I need him now too.
I need him to come.
My mom thinks I’ve come down with a fever. She says I look tired. My eyes are all swollen up and I am running a light temperature. She says I look pale too. All the color has leached out of my skin. I wish I could tell her that the reason I’m no longer pink is because I’m bleeding.
And the boy I was made all pink for has left me.
I have no reason to be pink now.
I have no reason to get out of bed.
So I stay in it all day, under my pink covers, hugging my pink pillow and muffling my sobs with it. Because my parents are home and I don’t want to alarm them more than I already have. I wouldn’t even have let them know this much — I’m used to being a good girl and taking care of myself when I get sick; no money for babysitters and too many jobs for my parents — but I guess that ship has sailed. So when they go in and out, checking on me, bringing me soup and medicine, I dutifully accept it all. I be a good patient for them.
Even though what I have isn’t explained by science.
What I have is a sickness. Of the heart.
And the drama queen that I am, it’s fitting that I’d suffer physical symptoms of it.
It’s fitting that I’m dying from it.
It’s fitting that I’m chanting his name into my pillow, trying to summon him, trying to make him appear.
And suddenly he does.
Suddenly through my silent tears, I hear my window opening and sit up in the bed.
With wide eyes and a trembling heart, I watch him climb over. I watch his feet land on the hardwood floor and the moment they do, I’m out of the bed in a sudden burst of energy.
In a sudden burst of wakefulness.
I cross to him and stand before his tall and barely breathing body.
I say barely breathing and I mean it.
I also mean it when I say that he looks like me.
All sick with heartbreak.
His hair all disheveled and sticking up on the sides. His eyes red and dilated. The scruff on his jaw thicker than usual. His cheeks hollower too.
Yeah, he looks like me.
I bet if I touched him, I’d find that he’s running a fever too.
“You came,” I whisper.
His features tighten up for a second in response.
“What… What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice trembling.
My voicehopeful.
Could it be that he’s here because he believes it?
He believes that he loves me and that we should be together?
“I’m here,” he says, thickly, “to make you finally understand what we are not.”