Don't Bring Tomorrow [Love Club]

Shattering Caly’s bedroom window in the middle of the night was - believe me - an accident. But, desperate times call for desperate measures, and when you’ve got good aim and a throwing arm that’s stronger than you previously thought it to be, accidents are bound to happen.

“Sorry!” I shout-whisper to her, as if my soft voice can muffle the wreck. The pebble I jettisoned toward her bedroom window and the resulting fragments of glass drizzle down towards me from her house’s second floor. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to see if you wanted to - if - do you wanna go get Tags?”

Accidents, especially, are bound to happen when you’re not being careful. When you twirl life around like it’s some stupid baton and you’re a pageant girl parading around on stage, instead of the double-edged sword it really is. Stupid. “I swear, I’ll pay you back for the window,” I tell Caly on the way to Tags. “I just really wanted to hang out with you guys tonight.”

Life in general is pretty accidental. Earth, most likely, was an accident. Or a mistake, but the two are sometimes interchangeable. What came first: the Universe or God? Did God create the supernova that became our reality? Did our reality explode into a cloud of energy that became our God?

Or, maybe, there is no God. As the three of us roam the empty streets - running, laughing, singing - our world feels both too small and too infinite to have any space for God. That’s no accident. In our world, the only gods parading around with double-edged swords are Caly, Tags, and Thea - and what a show we make.

Just before sunrise, we find ourselves on some cliff by the sea, marooned between the black ocean and the flickering lights of Four. My back seems to be permanently imprinted onto the spot of grass I’m laying on, and I’ve got both of my hands resting behind my head as if I haven’t got a care in the world. My eyelids are sagging over my vision, begging to be closed, but I pinch the back of my scalp to keep me from falling asleep. From seeing what happens when I close my eyes.

Because Gods are also good with breaking things - and I’m not just talking about the window-breaking-sort. Promises. Deals. Relationships. Hearts. Julien Baptiste’s eyes are a ghost the whole night, and it’s hard to convince myself that I don’t care about him when I keep myself up - and drag my friends into doing the same, insane thing - just to keep myself from dreaming about him. Because, if I’m gonna dream about anything, it’ll be about a day where no one feels expected to repair broken things. Where the only broken thing I’d ever have to fix is Caly’s bedroom window, and not Baptiste’s lonely soul. Where maybe even broken windows and lonely souls seem irrelevant and tiny and stupid in the grand scheme of things.

Sunlight slowly stretches out over the thin horizon, a tiny glow at the core of darkness. Goosebumps crawl up my arms at the sight. “Today’s gonna be a good day,” I tell my fellow friends/Gods. “I can almost guarantee it.”

Gods, as I’ve come to learn, are good at breaking things. Promises. Guarantees. An entire city, even.

When I wake up, I do so without even realizing I’d fallen asleep. The earth beneath us rumbles, quivers, and - somewhere beyond us - I can hear a collision.

For a moment, I have the decency to believe that I’m dreaming. But reality crashes down on me, like how it does towards the buildings and streets and everyone else. The ocean swallows them all whole, not even bothering to take a breath, and all I can think about is the debris of Caly’s broken window being swept away from the water and how a broken window might not be such a big deal after all.

“We…” I hear myself say, but I can’t finish it. We’re safe. We’re here. We should do something. We can’t. At the end of time, the three of us are still standing together, as if destiny herself preordained it.

That cannot be by accident.