neighborhood kids ☆★ ; lysette/avery

I've got stars in my eyes.

Dizzy, I flop onto a creaking mattress and drink in the chill of the night seeping underneath the crack below my bedroom door. The bed is tired too, groaning at the weight of my body, the heaviness of my pounding heart working overtime. Universes, I see them behind my eyelids. They remind me of a girl I once met when I was young and restless.

There's a flush of my heart blooming underneath the skin of my cheeks. I'm always rushing. Always red-faced and catching up with myself, slipping into dead sister's clothes, delivering tea and cake and stealing jewelry from deteriorating minds, growing pains nestled in my bones as I drift off to sleep. Days stretch into weeks and life takes over.

See the thing about life is that it doesn't stop to grieve, to cry, to feel sorry for you. It just keeps on going. I keep on being, with or without grief. With or without the absences carved into the shapes of my sisters.

There's a distance between myself and the girl who grabbed Lysette's hand at the reaping. I feel more and more attached to the girl who just wanted to feel her skin against my own when we buried Hyacinth. She was learning that death is inevitable, not just for the elderly she visits in the mornings. Death doesn't stop to check if you're young or old.

Death just takes what it wants and continues on.

I think I want to take her hand and put it in mine and then-

There it is, a dizzy rush, caught in my throat as a whispered desire.

I miss who I was.

I miss who I was with her.

Carefree. Like a breeze on a summers day, she's light and colour and hope for an even better tomorrow - I have faded to a dull grey, one with the walls in the hospital. Paper-thin skin the colour of fog, I miss not having to worry.

Guess I gotta grow up sooner or later.

And then that thought scares me and the rushing in my throat comes back, only this time it wraps itself around my airways and rips my head upwards. I snap back to reality - wonder if she'll hate me, wonder if she'll want to pull me back up from my misery. Wonder if I'm too far gone for someone so beautiful-

She's beautiful, isn't she?

Picture the night sky. A billion, trillion stars, all tiny and spread out like freckles across the bridge of a nose and when she talks it's like the sunset paints itself across her tongue. She's warm, twinkling, a thousand lights in darkness.

Clunk.

That's her.

Clunk, clunk.

That's-

"Avery! Open up, I gotta tell you something!"

-her.

With the weight of the day clinging to my chest I open the window and peer down at the night sky, wide-eyed and sparkling.

"Okay, uhhh-"

Fumbling out of the window, slippery hands on windowsills, ground shock welcomes my tired feet and the night is somehow heavier in the open air.

Suddenly conscious of the flush underneath my skin, the balmy palms of my hands and my tired eyes, I fidget nervously.

"Uhhh," shifting eyes, oh, she was made for moonlight.

"Whatcha wanna talk about?"

Star in my eyes, the rest above us insignificant.