Sonder

A short story about colours, tea-versus-coffee, guilt, and most importantly, realising that everyone in life is just as lost.

I had two favourite times of day: early morning and late night. Not dusk or dawn, but a few hours before and after. The mornings when everything was still hazy, not quite awake. The nights when all but the wildest few had gone to bed, and the stars were out and casting shadows.

These were the only times I had to myself, where I could feel the static pause for a moment and I could hear the hum of whatever station was playing on next door’s radio. The constant huffing and puffing of breathing ceasing while I watched the sky change from pure crimson to sunburnt orange to golden yellow, from navy to ebony to blindness. Nothing could ever look as magnificent as the sky when it was just about to break into a new expression.

Jovie always wondered about my disrupted sleep patterns, as if the view of empty streets bathed in red and garden patches morphed by the clouds woke me from slumber. She would keep track of when the floorboards creaked, and the time it took for our window to slide open and then shut, almost like my nightly movements were tilting the household’s routine. Not that she would mention it at breakfast the next morning, or whenever she stopped running long enough to fall back into step with me, but we both knew it was something that sparked her interest.

It was October now and I was still sitting on the roof for hours on end, wrapped up in one of Gran’s old, woollen blankets and losing track of time, just gazing, not affected by the cold, autumnal wind. It never differed; my mind wandered but I stayed firmly planted on the slated tiles outside our bedroom window, as if moving an inch forward would set my world a kilter and I might, heaven forbid, slip and fall the eight-foot distance downwards to the pavement below.

Thinking about it now, I understood why she would worry about me. I was always the more insecure one. Between the two of us, we made a whole. If you were to ask any one of our neighbours, they would forever refer to us as ‘Jovie and Laurel’, despite the extra sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds I had on her. I’d always been stuck in a kind of daze, hazy-brained, Mum said it was all the gazing I did �" “Up in the clouds you are, sweetpea,” �" then she’d laugh and turn back to Jovie. It never bothered me much.

Pops was a much quieter character than Mum. I’d often find myself wondering how they fit together so well �" chalk and cheese �" like two jigsaw pieces from alternate boxes that somehow slotted into one another perfectly. He was a tall man with kind eyes who didn’t speak at the dinner table during meals, yet when he’d wash the dishes afterwards, you would always hear his levelled whistles reverberate off the kitchen tiles. Pops and I had never butted heads or exchanged sharp words. Jovie was more like Mum in that sense.

Firecracker Mum with wispy hair and the mouth of a sailor. Mum was all Irish-charm and overly gesticulated anecdotes, her apron being the most permanent item in her life amongst lost purses and broken daughters. Our house was a treasure map of odd shoes, lone bracelet charms and a plethora of mislaid school notices. However, despite not being able to keep a pair of car keys in sight for longer than twenty minutes, Mum was the ‘bearer of all best kept secrets’. Most of them anyways, Jovie added in my head.

If you were to look at Jovie and I (aged thirteen), at first, you’d be stumped �" unable to tell us apart �" yet, looking closer, you’d be able to distinguish the almost miniscule height difference and the way she held her head slightly higher, towards the sky, as if she was waiting for it to open up and shower her with optimism. Jovie with her neon pink converse and rainbow personality; me with my tattered boots and lack of social skills.

Aged sixteen, her hair was cut into a stylish bob, straight and sophisticated, dyed a warm brown and highlighted with streaks of honey blonde, forever reminding people why they asked her for fashion advice. I had refused to do anything to my hair, preferring to leave the dark curls in their normal state of haphazard; the most drastic decision of my life being the fringe I got several years before. Jovie was always trying to fix my hair, brushing through it and pushing it back with one of her Alice bands. She never liked the way my fringe would catch in my eyes and prevent people from holding my gaze more than a few seconds.

Her eyes looked so similar to mine, both of ours liquid-like shades of golden brown. But I knew that mine were dimmer. I had less life, less lustre, while she had so much to give.

By the time Mum and Pops had gone to bed, both of them wearing ersatz smiles as they turned the lights off downstairs and made the quiet trip past our room, it was pushing ten o’clock; I’d been up since before seven to catch the last glimpse of blue being smothered by red. The rug in our room was warm and the light fractured through the gaps in the shutter blinds, creating patterns of shattered glass on the cream sheepskin. Jovie had picked it out, claiming it to complement the light rose blush of the walls. I allowed them to be painted pink because our room would always be glowing when we got back from school, like it was singing for our arrival. “If this doesn’t change our lives, I don’t know what will �" this, Laurel, is the colour of magnificence.” I remember thinking I didn’t want our lives to change and I didn’t understand why she did.

We had two single beds pushed up against opposite sides of the room, an imaginary line drawn between them. Jovie liked to cross the line, forever wandering into my side and grazing her painted nails against my things. She’d wanted to become an interior designer when she was younger, more recently, a model or some other kind of elitist profession. Her side of the room was covered in Kate Moss magazine spreads, or killer heels decorated in deathly spikes. When we were still communicating via twin-telepathy, we used to spend hours and afternoons and mornings talking about how we would start a business together. Jovie, interior and me, exterior, which was rather ironic considering she worked so hard on being magnificent on the outside, while I tried so hard at keeping my magnificence trapped within.

From the age of eight, when we travelled down to London with Gran on one of her ‘inspirational daytrips’ and walked along the streets of Westminster, I’d been overcome by the colours, and beauty, and feel of the place, that all of a sudden, the only thing I could see myself doing in the future was building places where people fell in love. Piecing together structures that would be covered in stone and kept protected by films of plastic in people’s photo albums, buildings people remembered years after, buildings that spoke to people. Westminster Abbey with its Poet’s Corner had all of a sudden found a place in my heart, a tiny crevice, hidden, but now filled.

Jovie and I planned to take over the world, one house, coffee shop, and cathedral at a time.

By the age of fourteen, we were halfway through high school and that was no longer Jovie’s dream.

She dreamt of kissing popular boys and buying new shoes, staying out later than our eight-thirty curfew and coming home with red eyes. Her mascara would be smudged and none of us knew why �" maybe it had been because, by age fourteen, she had a fondness for crying, maybe it was because too many boys liked to break her heart. At this age, I was at school finishing work ahead of time in order to attend beginner’s night classes for architecture. Going out to museums and churches and anywhere I could lose myself in for a few hours, only finding myself when I had secured a couple dozen pages of sketches and written notes about the history of the building. This lasted for several years, until we were both on the cusp of our final year in Sixth Form.

Our birthday was late in the school year �" “My June babies,” as Mum would say �" so we were a while off our eighteenth when we began looking for universities. Pops had been a professor in another life, teaching the Gothic era to students at MMU, before he’d met Dublin transfer Mum and we’d been welcomed into the world roughly three years ahead of hoped. Mum quit her job as part-time waitress, part-time first year history major, and they’d made a down payment on a 20th century, semi-detached house �" the plain, rectangular windows, the single-stacked chimney, and the extended white-porch persuading the two of them that they’d made the right decision.

Jovie was set on moving far away to a university based in a busy city with hustle and bustle and high-end shops and expensive men, a place where school girls and positive tests didn’t matter. I was set on remaining in the place where my parents met and attending Manchester’s School of Architecture. We’d certainly matured from the eight-year-old doubles our parents loved equally.

I vividly remember the day when Pops asked us a very simple question, a riddle almost: If you were to look into a mirror and see only the sun shining on your face, where would you be? Jovie answered straight away �" “a sunny place,” she had said �" whereas Pops wasn’t looking for an answer; he wanted thought. I’ve been thinking about that question for years.

Mum had always stuck to her story that if the house was on fire and she could only save one of us, she’d transform herself into a human hose and dowse the building in water. She’d always refused to tell us who looked better when we’d be in one of the matching outfits Jovie had forced me into; she’d never admitted to who made the best cup of tea when we all knew I preferred coffee; she’d never admitted to who was the better sister. But both Jovie and I knew who was Pops’ favourite when he asked that question.

Neither of us would acknowledge it.

At ten o’clock exactly, I cracked open our window, taking notice of Jovie’s empty bed and the ELLE magazine left face down on her pillow. The white feather I’d found this morning when the curtains flew open as the sky changed from blushing pink to murky blue lay next to it, already smelling of Jovie’s soft perfume, traces of flowers and cotton sinking it like dust. I quickly slipped on my brown boots and pulled on an old windbreaker, swiping a few scrunched up notes and my phone before deftly navigating the floorboards back to the ledge in order to climb out and onto the roof.

Jovie was the only person who knew where I hid when the house got too loud and she’d start to shout about being an adult and Mum would reply with a “nearly” and Pops would silently backup Mum with his kind eyes. Then Jovie would storm into our glowing room and sit on the warm rug and we’d talk about what building we’d visit next. First it was Saint-Étienne de Metz with its sensational height, tall arched windows and rose panels, making it one of the grandest cathedrals in the world. I tried to memorise its stained glass windows, more so because of what Gran used to tell us: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” This became fixed within me, Paris Fashion Week, Jovie stated in my head, taking offence at the lack of appreciation I instilled towards anything style related.

Second being St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. The church has a staggered layered design, and although the side churches are arranged in perfect symmetry, the cathedral as a whole is not. The larger central church was deliberately offset to the west from the centre of the side churches, to accommodate its larger apse on the eastern side. I’ve always loved the idea of a consciously imperfect place, made specifically so in order to make way for something just as beautiful. Inside the composite church is a labyrinth of narrow vaulted corridors and vertical cylinders of the churches; Jovie always said that if we were to find ourselves stuck in a maze, it should be in St. Basil’s.

Third was the one we’d always disagree on.

Hers being the Taj Mahal: one of the most splendid places in the world, a true complexity, a symbol of true emotion. That was why Jovie admired it; it was a monument of eternal love. It was built by the 5th Mogul emperor of India as a mausoleum to his beloved wife, a Muslim Persian princess. The couple met and fell in love. She was his companion on all his journeys and military expeditions �" it was on one of his expeditions when giving birth to their 14th child that she died. Overpowered by grief, he resolved to immortalise the memory of his beloved wife by building the finest sepulchre ever built. Jovie had always wanted someone to build something for her �" dedicate their whole existence to her.

Mine was the Pantheon in Rome. The Ancient Greek translation meaning “all gods” and over centuries there has been speculation whether this name comes from the statues of so many gods placed around the building, or from the resemblance of the dome to the heavens. The building is circular with a portico of large granite columns and a concrete dome, with a central opening to the sky. Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest cupola. The Pantheon was a place I could imagine myself hiding in forever, regardless of Jovie’s company.

The air was chilly as I held onto the slates of the roof and lifted myself down onto the pathway that ran around our house, my boots made no sound as I crouched under the porch light, waiting for the automatic timer to turn off. This was the time when everyone in the house was asleep; Mum and Pops residing on the opposite side to Jovie and I’s room. They’d never understood why we remained together in the twin room, our house having a smaller room only next door, but Jovie always found a way to persuade me not to move out, not to move on, to stay right behind her. We had a shared understanding that if we were separated, we would always find a way back to one another �" Jovie merely refused to comprehend that as a daily-nightly thing.

Walking the short distance to the front garden, an unkempt path of long grass and wild flowers, I winded the corner onto the street and carefully unlatched the gate, quietly locking it behind me and throwing a look back at the house to make sure no one was up and roaming. They weren’t, nothing stirred, not even a ghost. When I was much younger, I believed a giant painted the sky. Sometimes, as I watched the sun sink its claws into the horizon, or kiss the earth sweetly, I caught a fleeting glimpse of him. He spent his days swirling colours in his workshop, indefinitely searching for the perfect hue. I would gaze open-mouthed while he created innumerable colours and proudly documented them in the clouds, forever wondering if I could grow up, fly upwards, and help him. Be like him. Jovie never agreed, even at that small age, she knew who she wanted to be. She wanted to be her own person; that was when I began wanting to be like her.

The journey into town was much quicker than that during the day. The streets were wet and shone with drops of water, rain cried down from above and it made me walk faster, slightly more eager to get away from the puddles and into a place where it couldn’t fall. Streetlamps lined my path and I was thankful that there was a light I could trust.

Ten minutes later and I was opening the door to a classic café, hearing the bell ring overhead, and being enveloped in the smell of fallen leaves and a burning pumpkin candle. Sonder was part-café, part-bakery; it was hidden between a Starbucks coffee branch and a bank, so clandestine that I’d almost passed it. It was small and almost transparent with large windows and pale green, wooden framing, silver fairy lights dangling from the arch of each display, allowing passers-by to miss it without so much as a wave to a dream half-forgotten. It was both worn and enchanting, the black italic writing on the sign so cursive that you had to squint at it.

Closing the door softly behind myself, I made my way towards the counter, allowing myself to glance at the circular booths by the back wall and the picnic-style tables in the centre and the metal stools looking out of the window, as if it was a film screen. A few tipsy ladies swayed passed in long coats and bright heels, dancing in the puddles and giggling as one friend swirled around a particular lamppost several times. The odd older man hulked passed, digging in his pocket for car keys or a phone number, stomping his feet in broken bottle remnants and causing the night to echo with a curse. I couldn’t see any ghosts pirouetting through the rain, not tonight.

There was a guy sat alone, by himself, in a booth far from the window, with a pot of tea in front of him and a baseball cap resting on the table. His hair was the colour of coal, slightly damp from the weather and tousled as if he’d spent most of the night raking his hands through it. From where I was stood, I couldn’t make out much more, except that he wore a navy hoodie; a black duffel coat hung over the back of the booth next to him and I wondered if he really was alone.

A student took my order, the sheer lack of sleep obvious on her pretty face, showing how long she’d been up and probably how long she’d been studying. In a year, this could be me. It could’ve been me, Jovie added, her soft voice winding around the whirring of the coffee machine and the click of the till closing as the girl handed me back my change. She smiled, nodding her head towards a university leaflet as she asked me about my course. “I’m not in school,” I explained politely, taking notice of the Polaroids pinned on the chalkboard behind her head, dated with different kinds of writing and all featuring the same fairy lights. Her eyes flickered with something and, for a moment, I thought she’d recognised me; it was like the cogs were winding and then she flashed me a smaller smile, quickly turning around and grabbing a mug off the rack, getting to work on my drink.

When I turned to sit down, the guy from the booth looked up and I caught his stare. His eyes were a piecing emerald, orbs through which he could see the truth behind my smile, pinpoint the sadness carved into each line of my face. And quite honestly, they jolted a feeling in my chest as if they were calling to ignite anyone’s nerves. They were a maelstrom of green bottle glass and four-leaf clovers. There were no dark circles beneath them or cuts and bruises, only a bit of stubble across his jaw and a splash of paint on his cheek. He was attractive in a lethal kind of way, the kind of boy that made your heart stutter. No doubt about it, Jovie settled.

Then he smiled, like he understood what I was doing at ten-thirty on a Tuesday night in a quiet café with nothing but the sound of the rain outside and the light of the overhead lanterns that hung from the ceiling above every table. And after I looked away, embarrassed, I realised that he was alone, too. Jovie was always talking about guys like him, who haunted your thoughts and made you stumble on words. She liked guys who smiled at you first; I hadn’t really been given the opportunity to.

His eyes were burning holes into my face, so I gathered the remnants of whatever it was that I called confidence and looked back up at him. He was staring at me as if he was searching for something, and I didn’t know what he could possibly be looking for, but it sort of scared me when I thought of what he might find.

He offered me a small wave of his finger and I took that as an opportunity to walk towards him. He grinned as I slid into the seat across from him, the plush leather of the booth cool against my jeans, and I rubbed my hands together, still warming up from the cold wind outside. The sky was a deep blue, tinted by clouds of black and the odd helicopter’s light flashing in the sea of shadows. It was gloomy with the constant pour of rain and I felt glad to be out of it.

“What’re you hiding from?” the guy asked, squinting his eyes at me and leaning onto the back of his hand, propped up by his elbow and watching me imploringly. His face was made up of sharp lines �" the hard square of his jaw, the hollow under the score of his cheekbones, the slightly crooked stroke of his nose �" but there was somehow a softness in the gentle curve of his pink mouth, the tiny freckles picked out by last season’s sun, the curiosity in his eyes. I saw it all, saw the contradictions and the flaws, and I was entirely, breathlessly transfixed.

“Myself,” I laughed truly, honesty laced into the single word. I hadn’t laughed like that in a while; it felt strange not having to worry about creating the perfect, under-the-radar, false laugh. He seemed like he knew girls who were gorgeous with mellifluous voices, perfectly sculpted eyebrows, and the type of effortless cool that only comes with age and experience and a contact list of people who wear leather jackets and have pastel-coloured hair. I wasn’t any of that, so it didn’t bother me when he laughed back.

“Thank God,” he proclaimed, his voice fairly deep and smooth like the sound of the cello. There was a husky quality to it and it gave me shivers to think that he was walking around in this town and we had never even crossed paths. “It’s refreshing to know that there are still some people who actually say what they truly mean.”

“You’re welcome?” I wasn’t sure if that was quite a compliment, but it felt good to know that he was laughing along with me, no matter how ridiculous it seemed. He grinned again, his smile reminding me of open windows, or the summers Jovie and I would paddle at the docks. “How about you?”

“Hiding isn’t really my thing, to be honest,” he sighed, taking a sip from the tea in front of him, “I’d call it avoiding the situation.”

“And what’s that, then?” I asked, not allowing him to avoid the question; Jovie had taught me that avoiding things and putting them at the back of your mind didn’t always work in your favour.

“My future,” he told me, chewing on his bottom lip and tracing his finger around the top of the cup, a half-dozen rings gracing both hands and his palms were calloused. He had a long, silver chain hanging low on his neck, the cross, rusted, and clearly older than the wearer himself. “The normal stuff really.”

“I’m Laurel,” I introduced myself suddenly, giving in to the niggling thought of never having had to introduce myself to a stranger before. Everyone I knew now had never really been a stranger; they’d either been friends of the family or friends from a young age or friends of Jovie. If we’d ever met someone new, it would be Jovie who introduced herself first, and then I’d just be knows as ‘Jovie’s sister’ or ‘the other Bird daughter’. I didn’t know where I got the confidence from; it was like it flared up inside of me, bursting.

“Goodnight, Laurel,” he smiled gently, like he knew I was going to melt soon, or break into a thousand pieces. “I’m Finch.”

He held his hand towards mine on the table and I reached forwards to shake it, but was met with a steaming mug of coffee instead, the young waitress having only placed it down seconds before with the deftness you would expect a diver in the Coastguard to practise. I looked towards the counter, seeing no one but smelling the soft undertones of baking walnuts and candied applesauce; I shouted a small “thank you,” but got no reply, assuming her to be in the kitchen.

“So, Laurel,” Finch begun, smiling wondrously at me, like the cat that got the cream, eyeing me with those enticing, cucumber eyes and taking a sip from his teacup. I did the same, using whatever breathing time I still had to swallow the rich coffee, tinted with caramel and reminding me of the sweet, sugary frappes Jovie was always begging me to try. “Who are you?”

“I’m Laurel,” I said quietly, “Laurel Bird,” I said even quieter.

“No, I mean, who are you? Like, what do you do?” he asked, slowly but surely catapulting himself into my heart with his concealed questions that made my head run in different directions, trying to escape his jade eyes and understanding. “What do you want to be known for?”

Me, Jovie whispered, silently perking up once more, smiling her cherry lips and twinkling her golden brown eyes.

Finch carried on, “Go on, let me guess. You’re an up-and-coming actress, seeking solace in a naïve, young stranger’s bed? You’re a twisted murderer, looking for her next victim?” he continued, trying to make me laugh another true laugh, pestering me with different scenarios until I gave in and offered him an answer. “So what then? Gonna lure me in with that dazzling smile of yours?”

“No, none of that.” I scrunched my eyebrows at him in frustration. How could someone so enigmatic be so exasperating? “Honestly, I’m just a little tired of having to act all the time.”

“So you are an actress?” he pointed out, assuming that he was right and smiling smugly into his teacup, swilling the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing. This would have normally disgusted me but it didn’t.

“No, no, no. I’m tired of having to pretend all the time.” I sighed into my mug of coffee, wishing that I took it with sugar and thinking of how sweet Jovie always made it. “I’m sick of it.”

“What happened to you?” he inquired, leaning forwards and forcing his chain to hang lower into the half-drained cup, risking poisoning it with the metallic taste of silver.

“I needed a buoyancy aid.”

I glanced at Finch, his face catching shadows and a yellow glow, and I wondered why he’d taken the time to look at me. To try to figure me out. His eyes looked at me holding a reply, both sobering and intoxicating.

“Traumatic?” he asked suddenly and I was taken aback by how little time it had taken him to figure part of me out. It was like he wanted the part of me that I refused to give.

“What?” I asked, aware of how close we were, his face mere inches from my own, so close that I could make out each individual eyelash, lighter than I expected, given his dark hair, so light that they looked like spider’s web. A drop of water clung to one of them, iridescent under the lantern light, reflecting my own eyes.

“How bad was it?” he repeated, this time defining what he’d actually meant. “I know you experienced something; I’m just trying to work it out.” He’s just trying to work out how fucked up you are, Jovie added, goading me like sisters do.

“Yes.”

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Were you scared?”

I swallowed, hesitating. I shook my head.

“Did you feel helpless? Were you nervous? Panicked?”

“What kind of questions are these?” I asked incredulously, actually considering whether this guy was an actor himself. His attitude changed, giving me whiplash with how quick his mood could flip, along with his habit of asking me extremely personal questions. “Do you normally interrogate people like this?”

“It’s just a framework, so I can get a vibe,” Finch answered, shrugging his hoodie off next to him in the booth, shedding it like a second skin, as if the material was armour and he didn’t need it anymore. “See if you have any skeleton’s in your closet.” Now I felt the need to shed my skin and disappear, rise up, run.

“The first.”

“Helplessness?” he repeated, intrigue clouding the single word.

“Yes, all the time.”

“Been hallucinating? Any visions, or voices?” he continued, asking the kind of questions one would be asked at a psyche evaluation. I knew how to answer; I knew how I should answer.

This time I didn’t hesitate, “Yes.”

“Do you see ghosts?” It was random but neither of us batted an eyelid, almost as if Finch had asked someone these questions before, like some sort of familiarity test.

“Not ghosts, not ghosts; I don’t believe in that.” Gran had always told Jovie and I to be open about anything and listen to any kind of voice if it spoke to you. Others might say Gran was a bit different, peculiar, mental even, but we just thought she was kooky. A little more tuned than everybody else. “Or heaven or hell. It’s not that kind.”

“Then what is it?”

“Manifests.” It was the only word I could think of.

“Like hidden?” Finch asked me, unsure to what exactly it meant. A manifestation was something that showed or embodied something intangible; it was a symptom.

“Yeah, sort of. It comes to me in waves,” I tried to explain to him, hesitating whether he would think I was simply a mad-girl, or if he understood me, to what extent, I didn’t really care. “Asking myself a question and getting h-someone’s voice back in reply. As if they’re listening to my every thought, feeling every movement.”

“Do you have proper conversations?” Finch asked the question mad people always get asked, but it didn’t feel like he was judging me, more like he wanted to gage how believable all of this was. “As in, ask something and they reply?”

“No, it’s more like, I don’t know, it just fades across �" like wind.” I tried to think of something relatable, a metaphor to make him piece together what I’d been experiencing for nearly a year. “Then it’s gone, and I’m stuck trying to decide if it really happened, or if I’m going mental.”

“I don’t think it’s mental.”

“You don’t?” I asked, sceptical whether he was pulling my leg and just trying to get a rise out of me.

“There are still feelings,” he almost breathed the words, exhaling them as if they would evaporate like water and never be acknowledged again. “You’ve just got to let yourself actually feel them.”

“It’s almost like I can’t,” I admitted, wanting to be honest with him, unlike I usually was with Mum and Pops. “I’ve tried to feel sad, but I can’t. It’s like I’m immune, numb even.”

“There must’ve been love.” Finch blinked at me from behind his downcast eyelashes, stirring his tea with a look of acceptance on his face. He was mature, I knew that, but I didn’t quite know how mature he was; it was like he’d experienced everything and anything, all at once. He wasn’t belittling me or throwing me to the curb with patronising eye rolls and obviously researched comments, he was trying to help me.

“Love. There’s always love, isn’t there?” I asked him rhetorically. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” I sounded like a character from one of the Romantic books Jovie would read after she’d been dumped by her flavour-of-the-month; proclaim my cynicism to Finch in untrue ‘Laurel-fashion’. “In books and films and plays, it’s always so compelling and so complex. There should be more than one word for love.”

“Is there not?” he asked, interrupting my spiel and waking me from my head filled with faulted plotlines. “People experience love that kills and love that redeems. There’s love that believes in the guilt in love that saves the bereaved.”

“What people do for love, die for it even,” I finished, exhaling as if I’d run a marathon, or swam across the lake at the docks. I shivered. The rain had stopped for a moment outside and I noticed the moon was out in full force. “The sun loved the moon so much, he died every night to let her breath.”

Finch raised an eyebrow, expectant. I carried on,

“There was once a moon, as beautiful as could be, only the stars could fathom, but the sun could not see. The sun so radiant, he burned so bright. The moon so luminous, but only showed her face during the night,” I recited, having heard Gran tell the story so many times to Jovie and I. It was our story, the story that related to us. “She was untouchable, surrounding herself with a blanket of darkness. The sun would give anything to catch a glimpse of the moon illuminating the night sky.”

I thought of the nights when Jovie would catch me sitting on the windowsill, too nervous to try to make it onto the roof in the dark, and she’d lie in bed, watching me watching the sky. The light of the moon would float on the black clouds, creating patterns on the streets below and looking like white fire. Floating, Jovie repeated in my head. I hated the word. I looked at Finch and he had his eyes closed, almost like he was dreaming. I continued,

“Until one day when the sun was sliding out of the heavens, he caught a glimpse of her. She was peeking up, a rare side of her being exposed to the light. And while the sun could shine, he knew the moon could glow,” I paused, swallowing back the tears as my mind flashed to our glowing room. “Just as the stars were wandering into the night, the sun fell in love like a lightning bolt. How he wished to see her more than the fleeting moments he shared with her at both dawn and dusk. But they were a world apart.”

I stopped, imagining how Jovie would laugh and joke, saying that we were, one day, going to be a world apart, and find our way back to one another �" pulling on the end of a piece of string and feeling it pull back, just as strong. I tried that now but felt nothing.

Finch opened one eye, the murky green stilling me, forcing my mind to the last time I’d felt that string pull. The docks where we would take turns paddling, seaweed up to our knees, tangling and wrapping around our feet like hands grabbing for air. Jovie would dance in the rock pools as I watched. Pops would buy us ice cream and Mum would sit with Gran on her old, woollen blanket. Even last year, it was the last remaining Bird outing, an annual thing that hadn’t yet died out, burnt out or drowned.

He caught my eye, urging me on with a soft smile. My voice was getting raspy but I didn’t stop,

“’Go,’ the moon whispered to the sun one of those nights, her voice as sweet and sorrowful as the last light of morning. ‘Go and let me breathe, for you and I have decided fates. You illuminate the day, and I cast a glow on the night’.” Jovie always thought it was sad, she would cry afterwards, only soft tears that left silent trails in her foundation, but I thought it was peaceful, happy even. “During the summer he would stay a little longer just in case she would change her mind. It was no use.”

I finished, taking a drink from my mug and trying to appreciate the caramelised taste on my lips.

“That’s it?” Finch asked incredulously, sitting up right and opening his eyes as if he needed to see my eyes to assure himself that the story had come to a complete end.

“Pretty much,” I admitted, familiar with the disbelief in his tone, as it was similar to the one that clouded Jovie’s the first time she heard the story being told. “The sun could feel the moon’s peaceful soul and it soon became clear. He would die each and every night to let his true love breathe, for it would put an end to all her misery.” I took another sip.

“Well that’s fucked up, isn’t it?” he asked, laughing bitterly, unhappy with the true ending. He seemed to me like the guy who liked a happy ending and was used to being awarded with one.

“Not really,” I said aloud for once, always used to saying it in my head so as not to argue with Jovie, “it’s all about sacrifice and giving something up for the person you feel deserves to be loved more than yourself.”

“Does that not scare you, though?” I raised my eyebrow at Finch this time, questioning him further and making his ears go slightly pink at the tips. “Sacrificing yourself?”

The doctors had all phrased it like that, even after, when Pops had given a statement and I had come to, the sedation wearing off and leaving me with phosphenes dancing in front of my eyes, colours of blood red and whirlpool blue and seaweed green swarming around my face. I had been told that some people have to be sacrificed sometimes.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.”

“What scares you?” he asked, his raspy voice cutting the silence and waking me from my own thoughts. Finch’s eyes were alight, as if they were shimmering. It was ethereal and I couldn’t look away.

“Heights?” I wasn’t sure what scared me; the thought of being up high made me feel nauseous. Maybe it was the idea of falling that I was truly scared of. I knew what made me feel terrified though �" I could see the colours in front of my eyes again and the deafening silence around my ears and my body and my throat.

“No. What scares you, not heights, not f*****g spiders? What makes your heart race, your knees shake, your palms sweat?”

You, I thought to myself. People like you. Falling in love with you, Jovie’s pesky voice added. I swatted her voice away, not even wanting to flirt with that idea. The way he looked at me, straight in the eye, no wavering confidence, no nothing, had me in a net. It was like I was a fish, floundering, tangled up and screaming for air �" well, water. How ironic? Jovie sneered, her cherry lips resembling the Cheshire cat as she spun around inside of my head, like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole.

“I don’t know,” I spluttered because he was distracting; he had me in a state of panic. I knew what scared me �" that was the problem.

“There’s gotta be something that scares you, Laurel.” The way he spoke my name sent shivers down my spine. The way each syllable was defined.

“Not being who I’m supposed to be. Not being good enough,” I admitted quietly. “Death. Not falling in love.” Life. Falling in love.

He was quiet, as if he knew how exhausting it had been for me to answer him. He smiled at me and moved his hand to cover mine, stopping the tremors from travelling up my arms and into my brain. “We never know who we’re supposed to be, we just hope that who we end up at the finish line is the best version of ourselves we could’ve ever possibly created.”

“So, who are you supposed to be, Finch?” I asked, smiling through the crack in my façade. He hesitated, sniffling and picking up his tea again �" the moment over.

“I don’t know, Laurel, but I guess that’s kinda the beauty of it.”

“I feel like I know you even less than I know myself.” I laughed because it was true; he was a closed book, sealed shut and stitched secure with thread as fine as the weak glue that was holding me together.

“Let’s get to know each other then,” he suggested, smiling wildly with wide eyes and clean skin, his black hair beginning to curl up around his ears like vine on a building. “What’s your favourite colour?”

I laughed then because it was the most cliché question in the history of cliché questions, something you’d ask your friend in reception class, or talk about when learning a language for the first time.

“My favourite colour…” I thought, my mind trailing through all of the shades I’d seen while sitting up on the roof, the light pink and dusky yellows, the cool blues and sharp violets, the dark whites and light blacks. “Only one?” Finch nodded. “There’s too many.”

“Mine’s blue,” he said simply. I scrunched my eyes, asking for a valid explanation, making a point of staring at his hoodie and the baseball cap left strewn next to him, raising an eyebrow. “People who have blue eyes never really have blue eyes; they’re clear. Translucent. It’s like whoever made them decided to deceive all others, even their own reflection.” He smiled. “I kinda like that.”

Satisfied with his answer, I said, “I like it when the sun is just rising �" when it breaks the line of the horizon �" and for a split second, you see all the colours, at full brightness.” I sighed. “I like the colour of the sky when it changes into a new day.”

Finch seemed like he was in a haze for a minute, so I looked at my mug and took the last sip of lukewarm coffee.

“I take it asking your favourite drink would be daft?” he commented, suddenly back to cracking jokes, no longer half-there, half-elsewhere. His eyes had brightened again, the cloud of distance gone and replaced with striking gold, flecks of the colour intertwined with the green and it was hard to distinguish whether it was the lantern above or if it was just him.

I laughed, “I’m definitively a coffee girl.”

He laughed, “I’m definitely not,” he paused, clarifying, “either.”

“Tea is just so,” I made a face, “bleurgh �" it’s like lukewarm leaf juice.” As I said it, I could see Finch’s face turn defensive, like he was ready to argue his point, armed with a pot of the very thing I detested and the charm of a love potion.

Catching my smile, he hesitated on the thought, swallowing slightly, “Each to their own,” he nodded, almost like making me smile was worth allowing me to win this round. “Laurel?”

“Mmm?” I hummed, leaning forwards on my arms, my hands folded together so that I had somewhere to rest my chin. He was watching me with those curiosity eyes and I knew that what he about to ask wouldn’t be something as simple as the tea-versus-coffee debate.

“What’s your biggest regret?”

I hummed again, thinking back to all the times when Jovie and I would play the piano when it rained. We would sit on the small, wooden stool (her on the right, me on the left �" just like how we had been in the womb) and we would play half of the song each. I would play the rhythm, the steady beat; she would play the melody, the main show, because she was the main character�"the protagonist�"the star at the centre of our own unfolding story. We were surrounded by our supporting cast: family and friends hanging in our immediate orbit. They were scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drifted in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, were the extras. The random passers-by, each living a life as vivid and complex as her own.

“They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited mentalness.” I thought about what Gran had told us. “When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs’ flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you’ll never be able to see. That you’ll never know exists. In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of a story passing on the news. As an open window at dusk.”

“Laurel?” Finch asked, a look on his face that suggested he heard every single word I’d just spoken. I met his eye. “What’s your biggest regret?”

“Giving up the piano,” I answered as if I hadn’t just spoken a soliloquy of complete and utter irrelevance. “When a storm would happen, I always found it calming. Something in the lull of the music that would somehow bring me back down.” And my voice, Jovie added obnoxiously, but I couldn’t deny it: Jovie was my rescuer when the thunder would crash and the wind would wail. Even up until recently, when her mood was moody and, instead of spending the early mornings watching me watching the sky, she spent them with her head over the toilet �" “Don’t tell Mum!” she had made me promise while I held her hair, no longer the ‘Princess Bird’.

“I used to play a bit, played in a band since high school,” Finch said suddenly, waking me up from the memory. The dreamy look was back, waltzing across his face as his smile tap-danced on the left dimple in his cheek, the nostalgia swaying and twirling in those green eyes. “Even played a few for a record producer at a grungy bar once when I was first at uni.”

“I didn’t peg you as a pop band kind of guy,” I quipped, looking him dead centre in the eye, a smile of my own threatening to show itself when I caught his eyes widen.

“We were very rock ‘n’ roll. Smashed a few guitars back-in-the-day,” he did a Mick Jagger wink, pausing overdramatically. “Couple of ballad covers, mostly our own music though. Of the indie-rock variety, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed, squinting my eyes good-naturedly at the joking tone to his voice.

Finch sighed, almost like he regretted beginning the story, nevertheless, he proceeded, pulling at his lip with a sort of hesitation.

“He said that my songs were like glass shattering,” he whispered, the last words blending together into one single sound of unhappiness. I couldn’t decide whether he was a happy person who’d experienced sadness, or if he was sad and hid behind a happier time. “I gave him my mix-tape. Few months later, I hear one of my tracks on the radio �" a single chord and I knew; he’d fucked me over.”

“What was it like?”

“Gigging?” I nodded. “It was like my own personal stash of an illicit drug. The intensity and pure exhilaration, then it was just quiet. Y’know?”

“No, not really,” I told him honestly, never having experienced a standing ovation that wasn’t when I was stood next to Jovie at our school’s Christmas concert, or when I was awkwardly clapped back to my seat after a solo presentation went wrong during class.

“Electrifying almost, standing in front of a crowd who knew the words you wrote �" could relate to them, feel them �" and getting a buzz.” He was dazed by the memory, having a similar effect as me. “Afterwards it was nothing in comparison. People warned us about the demand of a new band and whatnot, and the effect it could have on young lads like us, but we didn’t care. We were finally getting noticed, breaking out.”

“So, what happened?” I flipped the question that he’d asked me before back to him. I wanted to know more, understand more.

“I stopped dreaming,” he said simply, stating it like it was a fact, engraved in the stars.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like I forgot how to ask myself “what if”. I forgot how to close my eyes and write.” It was sad watching him say this because he had the look Jovie began to have in her eyes when she’d come home late and not say much.

“Nothing else?” I asked, wanting to know more about him, craving to know as much as he knew about me.

“Well, the norm really. Got used to hanging out in back alleyways outside stage doors instead of studying, just waiting for someone to offer a joint of something, anything.” I was stunned, disappointed even. I knew a few people who’d taken drugs the odd time, even Jovie had tried some stuff before (not to mention the bedtime pills she’d slip into her water), but never in this much desperation. He made it sound like an inevitability.

“Why?”

“Getting high used to be like how you imagine heaven. Pure light. The perfection of it all. Even in me.” I couldn’t comprehend why he was telling me this, like he had to justify his actions. It was like he wanted me �" no, needed me �" to believe him. To see his side. To understand. “Then I got lost, kept trying to climb higher, get closer to that light. Like an endless ladder where all you do is get further and further away.”

“You seem like the type to know better than that?” I admitted, thinking back to when I’d given Jovie the same lecture. “Trying to get something unreachable.”

“There’s a part of you that wants to get lost, too, y’know? To climb that ladder.” He sighed, reaching to drain his tea, like a scratching impulse to drag me off my cloud. “I can tell.”

“If you met yourself, what would you say?” I asked him, hyperaware of our knees touching under the table and the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

“Get your heads back up in the clouds, I don’t know.” He laughed, shaking his head and facing the floor. “What would you say?”

“Better luck next time.”

Jovie always banned me from saying that; she was optimistic while I hung onto test scores and constructive criticism, forever trying to improve myself. She’d always told me that if I aimed to be the kind of person I wanted to grow up into, I would do just fine. She never let a teacher’s comment or seaweed drag her down. Only once, Jovie reminded me, her facetiousness effervescing like the pink bubble-gum she blew on.

“It’s weird but there’s this… this, this part of me that wants to be doing something all the time,” Finch exploded. It was like the tea had altered his whole, entire demeanour. “I just want to learn stuff and eat new foods and feel massively hot and cold, and, I don’t know, swim in all these different seas and meet people who know nothing about who I am or where I come from. I’ve got this… this, urge for it all. Do you know what I mean?”

He looked at me then, dead in the eye, dropping his hand from his mouth, and I smiled and shook my head slightly, overcome by his confidence and certainty. The only thing I’d been that certain about in my life was that there would always be someone who felt the exact same walking the earth. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I just �" it makes me feel … alive, y’know?” he asked again, the word filling Sonder with something resembling nervousness and excitement �" some kind of desperation to live. “You’re here and you mean something and if you died tomorrow you will have left something behind.”

I swallowed loudly. “Finch…”

“I don’t wanna die without feeling alive,” he said quietly. “That’s my worst fear.”

It was such an honest thing to say that for a moment I was taken aback. Something clicked inside of me, like I was coming up for air; the murky green separating and letting me swim upwards to the water’s surface. The seaweed claws released their hold of me, and Jovie smiled down from the giant’s workshop in the sky; her golden brown eyes like looking in a mirror and holding the perfect amount of magnificence within them.

It was then that I realised with a deep sense of relief that for the first time in a long, long time, suddenly it didn’t feel like there was a million miles between the rest of the world and myself. There wasn’t much space at all. I reached for his hand �" just like how he’d reached for mine �" lacing my fingers through his and squeezing them tightly. I should have been nervous about doing that, but I wasn’t. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

“You might possibly be the most magnificent person I know, Finch,” I told him, and he froze, surprised, before his whole face lit up.

“You’re mental,” he grinned, and before I could stop him, he brought our interlocked hands to his lips and kissed my fingers, beaming like I’d just promised him the world. He stopped suddenly, his warm lips still resting on my cold hand, as if he had frozen again. I felt hot and, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t mind someone being impulsive. Not thinking. Not waiting. Then I looked into his eyes, still, and I wondered if it was his warmth that enveloped me and became mine, or if my cold found him and seeped in, instead.

“I miss jumping in puddles.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice, the rough timbre of it bringing me out of my head once more. When I tilted my head toward him, I found him watching me, a now wistful glint in the green. “What?” I croaked out, unsure if I’d heard him correctly.

“I miss jumping in puddles,” Finch repeated, speaking clearer this time. “After being told to ‘grow up’ for so long, you kinda forget what it feels like to act how you really want to. I love jumping in puddles.”

“That’s �" that’s ridiculous.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s jumping in puddles,” I told him incredulously. “There are more important things to miss.”

“Well, of course I miss my family. All my friends.” Finch was quiet for a minute and, when he spoke again, his voice had softened, a fondness to it that warmed my heart just from the sound of it. “I always miss my house in Surrey. The river that ran through the field near the house. The sound of the birds chirping early on a spring morning. The feeling of the sun on my face after it had been hidden by clouds for days.” He paused, chewing on his lip. “But I also miss jumping in puddles and trying to swing over the top bar and making mistakes that I don’t even regret.”

I wondered how old Finch was and what he did during the day, what he did for a living, whether he was a student or worked in an office, whether he had a girlfriend, whether he was happy. The look on his face suggested he could be happy, and as crazy as Finch sounded, turning playground activities and pubescent slip-ups into poetry, I sort of understood what he was saying. Because, recently, I had been neglecting the smaller things that I missed daily without really thinking about them. “Freddo frogs being 10p.”

“Freddos?”

“And Dunk-a-roos. The feeling of coming home after school and just spending all day outside on your bike. Library cards and sitting on beanbags in the corner with a good book without being called ‘totally weird’.” I laughed. “Not worrying about eating too many fries from McDonald’s and having a chocolate milkshake because you’d be running home like a crazy person ten minutes later when it started raining.”

“Concerts in tiny venues where the music is so loud you can feel it in your bones.” He smiled, looking at me with those dreamy eyes of his, as if he was caught halfway between reality and fantasy.

“Dancing to Fleetwood Mac on the record player.” I remembered when we were younger and Pops would tease Gran, claiming that she had a ‘crush’ on Stevie Nicks. She’d spend hours playing her music while she ironed in the kitchen; Mum and Pops would ballroom dance, twirling with colours of kind eyes and firecrackers.

“Hugs from my mum.” The sad smile replaced the happier one.

“The sound of my dad’s laugh.” I looked at my empty coffee cup, moving my finger around in sugar granules that left snow angels on the table.

“Life not revolving around the future,” he said, spitting out the final word as if it scolded his tongue. Finch’s features contorted and for a moment I forgot that he was handsome �" there was something ugly about the way his eyes narrowed and his lips snarled.

I sucked in a harsh breath, exhaling, “Swimming in the ocean.”

Finch met my eye, his face faltering, “Feeling like I have a home somewhere waiting for me.”

“Do you have a home?” I asked, needing to know more about him. There had been boys I’d liked before, only fleeting crushes because of nice hair and thoughtful gestures and well-answered questions in class, but there was something that both comforted and set me on edge when I looked at Finch.

“I did.” He coughed into his elbow, swallowing when he looked back towards me. “When I left for uni a few years ago, I moved from Surrey to study Art, now that, was a joke to my father.” Finch laughed without any humour in it. “Practically disowned me there and then. My mother, however, always saw so much of him in me, and, when she got ill,” he paused, chewing on his lip again and raking a hand through his hair, pulling at it, tugging, “well I didn’t have the heart to correct her.”

“What do you mean, how ill is she?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Let’s just say she loved my father a lot, and when he left, she changed.” Finch was sombre, avoiding my eyes. My parents loved each other infinitely; Jovie and I had always been lucky that way. “She had some good days, but some, some weren’t so good.” He sighed, as if he was releasing some kind of weight he’d been carrying around for years. “Some days I’d get home and she’d be cooking in the kitchen with the brightest smile on her face with the radio on some salsa station playing and we’d eat and talk about our days and then we’d go to bed and in the morning it was like she was a different person. Like she snapped and I’d woken up with a woman who wasn’t my mum.”

“Oh, Finch,” I whispered, not wanting to give him the same sad eyes that so many people gave me, but still wanting to tell him, show him, that I knew how he felt. That I understood him.

“It first happened when I was seventeen, my father had been working late for a while and my mother began to walk around the house like she knew �" like she felt �" something was about to change. She started to wear perfume more and she’d kiss me on the cheek every morning and night.” I knew what was coming, noticing now the way Finch folded into himself when he spoke the last sentence. “She only did it once when my father still lived with us, but then again, he didn’t really live with us. It was more like he lived in us �" like, when he was around, we all felt like a family. Then he left and it started to happen.”

“Finch, you don’t have to-“

“I felt like I was being smothered. Slowly,” he spoke the word as if it was a knife cutting into his chest, ripping him apart and leaving him with a gaping hole in replace of his heart. “Each day I was getting closer to something I both feared and was assured by. She would hold my hand while we ate and then she’d sit right next to me while we watched television, like she just wanted to be close to someone who loved her, not matter what kind of love that love was.”

“Please, Finch-“

“She never touched me after he left, not like that anyway, she touched me like she forgot I was her son, almost as if she wasn’t conscious anymore.” I imagined a switch being flipped and I shivered. “She would called me my father’s name, argue to me over bills and shopping lists, when I’d leave for university early on the Monday morning and return home late on the Friday night, she’d wait up for me, thinking I was working away. I hated every minute I spent with her, and then hated myself for hating it, hating her.

I’d always known something was wrong with her but then I’d talk myself out of it, tell myself that she was lonely, she was sad. Depressed, that’s what all the Internet searches told me. I refused to refer her to hospital, because, deep down, I knew that she’d never be ‘mum’ to me. She’d never be the person she should’ve been to me.

Eventually, someone found out, I can’t remember who �" don’t want to. But they did, and she was given medical care and pills, lots of pills, and I dropped out of uni and tried to focus all of my… anger into something, anything. That’s when I met back up with my old band mates and started doing things I shouldn’t.”

“Where is she now?” It was stupid of me to ask but I couldn’t stop myself.

“She’s gone, hopefully somewhere better.” Finch sat up straighter and wiped his face, as if he’d been crying and I’d somehow missed it. “Laurel, she was very ill, very sad. There was nothing anyone could do.” I thought I was beginning to grasp a part of Finch no one had ever allowed me to hold onto, and in a way, I was. “My mum was a sad woman when she died, the doctors told me that she’d always had that sad part inside of her, it was only when my father left that it began to show.”

“You cared for her,” I whispered, forming the word like it was bile in my mouth. “She abused you and you cared for her, Finch.”

“Laurel, you’ve got to understand that she couldn’t help what she did to me, she only did it because it was the only way she thought she could survive,” he told me slowly, anchoring me with his green glass eyes. “Imagine being trapped inside of someone else’s body and everything your mind tells you to do, your body �" this alien body �" tries to scratch and claw at you, to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong, it’s evil.”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t fathom how Finch could be so understanding and accepting of this, this thing. It was something that not only changed him, but everything he was meant to do in life, it changed his course and I couldn’t wrap my head around how he was so longsuffering of that.

“You didn’t deserve anything, Finch. You don’t deserve anything bad to happen to you, ever,” I told him honestly, not caring whether the giant in the sky sent down bolts of thunder and storms of great swirling grey to eat me alive, because Finch only deserved good.

“Yeah, well, sometimes there’s no one else who can,” Finch shrugged, “I only did what my father was too cowardly to do.” He was bitter, and rightfully so, but I couldn’t get my head around someone with so much light in them could be bottling so much darkness inside. “It was years ago.”

“Is that why you like to ask why?” I asked him, ironically, suddenly. “Because it makes you feel like you know people?”

He was taken aback, “I guess so,” he thought for a moment. “My mum’s illness pointed me in the direction of psychology, which it what I’m studying now, second year.” He smiled, his dimples not showing by his eyes slightly brightening. “Because of my mum, I’m on the right pathway �" my pathway �" which I guess is what people try to do all along.”

I thought of Jovie, floating on her back at the docks, of Pops, hauling me out of the water while Mum and Gran got caught in the old, woollen blanket. Of the sirens that echoed in my head as if I was still gasping underwater. Of the lights that flashed in front of my eyes as if Jovie was shining a mirror in my face, trying to get me to wear makeup. Of our glowing room and how it didn’t seem to glow anymore, didn’t seem to sing. I thought of Jovie and I, the Bird twins, and how only one of us had the opportunity to fly while the other was forced to swim with the sea.

Jovie told me a story that day, when the sky was golden and the docks were bathed in colours of magnificence, about two sisters who shared the same room, the same clothes, the same thoughts at the same moment.

“These two sisters did not have much but they had each other. The older sister walked ahead of the younger so the younger one always knew where to go. The older one took the younger to the river where they floated on their backs like dead men. The older girl would say: ‘Dunk your head under a few inches, then open your eyes and look up at the sun’. The younger girl: ‘I’ll get water up my nose’. The older: ‘C’mon, do it’, and so the younger girl did it and her whole world filled with light.”

Jovie finished, “That’s like us, Laurel-leaves, isn’t it?” She smiled wickedly, her cherry red lips stretching into a smile that some may consider sinister, but I didn’t because it was Jovie and she was mental.

“Yeah, Jo-Jo, except you definitely lead me,” I pointed out and she punched my arm, cackling as we floated at the docks. Pops had taken a stroll down to the ice-cream van to grab us all a treat, Gran asking for a 99 Flake while Mum fancied a Maxibon ice-cream sandwich. Jovie and I flipped a coin as to who would order a sherbet volcano and who would settle for a double scoop of bubble-gum, it was fitting that I got the bubble-gum while Jovie got the sherbet as she’d been popping pieces all morning.

Jovie blew an almighty bubble, pointing to where Mum and Gran were chatting and flicking through old Ideal Home magazines on Gran’s blanket. We’d left for our annual weekly Bird outing at the docks where Grandpa had owned a boathouse before he died several years ago, this was a place we all knew like the back of our hands, where we all felt safe, our second home.

“You think they’ll notice if we play dead men?” Jovie asked with a devilish smirk, her left eyebrow hiked up into her hairline as if it was daring me. Her honey blonde hair shone in the sun and the water droplets that clung to it seemed to me as if they were pearls. Mine, on the other hand, was undoubtedly tangled and caked in various layers of salt; Jovie’s always seemed to shimmer, like it belonged in the water.

I gave her a pointed look, “More than the time we played Bogie at Grandpa’s funeral.” We shared a giggle, having only ever been to one funeral during our short lifetimes and never really knowing what was and had ever been ‘appropriate’.

“Don’t be boooring, Laurel,” she dragged the word out, taunting me with it, knowing I’d inevitably give in to her one way or another. “Or I’ll have to tickle you.”

I stopped giggling then, looking up at her lustrous golden eyes, she was teasing. “You dare,” I spoke, my voice getting washed out by the sound of the waves that were beginning to pick up lightly as the tide began to return inland. She made a move towards me. “You dare!” I squealed, propelling myself away from her and towards the docks.

“Come on, Laurel-leaves, don’t be a scaredy cat,” she sung, swimming further into the water like she was born to do. “Follow me, follow me,” she sung the beginning of the hymn we would sing in church on Sundays, smiling at me from over her shoulders, a part of her knowing I would do as she said.

“Wait up!” I shouted, moving my arms faster to tackle the waves that were coming our way, some rather forceful as they were overcome by Jovie and doubled in size when they worked their way in my direction. “Jovie, slow down!” She was getting further and further away now, almost twice as far away as I was from the dock, and she showed no sign of slowing down, as usual. Jovie with her mile-a-minute thought processes and fast legs; me with my indecisiveness and tiring arms.

The water was becoming dangerous now, as we had been warned by Pops before we ran away from him �" me, chasing to try to catch up with Jovie �" and dove over the docks, exchanging our shoes and socks for imaginary mermaid tails. I could see Jovie from where I’d been forced to stop, to tread water, to wait; she was struggling against a particularly tough wave, one that was preventing her from moving forwards, moving further away, leaving me. It was like she was screaming but I couldn’t hear her somehow. Her arms were moving frantically but I couldn’t make out her legs.

Pops was shouting for us to come back from where he was stood on the wooden docking. Mum and Gran were still flipping pages and drinking iced tea, not thinking anymore than they should about the two Bird daughters pushing the limits of Pops’ patience.

I waved to Pops, still trying to keep my legs moving against the strong current that showed no inclination of quelling, and I could see his cool composure turning to panic. Jovie was too far away for me to make out her eyes, my eyes, our eyes, but I thought I saw her motion for me to swim to her. Her movements were overly gesticulated, however not like Mum’s were when she would tell us off for answering back, these were precise and forceful. Jovie was asking for help, something that she never asked for.

Ordering my limbs to jump into action, I powered my way towards Jovie and away from Pops, no matter how many cries I heard from him for me to leave Jovie and swim back. I kept going, willing my tired arms and burning legs to keep going, just keep swimming I heard Jovie sing in my head.

I think I blacked out for a second because what I saw next must have happened quite quickly, one minute I was swimming alone, the next, Pops was grabbing me by my forearms and dragging my up. He held me like a was a ragged doll, dead weight, and he kicked his legs with the force of a man who was filled with desperation, he kicked us upwards and I could breathe again. We broke the surface and my lungs were coughing up water.

Jovie was nowhere to be seen but I could hear screaming, calls of help and pleas for someone. She called my name several times, repeating it as she was pulled under, swirling with colours of clear water and blue rocks and green seaweed. I hit and hit and hit at Pops’ chest as he dragged me away from Jovie, who refused to stop fighting against the arms of the water, much like I was within Pops’ firm grasp.

When I looked away from Pops’ kind eyes, I could only make out the outline of Jovie’s hand as it sunk beneath the crests, rollers of water covering it like a blanket as it swayed and waved to me. I was screaming, so loud that it sounded like silence, ringing in my ears like a storm. I fought against Pops for a while until he released me, I swam further out, only for a few seconds, and I dove, the water beginning to slow down around me. Underwater, it was bright and blinding, as if, all this time, I’d been swimming with my eyes closed.

Later on, when the Coastguard arrived too late and found only one twin still breathing air, I found out that Jovie’s leg had been caught on something under the water and, as the waves spiked and the tide came in, she’d failed to free it. I remember not liking the way they said the words ‘failed’ and ‘free’, as if she hadn’t succeeded in being confined, trapped. It made me hate what happened even more, like Jovie died without any justice.

Pops had rescued me, not Jovie, and I felt a burden.

Jovie was only trying to fill my world with light, and, in a sad way, I guess she had.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Jovie, about the little bubble we used to sit in when we were younger and would dream about buildings, about our room that sung on our arrival and glowed even when we felt gloomy, about Mum and Pops and everyone in Gran’s stories.

I thought our pathways were defined by what had happened to us, what kept us up at night, sat on our windowsills watching the sky change from pure crimson to sunburnt orange to golden yellow, from navy to ebony to blindness. In reality, it was defined by what kept us going, what kept us swimming.

Maybe I didn’t know the ins-and-outs of Jovie’s life without me, and maybe that was a good thing, because it meant that she had something to call her own. She’d always told me that we’d be there for each other, forever, and that we were to be an extra ear, just to listen, not judge, which was why I never thought twice about the pills she took before bed, or the little plus sign she kept secret at the bottom of her underwear drawer. She never told me about the boy who bought her the magazines, or the perfume, or the bubble-gum, but she did blush once when I mentioned her French tutor. Paris, fashion week, duh, sung Jovie. And I’d always thought her favourite colour was pink, but maybe, just maybe, I was learning that it could’ve been all the colours, at full brightness.

And with that, I knew Finch was right. You didn’t need to know somebody to love them. You didn’t need to know anything other than the fact that your heart sped up when they laughed and that you liked the way their hand felt holding yours and you wanted to sit with them just because it made you feel safer. You didn’t need to know what their favourite colour was or what their drink order was when they stayed up late at a cafe or why they always liked to make you smile. You didn’t need to understand them entirely, you didn’t need to try to figure every last piece of them out, and you didn’t need to be the person they went to when they didn’t feel okay. You just needed to know that they tried to fill your world with light, and that should be enough.

Finch smiled, and my heart sped up, cliché right? Jovie added, grinning at me from within the puddles outside. She sat propped up on her elbows with her blushing pink mermaid tail twirling in the rain, where she belonged, where she was meant to be, because some people are born to swim with the sea, and others, are born to fly, to sing and jump in puddles, to speak lines of poetry and look at the clouds.

“Laurel? You still there?” he asked, waving a hand in front of my face. His maelstrom eyes could most certainly see the truth behind my smile and pinpoint the sadness carved into each line of my face. And then he smiled, like he understood exactly how lost I was in life and that was when I realised that he was just as lost, too. We were staring at one another as if we were searching for something, and none of us knew what we could possibly be looking for, but it sort of scared us when we thought of what we might find.

“If you were a building, you’d be a church with the spires of La Sagrada Familia.” His eyes widened and he leant back, as if he was taking it all in, taking me in. “Something beautiful and impossible to replicate,” I paused, considering whether to proceed and have him thinking I was mental, or whether to proceed without caring. “You’d have the colours of the Blue City in Morocco because you’re sad and curious and it’s your favourite colour, but you’d be built into the canyon of the Guáitara River. You’d have the windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in France �" the most beautiful stained glass windows, because they say that windows are the eyes of a building.” I chose now to look into his eyes, bad decision Josie teased. “You’d have the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel �" the most famous ceiling in the world �" and the pipe organ from St. Stephen’s in Vienna. A lot of churches smell the same, like incense and smoke, but you wouldn’t; you’d smell like cucumbers and rain and leather because that’s the first thing I thought when I sat down across from you. You’d be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You’d be bright inside, like you’re bright inside, like you’ve got stars in your chest instead of a heart.” I stopped, smiling as he blushed slightly and chewed on his lip, sitting forward and playing with my fingers on the table. “But I’ve seen your heart, and I know where you’d keep it. In the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.”

Neither of us spoke, maybe it was because we were both too busy deciding whether we knew what someone’s heart really says about them, and whether or not spending an hour or two with someone really gives you a true representation of that person, or maybe it was because we were both kind of mental in our own ways. Me with my dead sister and fear of puddles; Finch with his broken family and fear of dying without feeling alive.

“You’re the most magnificent person I know, Laurel,” he whispered huskily, a simple gesture that made my heart burst and sing and glow all at once.

And maybe, to someone, I was.

Author's Note

Warnings of death and minimal mentions of drug use.