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Lights would flicker quicker than a glimpse at stardust, the fumes of freshly cut grass trampled on by the weight of keepsake sneakers trapped a high schooler’s mind in limbo as she awaited the day to end.
To wait for that final bell, the signal of freedom, even if it was only temporary.
She wanted to get out, to forsake the relentless day-to-day hustle. To skip the conversations, she knew, never really had any natural meaning.
She wasn’t escaping the school itself, more so, running from the predictions of someone in her mind. Fleeing before she could catch herself, nauseated over a situation she should’ve prevented miles away.
That’s the thing, though, she didn’t.
Rain didn’t actually prevent anything, especially when it was something she wanted. But she knew, she still knew what the future held.
And yet, she jumped anyway.
Even after everything, subconsciously, there was a part of her, some part tucked behind closed doors and sitting on a bookshelf from years ago, just collecting dust that her moral sense of things had neglected.
Instead of relying on the long-term side effects of her actions, she put herself on the focus of now.
The present tense. That big advertisement to “live in the moment.” An overdone cliche of yelling “yolo” with your hair sprialing out an open car window, catching every flare of air up your nose just to acknowledge that you exist.
Actions done within the moment cause baggage for your memories to dwell on in later years, and she knew that.
Rain understood that better than anyone, or at least she had thought she did.
The reason behind her dilemma was that she sought out a gift (at the time) of being able to drive anyone away by a simple act, a rhythmic one, to be exact.
Sure, she’d gotten the whole headache down, watching person by person ask and walk away with a rehearsed decline. She’d take that same story crumbled up, and set in a different perspective, and laugh it off with someone, as if it were a coffee table joke.
Now, she can’t do that anymore.
This time, somehow, it was different. It felt different?
It wasn’t love that she knew. But unfortunately, this emotion, this, she didn’t understand yet.
Rain just knew that something was there.
Whether it was a fleeting memory or a feeling that would swing over a century. It was confusing; she couldn’t comprehend it, didn’t glance out as to why so little could estimate so much.
To be transparent, it distressed her how forgetful she had been acting. Remembering that Jackie wasn’t exactly hers to ‘have’. She wasn’t for anybody.
No matter how easily Rain was able to manipulate her own mind into thinking otherwise.
Honestly, the whole thing was appalling. How quickly she switched off her brain, even if it was only for a moment. To cope with the damage already done, truly, it was astounding.
It quite frankly made her curious.
What was there about Jackie that she didn’t know? What was there to seek and find?
Better yet, what was there about Jackie that had Rain wanting to know in the first place?
There was a tidal wave of questions that overflowed her head like sheep, none that would stick like bad gum under a hand-me-down desk for later generations to deal with, but one shaped into puddles that stamped her memory.
“I can turn it off.”
She said, words still haunting her even now.
Jackie’s laugh over the matter wasn’t any help either.
What a load of bull, she wasn’t fooling anyone. She wasn’t fooling Jackie with that white lie either.
Hell, she couldn’t even fool herself.
Everything seemed so natural with Jackie; that was the problem.
Too easy.
You would think that someone so similar would drive you away as though you were being chased by lightning.
But, yet, here she stood.
Still, after passing that same line that should’ve never been crossed.
Rain wasn’t even mad at her, and to admit it swallowed her whole; she wasn’t even mad at herself.
She tried finding that shallow lake of guilt to gain some self-respect from it all, and she remained indifferent.
Rain wasn’t feeling guilty for what happened, and she knew that if Jackie asked her the same question in a universe where the day replayed on loop, she’d make the same choice all over again.
So, she found herself stuck.
Stuck in the memory of a kiss that never should’ve been, the hands that should’ve not known the cusp of her face.
Reliving the understanding of something she knew to be wrong, what should’ve been wrong.
It’s that it was all so complicated to unravel that even if she did actually do that herself, she would’ve gone mad.
“I know you know I love Rare, and that she’s the one I’ll one day marry, but right now I want you not to think about that, okay? Cause I’m about to do something that’s never to leave the two of us understand, Dash?”
It could’ve been the weight of the blonde’s hand resting on the cup of her cheek, a strand of a loose-waved curl slightly nearing in to tickle Rain’s skin.
Catching the glimpse of a prospective that if Rain had a camera for eyes, she would’ve already been out of film.
Possibly the crack in Jackie’s voice that made it sound overly sincere to go back before the unpredictable. Or maybe it’s what Rain drove her further off the cliff.
Then, a rasped thumb passed by her lips.
“I mean, yeah, no, I understand.”
Rain purged down saliva in a heavier gulp than she would like to reconcile for.
“Totally, understood.”
Rain reassured herself, watching as the gaze pierced straight through her eyes, eyelashes wisping away like gentle playful daggers of death.
How wonderful life is now that she is in the world and fully one with the serendipity of it.
The bliss of a spring harmony, an afternoon kissed by sunny-dewed tulips, freckled hands meeting bitten nails tainted by old decorative nail polish. Apple and cherry bathed lips meeting one anoth—
Fuck, she wished she were able to just grasp her mind around it.
Wrap her senses in a way so that she would be in a place to not fall prey to a cocky smile and a laugh that would crash her heartbeat into overdrive.
If she were truly speaking unspoken truths, it frightened her.
Rain was horrified because she knew that the feeling was temporary.
Some small grace of a shattered moral compass was smart enough to put that together.
And yet, in the end, none of that mattered.
Jackie could haunt a scent in a place that never knew her name, and Rain still would trace everything back to the melody of before.
The whiplash of a memory that never was, just a motion picture of Jackie’s face when she spoke out things she wished she had never meant.
Rain knew about Jackie and Rare, even if she bundled it up in a bottle and threw it away within a precocious ocean.
She still knew.
Rain found herself tugging at a rope that only grew tighter when Jackie would mention Rare.
On occasion, she’d smile and say something complimentary, but she never meant it.
That, she felt sorrowful for.
Not because she was coming off as a narc, but because it confused her how you could be so in love with somebody you never even met.
Maybe that wasn’t a good thing to state either; of course, she’d never have the audacity to ask Jackie that, so she let it be.
Let Rare and all her wonders of the sea, far yonder, be the residence of the unknown French fantasy.
Okay, now, that just sounds pathetic.
Rain pushed her thumb and index finger towards the brim of her nose, shutting her eyelids to regain meaningful thought, not jealous intimacy.
Did Rare know that each time Jackie was bashful, she’d hide under the rim of her father's hat?
Or when each time they hugged, Rain would get a wave of vanilla and sun-kissed apples that conquered all that she was able to smell that would stain on her clothes for weeks, even after being washed?
Maybe when each time Jackie was stumped on what to do, she would fiddle with a loose knot on the same red tie she wore in her hair.
The times Jackie would drunk call her, just to be able to talk to Rain. When she thought that it was getting too sentimental, would Rain be the one to reassure her that it’s alright to express things outwardly?
Did she know that if you’re close enough, you could spot the hazel in Jackie’s eyes that were flooded with a forest of moss?
Holy Celestia, Rain was becoming even a bigger asshole than she had set a record for.
At the end of the day, they both knew the solution to avoid the rollercoaster to come, but neither of them was up to the task.
Jackie could never bring herself to pull away from somebody she’d drawn herself deep within, and Rain knew that she'd beg Jackie to stay if she ever started to think otherwise.
Oh, how she hated it.
She hated admitting to herself, too, even if it wasn’t aloud, the feeling still lingered.
Each interaction was sliced on thin ice, both of them holding on to each other's hands because Celestia only knows what would happen if one were to let go.
Knowing even so, after embarking on some poetic dreamer's scheme of a girl who never really figured out how to get her life together, the facts would remain.
Jackie was not hers to have.
The feeling drove Rain into an abyss, more or less to the point where she knew that there was no return.
Back to when she realized too much won’t ever be enough.
Again, even when she tried to shut Jackie’s gaze from her subconscious, she couldn’t find the courage to do so.
Not completely, honestly, not at all.
That might’ve been what stung the most, because Rain could downplay it all and act as if they’d just cross it off as a ‘wacky’ experience and evidently go back to normal.
But that’s not how it works.
Normal.
That word reeked of vicious underlying.
Normal. Rain didn’t even know what normal was.
Nothing had ever been ‘normal’ between her and Jackie, not in the beginning and definitely not now.
I mean, how do you come up with a story something like theirs, using some overpracticed sync of a cliche such as ‘fate’ would’ve been undermining it too.
Maybe that’s why Rain neglected the code, made the tiniest mistake of acting on an emotion too soon. Using chance over logic never settles the waters; it just calms the tide for a while.
All it took was a look, and Rain found herself drowning deeper in an unstable wave of the sea that she could never dedicate to before.
Something about Jackie made her vulnerable.
That was another thing Rain was unsure of.
She was never one to show off her personal endeavors as a display to be worrisome for others to package up; that was an effort she learned to maintain on her own.
And even someone like Jackie wasn’t able to be let into that side of her yet.
She wouldn’t allow it, no matter how much a voice trapped inside screams to do the opposite.
Rain couldn’t tell her the story of how she came to be the way that she was, so she’d brush it off with a snarky comeback that either left Jackie smiling or coherent enough not to ask any further questions.
I suppose that was her biggest struggle. Trying to communicate things that she’d developed in her mind that weren’t worth mentioning.
Afraid of being able to tell the secret that she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep.
Sadness as a gift could’ve been more promising than anything else.
It put Rain in the headspace to understand what was needed of her, even if it wasn’t what she wanted.
Conversations that lead them nowhere would flow across her head as if it were just a stranger passing her by.
Rain would hear Jackie recite the same issue over and over again with a different meaning, as if she were able to own a time machine and head back into the past to a time where they never were.
It would’ve happened sooner or later; it doesn’t really matter who said what. Both of them were aware of what they were to each other.
Too much known about the other to be strangers, and never in a position to be anything more than friends.
Scenic flashes of memories that sank into her skull repeated a whisper that Rain never knew how to quit.
“I’d rather be your friend than nothing at all.”
“That’s the thing, Dash, I don’t know how to be your friend.”
Rain still traced back to the anxious distortion expressed on Jackie’s face, how her brows furrowed.
How her nose would scrunch up to deflect water from clashing into her eyes.
She looked so serious, her boots tapping against the pavement of the stairs, waiting for the moment she could look up and not find Rain staring straight at her like she were some historical painting to be gawked at.
“I can’t concentrate when you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
"Y'looking at me, Like I hold the moon and stars."
She still remembered the soft murmur Jackie made when her gaze slipped up to meet hers.
The way words burned at the tip of her tongue, but breath kept in a knot so as not to say anything rash.
Birds went on singing, feathers glowing like stars above, Rain sat by a tainted window still waiting for that symbolic bell.
Maybe one day they could both look back and laugh over these days at a meet-up with the group, refreshing old photographs and capturing time in a bottle before it all got too real.
But, for now, Rain decided to keep such thoughts to herself. Words were never her strong suit anyhow, and she doubted they would be of any good use now.
Somewhere along the milky-way, there’s a universe where they’re together, looking down on them in remembrance as the two they’ve never heard of struggle in a fool's game with the world they’re in.
And although Rain didn’t know what was to come, she would go back and hit the replay button like this season was a catchy song she had stuck in her head, like it was the first time.
Jackie would be there leaning against the next-door neighbor's locker, thinking to herself that the time Rain takes to fix her hair in the mirror is the same time she could be using to get them both to class. Yet, she wouldn’t move a muscle to provoke otherwise.
Rain traced back to the day when she bribed Jackie to stall going to class, seeing it only worked for a little while until they both had to walk back their separate routes.
She could still picture Jackie’s face once their eyes met when Rain turned her head to watch Jackie walk away, seeing as she had done the same.
A bittersweet smile that replicated the dimples Jackie bestowed. When she went away, Rain could still see her with the sunlight on her face in her rearview.
Even if they weren’t everlasting, there was no harm in believing only for a little while.