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It was easy for Mira to remember the moment she fell in love with Rumi.
From the moment they met, they butted heads, stubbornness meeting stubbornness, every training session a chance to one-up the other. Mira had rivals before, but she hadn’t called them that. She had called them enemies. It seemed ridiculous that she would have to eventually call this person an ally, with her goody two-shoes shtick and her ability to be infuriatingly perfect at everything she did. She was the kind of person Mira had always hated.
Then Mira found her one day, out by the old tree, kneeling in front of a grave. There was a look on her face Mira had never seen. There was a song on her lips Mira had never heard. Stone was her audience instead of a mother who could have been there, who could have loved her the correct way, the way parents are supposed to, who could have filled her heart in all the same places Mira’s was empty.
Then Rumi wept and Mira held her and Mira saw behind her façade for the first time. And Mira thought, maybe being allies meant more than having a common enemy. Maybe it meant standing beside someone who knew the shape of your grief and your reason for standing at all.
And by no choice of her own, Mira found her heart had chosen itself to love all the parts of Rumi that she hid from the world.
There were a lot of things to love about Zoey, but the first thing that grabbed Rumi’s heart was her fierceness.
It was a different kind of fierceness than Rumi was used to. When she first met the girl, she misjudged Zoey in the way so many people did, mistaking her blind trust and optimism for naivety. She didn’t have Mira’s intensity or Celine’s stoic determination or Rumi’s own devotion to perfection for the sake of their duty. But she did have a persistent, enduring hope that never wavered.
When they started training, Zoey struggled to keep up with her and Mira. She was always behind on laps. She was always behind on reps for their workouts. She was always the one disarmed during spars. And without fail, she would get up and keep going every single time, undeterred, a smile on her face.
Rumi worried that the life they’d been pulled into might dull some of that light. Somehow, it only made Zoey brighter.
The first time Zoey asked the girls if she could share a rap with them, they cozied down on the couch while Zoey stood in front of them, nervously fidgeting with the pages of her notebook. And then, her entire demeanor shifted.
Zoey’s face and voice took on a ferocity Rumi had never seen from her. The rhythm and lyrics flowed into Rumi’s soul, words about Zoey’s past, her home, her fears, her dreams, what it meant for her to be here now. Words that contained color and joy but also an ache of how things could have been, how she dreamed they could be.
When Zoey finished to applause from a speechless audience, her eyes lit up again, that usual smile stretching across her face and pushing her cheeks upward. In the same breath, she could yell about all the unfair things she endured and then stubbornly keep loving the world anyway.
In that moment, Rumi realized how far behind Zoey she was, and that she never wanted a life without this piece in it.
Zoey never forgot the feeling of the moment she fell in love with Rumi and Mira.
She had never been forced to make friends before. She grew up flitting between people, inserting herself into any group that would give her the time of day and retreating into her notebooks when they wouldn’t. Then she found out the fate of the world hinged on her befriending the coolest, most out-of-her-league people she’d ever met. It sounded more intimidating than the part about fighting demons.
She tried to rein her thoughts in, share a tolerable amount with them. They asked her more. And they listened. And then they asked some more. And before she knew it, they became a different sort of notebook, one that sang her words back to her, in voice and in heart.
When she was with them, she could be everything, no longer needing to choose which parts of her were right. She was loud and excitable, and later she was quiet and gentle, and they hugged her both times. She hummed softly at home and rapped angrily at the studio, and both times, they smiled and watched in amazement.
There was the day she felt the most homesick, when she went to sit on the roof at sunset and think about the sun rising on the other side of the world. And Mira and Rumi came out to sit on either side of her. Zoey asked them if she made the right decision coming here, how she could know what was right if there were things she loved about both places.
And two arms wrapped around her from either side, holding her close, no answer to give except “we’re glad we know you.” Something blossomed in her chest that she’d never felt before but that she somehow knew was the feeling of home. And she finally understood that her heart could be in two places and she didn’t have to choose.
Rumi wasn’t sure if she fell in love with Mira in this moment or if she just hadn’t noticed until then, but she remembers it.
Rumi had learned to separate in her mind the things she liked versus the things she could have. When they were out shopping one day, Zoey excitedly grabbing their arms and pointing all around, Mira calmly guiding them around the mall and frequently checking that Rumi’s hair was hidden, Rumi’s eye caught on something in a store window.
A shimmering white dress, strapless, gold accents swooping around the waist. Far too revealing. Nothing she could actually wear. She didn’t even know if she’d like wearing it. She’d never had a chance to try something like it. But it looked nice.
“It’s pretty,” Mira had commented over her shoulder, Rumi unaware she had been looking long enough to be noticed. With a shrug and mild agreement, Rumi moved on.
But the next month, Mira revealed the new outfit designs for their upcoming shoot and something caught in Rumi’s chest: sleeveless shimmering white top and shorts, gold accessories around the waist, with matching white skirts for Zoey and Mira. Rumi stared at the outfit, then at Mira who nonchalantly handed her a matching jacket “in case you prefer how this looks,” and left her to change.
The three of them regrouped a few minutes later, standing in front of the mirror and looking even better than Rumi could have pictured. And it took until then for Rumi to realize that Mira listened between the lines, hearing not just her words but her silences, not just the songs she sang onstage but those she sang in her heart.
And she wondered if Mira could hear the things Rumi’s heart sang about her.
It was hard for Mira to remember the moment she fell in love with Zoey.
Because every moment with Zoey felt like experiencing the world anew again, each one causing Mira to tumble closer and closer to never being able to leave her side again.
Perhaps the first moment was when Mira got injured during sparring and Zoey patched her up and smiled sunlight at her and told her it was ok if she wasn’t tough all the time. Or maybe it was the night Mira couldn’t sleep and Zoey laid out under the stars with her and talked long into the night and she held on to every word and it was the most time anyone had ever wanted to spend with her. Or maybe it was when Mira first opened up about her parents and Zoey came back three hours later to perform a diss track she had written about them and Mira laughed until her sides hurt and her heart felt whole again.
Eventually, she stopped trying to trace moments like a line with a starting point and instead let them play out in her head like a song, blending and repeating into one continuous melody that lived inside her.
Because in the end, the starting point doesn’t matter.
The when isn’t important when you love somebody more than breathing.