Heartache.

He sat next to her, twirling the pen in his hand, pushing the tip against the skin of his left hand the way he always did when he was thinking. Little dots were left in its wake, to people that knew him, signs that Simon had been deep in thought. She looked at him, studying his face, the way his hair fell slightly below his brows when he looked down. She felt the urge to run her fingers through his hair and push the dull locks out of his eyes.

“What?”

He looked up, noticing that she’d been staring. She’d been hoping that he’d notice.

“Nothing babe, just you.”

He smiled at the words, the edges of his lips curving slightly upwards before abruptly returning to the frown of concentration as he studied, once again, the haphazardly annotated pages of his well- worn textbook. She felt her heartbeat change as the smile came and went, like how wind catches in your hair when a fast car drives by. She stared at him again, studying his face for signs that he still adored her like he used to.

They fell in love fast. It was a romance right out of a storybook too, with not a thing out of place. Simon was studying an article for an English exam, “Tragedy and Its Conventions”, when he looked up and saw the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Hair tucked behind her ears, cheeks flushed from the cold, bottom lip tucked ever so slightly in the top row of her teeth as she contemplated the work before her. He knew her too, she was taking the same English exam that week. Why hadn’t he ever noticed her?

She looked up, eyes widening at the realisation that she was at a table full of strangers that knew each other.

“Can I sit here?”

“You- Of course, sure,” He replied. The words were slippery and slid out between his teeth before he had time to think about them. Look at that angel, he thought, why wouldn’t he want her to sit next to him. The girl went back to her work but he spent the rest of the hour thinking about her.

It progressed quickly and without warning, from sitting together to talking to hours- long phone conversations, long walks and knowing looks in hallways and one day, a confession. He told her, he couldn’t hold it in anymore. He couldn’t wait to tell her all the things he thought were amazing about her. He saw a future with her, he said. He told her that day, for the first time that he thought she was beautiful.

Claudia remembered the words as if they had just been spoken to her as her eyes searched his face. What was there? Nothing. What she was looking for had become scarce, in her eyes at least. The knowing smiles, him reaching over to touch her hand every few minutes. Things that she had once been embarassed by, she now longed for.

The bus ride home was quiet. They held hands and smiled at each other once in a while. They talked about their days, their plans for the weekend and some movies they thought might be interesting to watch. When she got up to leave, he pulled her close and kissed her on the cheek. The places where his lips had touched her skin felt to her like holy land and though she would never admit it to anyone, she played each memory of every kiss they shared over and over in her head until the thrill of it was gone.

She couldn’t remember when it began to feel like this. It felt like she was tired. If the first time they touched, the first time they kissed, the first time he told her he loved her were wooden beams, they felt now like ash. She knew in her mind, what they had once been, how they once felt. She knew how the grain of the wood felt against her fingertips, every crevace, every sinew, explored and re- explored so throughly she could reconstruct them effortlessly it in her mind’s eye. It was the sight and sound and taste of bright, deep, luxurious mahogany, seared into the back of her eyelids, the surface of her eardrums, the tip of her tongue. She knew it better than she knew what this ash she now held in her hands was.

As they lay in separate beds on opposite sides of town, the crackling sound of white noise filtered through each of their headphones. Their phone calls had always been filled with silence, it just depended on the day and consequently, the type of silence they would hear.

“I love you babe,” he said finally. “I love you too,” she whispered back. Silence.

“I’m afraid,” she admitted.

“Because of her?” He knew the answer to his own question.

“Because of her,” she replied.

He made a grand declaration of love. He told her, she was the only one he loved and would ever love. “I want to marry you someday,” he told her. Claudia had heard this before. She knew he meant it. Yet, when she looked down at her palms, all that was there was snowy white ash falling through the cracks between her fingers. She felt like crying.

In the darkness that night, to the sound of the quiet whirr of the celing fan, she prayed for him. “Dear God, please let it be the way it was, please make her leave him alone,” it was a cry of desperation more than a plea for help and she could feel the tears brimming in her eyes. Hot gasoline running down her cheeks, dousing more and more of it in the endless flow of liquid disappointment, liquid rage, liquid sadness. She told herself she would stop. He loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he’s told you, he’s told you, he’s told you. She repeated it like a mantra again and again, He loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he’s told you, he’s told you, he’s told you. It didn’t work though, it never has and then she began to imagine.

Imagined her talking to him, imagined her hand on his chest, her fingers in his hair, his smile in her eyes. She’d been blessed with a wild imagination. It was what made her a dreamer, a voracious reader of fiction, a writer. It was her reality but in her head, the information she already had was no different from an intriguing cover of a book or a puzzling writing prompt. From it, she spun stories and a million heartbreaking realities. Each time she began to think, she felt the tip of a match on her skin, when she let herself imagine, there was the searing heat of the match being struck against it and coming alive.

“I love you baby, don’t worry,” she read the text through her vision which was blurry with tears. He loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he’s told you, he’s told you, he’s told you. It was much too late though. Too many tears had been shed and the stories that she’d madly woven had set more and more of what she clung to ablaze.

She closed her eyes, hugging the phone to her chest, savouring the words, I love you, I love you I love you, in her head, in her ears, on her lips. But the tears continued to fall, exploding violently as they hit her skin as she thought about her, hearing those words from him and then, without a thought, set them ablaze.