled a little bit at my stupid joke. I pointed my finger in the other direction and, speaking in a stupid accent, “and over there, in that planet, is where everyone talks like this.” Her giggles became louder. “It’s been theorized that there is more than just one universe other than our own, and because of that, there is another kind of planet that is like ours. So it seems there is more than one kind of me, and I dearly hope they all have someone like you.”
I could feel that she cracked a smile underneath me; I didn’t need to see it to know. A few seconds of silence were broken when Lara asked me, “Where would we be?”
I snapped out of the fantasy the stars lulled me into. Lara sat up on the edge of the lawn chair, taking my hand tenderly. She stared into my eyes with a curious glare. She mumbled again with a brief smile, “where would we be if I never forgave you? What about if we never had that fight in the first place? And what if we never met each other at all, like what if we never became a couple?”
It was like she tunneled through every thought in my head. For a time that I learned one of the most valuable lessons I could’ve learned, those questions were all answered in my brain after our first fight a few months ago. That fight struck a blow low enough that we hadn’t spoken for days. I had been interrogating myself with those three questions: what if we never forgave, what if we never fought, and what if we never forged relentlessly, and each time I did, they were becoming more of a reality than the thought implied. How I was able to win her back remains my greatest triumph because I had almost lost the one fish in the sea that I don’t ever dare to throw back. I didn’t want to lie to Lara; she didn’t deserve a liar, so I took a deep breath in.
“Where we would be… it isn’t exactly a happy place, Lara,” I mumbled, slightly hesitant with the words that came through. “If you never forgave, then it ends badly. If we never fought, it ends badly. If we never forged… that is a completely different story.”
She gripped onto my hand tighter. “Tell me about them.”
I was nervous to. At the same time, I feared to.
A brief pause brought me back a few months ago. Though the both of us were incredibly tired, Lara and I were talking to each other through Facebook on a Friday night in November. The words I had said to her that night… I prayed that I could take them back. If I had stopped talking when I could, almost a week of silence and regret would be but a fantasy. Her friends always mattered more to her than me, so what right did I have to say she didn’t care for them? They were there longer than I was: some only for a couple of years while others were there her entire life, and then there was me who wasn’t even there for a single year yet. I learned my lesson the hard way, and as much as I tried burying that problem into the ground, Lara’s question couldn’t be answered without mentioning that event.
“Where we would be if we never forgave is an obvious outcome,” I began, a little hesitant but more comfortably as I looked at Lara. “That was only one fight and one week of not talking. Give it we never forgave, the “one” in both of those is gone. One fight turns into two, three, four, and then the pain escalates as each one comes and stays. One “sorry” after another starts to become pointless to me, realizing I’m just wasting my time for a cause that only got worse. You’d hide your friends and family away from me, all the while they’d feed you lies on how I’ve changed or I’m willing to forgive and forget.”
She nodded her head, agreeing with a majority of everything that I was saying. “One week of not talking then turns into two, and then three, maybe four. With the passing days, we start to hate each other twice as more than we did yesterday, and with that flame of hate ignited, the flame of our love becomes non-existent; it’s up in smoke. As soon as that flame of hate blows away, love isn’t going to come back. What we were before is nothing more than a candle that can’t be lit anymore.”
I took a hesitant breath. Lara, although paying attention to every word my lips muttered underneath the slight breeze that blew every now and then, didn’t speak or mutter even the faintest sound.
“What if we never fought sounds like a good idea – well, until you consider the fact that I become worse,” I forced venomously. Confused and bewildered, Lara’s eyes drifted off into the stars; I knew she was listening to me, but it was so typical of her to act like she wasn’t. Like she was hearing voices in her head, she hummed a tune, but I knew well that she wanted me to continue. “It was you who mentioned what I had been doing wrong, but if you didn’t ever bring it up – I wouldn’t ever know. I’m oblivious as it is, so if you brushed that off your shoulder without telling me, then I will become a terrible person.”
“I see myself saying that I am the most important person to you: your happiness, your excitement and everything in between would be because of me. If you had accomplished an absolutely spectacular sketch, let’s say, I would say I was your inspiration even though I had zero knowledge of it. If you had passed a test, I would say I helped you study when, in fact, someone else like Ally or Ben helped you. I would make it seem like you couldn’t live without me. I would take you away from your family and friends in the wrong way, the horrendous thought “I’m more important” poisoning everything in me. I would become selfish, inconsiderate, and someone who should be in jail for treating you like that.”
Still, after everything that Lara had been hearing, she hadn’t uttered a single letter. She must’ve been taking everything in still, or maybe she was denying everything I was saying. Maybe she wanted a plate of the lasagna that was left out on the table inside the house, I don’t know, but one thing was for sure: she was listening.
I choked a little. “What if we never forged” was the last thing she wanted to know, and maybe the last thing I wanted to mention.
“What if we never forged, the way I see it, is the worst of all three,” I said softly, grasping her hand tight, “for this one reason: I would feel none of this. Everything that I am feeling for you is unique to you alone, but how could I know what all of this feel like if I denied you? I wouldn’t know what it would be like to feel a first kiss or a first dance the way we felt them, Lara, and to this day, I was always scared to think about it.”
“Walking down the halls with both of my hands occupied, I wouldn’t see the love of my life walking down those same halls. I would see a friend of mine, just another person that I share common interests with. We’d talk for only a few minutes, 10 minutes straight if we’re lucky, compared to now when you and I talk for a few hours, 10 as the minimum. You would be part of the many reasons why I wake up in the morning instead of being a separate and special reason. Days and nights can pass by quietly and you wouldn’t be in my mind, and I wouldn’t be in yours. Love wouldn’t come my way like this, and it wouldn’t come to you either.”
For what felt like weeks, a grim and unsettling silence settled blindly once I was finished speaking. Lara’s eyes were locked against the chipped wood on the porch, a collective rhythm she had on her breaths. Her grip on my hand was becoming loose, her tender fingers slipping away from me. My heart was already beginning to hurt… I mean, I lost them once already…
We hadn’t spoken about topics like possibilities since she broke up with me a month ago. For days we tried diverting attention away from topics as sensitive like this; we had been doing well as friends and breaking that flow scares me – what would happen if it did break? Not since a month ago was I able to talk to her alone like that night, and out of everything that we could have been talking about, she wanted to talk about that. I didn’t blame her for asking: I had been meaning to tell her all about these questions. I guess I just didn’t know when the right time to bring it up was, and up until that night I thought I was too late.
“Where would we be…” Lara muttered, her sudden voice a gentle shock since she had been mute since I began. All of a sudden, her grip against my hand tightened. She peered back at me shyly, and that beautiful smile of hers began to form. I hadn’t seen her smile like that to me in ages, our breakup taking such a toll on me that I almost forgot a smile like hers.
She took my hand and coiled all of my fingers except for my pointer finger. She directed that finger onto the wood on my porch. I gazed at her with an intense curiosity; what was she doing? Her breaths then became hesitant, her body shivered, and with those two pieces of sapphire looking lovingly at me, she started to talk.
“If I never forgave you, then we would have avoided each other the entire night at the dance two weeks later, huh? If I never fought with you, then you would never see the chinks in your armor, is that right?” For a girl whose touch was warming, her words sent uneasy chills down my back. “And if I said I liked you, I would have never felt like the princess that you had promised you’d make me feel like when we first began?”
I nodded my head.
Without warning whatsoever, Lara leaned in and kissed me. Shocked beyond the sound barrier, a daunting chill ran down my spine with cleats laced on. I kissed her back, closing my eyes and reminiscing what it had been like to kiss her. With my finger still pointing down against the porch, she detached from my lips. It was like she flipped the off switch inside of me because of that kiss, I had been indefinitely frozen where I sat.
“Then, Daniel, out of all the universes that can exist out there, leave me here – with you.”
I hope you have enjoyed this little short story that I wrote a few months ago. It’s one of the best short stories that I’ve written for many reasons and I am glad to share it with you. I don’t know how much of my writing I will share here as this is a new thing but if you seem to enjoy that, then for sure, I’m going to post another one again.
-Dean