Javier

Autumn crept towards winter, and the sky was always dark. We were on a Ferris wheel by the river. Everything around us was grey, the sky leaking with misery. The river below us was choppy and dark as the sea. I'm afraid of heights; I didn't want to go on the ride, but Javier had been begging me to for weeks. And now the wind was cold against my face, and I felt outside of myself.

I could see myself sitting there with Javier. A girl who looks like me, but wasn't me. A little rag-doll of a girl. Dirty blonde hair whipping around her face. Fake blonde, of course, long and tangled, a mess. Skin so pale you can see her veins twizzling through her arms. Maybe the misery of being in love is already in her skin, maybe you can see it in the purple wells beneath her eyes. Maybe that's why she looks so crazed, why concerned strangers stare at her on the street.

The girl on the ferris wheel grips on to the silver bar in front of her. She shivers, wants to huddle into the boy's arms, but she feels too stiff. Her hair blows cold against her cheek.

'So you've decided to go to Scotland' she says finally. He avoids her eyes, looks down through the bars at the river. 'Yeah' he says. 'I guess I have.'

She nods, doesn't say anything. The Ferris wheel creeps upwards, and the little cage they share swings precariously in the wind. 'Let me come with you' she says.

And he sighs and shakes his head. 'I'm not ready for that' he says.

The months become weeks, and days. She tries to stop the time from running out, but he'll leave on Tuesday, and there's nothing she can do. So, there are two shapes curled together in the bed, one sleeping, one not sleeping. Naked, she twists in his arms. She climbs out of bed slowly, as if her movement might wake him, though nothing can wake him. Silently, she leans over and touches her lips to his back.

She picks up his jumper from the floor and pulls it over her body. Petals dried to the colour of champagne are strewn all across the carpet like fish scales. They crunch beneath her feet, and she remembers how those same petals made the bathwater pink, seeping warm into their pores. She remembers the wet sound of their skin colliding, how the petals clung to slippery limbs. The awkward press of his bones, so she was fossilised in ceramic. She touches his back lightly, and his skin is so warm, so brown, so soft.

And she stands by the window, forehead cold against the glass, and she thinks, You'll leave on Tuesday, and she doesn't believe it yet, doesn't believe that a love so young, so desperate, still in its first violence, could end. Just a little bit longer, she's begged him. Just a few more months, but he'll leave on Tuesday, and she stands bare-legged and cold, unable to sleep.

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