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Measures January 25, 2009

Posted by Girlbird in aspirations and dreams, life, love, prose and short stories, writing.

Have you ever wanted something so much, she mused, that it made you want to burst into tears… but at the same time it was so wonderful that you couldn’t really cry over it? That you reveled in your sadness?

He looked at her then as she sat turned a little away from him, silhouetted against the stars, her skin illuminated by the moon, hair intertwined with the same light. With her flowered dress and her bare feet, wet from the dew soaking the grass, she looked like one of those dryads or whatever that he had read about in the fourth grade. He breathed. She, this scene, the question she had just asked was every cliché he’d ever read or watched, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to care. Although he was the boy who tried to escape every expectation, every social grace, every conformity, every Hollywood theme, somehow in doing this he became the very ultimatum of the classic social rebel.

She looked back at him, lounging in the wet grass, his long limbs stretched out and his head thrown back as if he hadn’t a care in the world. She took in a breath. Through the ragged locks of hair that flopped over his forehead, his eyes appraised her, and for once they weren’t filled with a bitter, biting cynicism. There was no curtain there tonight. They were piercing, certainly, but for once it was as if he was really looking at her for the first time, and perhaps he liked what he saw.

She blushed and lowered her gaze, seeing the unspoken answer in his silence.

Have you ever felt that something was so wrong for you and so right at the same time? she asked then, her heart pounding.

He shrugged and tipped his head back up to look at the sky. Is anything every really… right? Or wrong? How can anyone judge that?

She trembled. There has to be some measure of it.

He shook his head. Sometimes people set too much in store by rules. You get too caught up in rubrics and precedents and measuring cups.

But without measures, how could anyone have goals? How could we move forward? How can we decide what we truly want, making choices, if there’s no way of determining which is better?

He could see she was nearly crying now, for although her face was darkened by the night, he saw the tears glistening on her cheeks and heard the hysteria building in her voice.

Hey, he said softly, as if speaking to the stray and skittish dogs he had used to work with at the local animal shelter, sitting up. Come here. She scooted forward, and he took her hand and placed it against his chest, over his heart.

Her fingers curled and she closed her eyes, feeling the quickening pulsing beat radiating through her skin and down her bones. She looked at him questioningly, their breaths mingling. He pressed her hand closer and met her gaze.

This is how we tell.