#anoma

to my most darling, @gigiree: happy birthday, my dear! I hope you’ll enjoy this story about your beloved OCs, Anoma and Vivi. I pray that I do them justice and capture them the way you write them too. You are a wonderous thing. 

Anoma doesn’t know when it starts, the way his heart--if he can even call it that--starts to feel alive again. It’s a dead thing in his chest, exposed through rotting tissue and bare ribs. Yet he feels it thud, pound against the air that slips from the thin membrane of his skin, when Vivi smiles. Small little promises that are only strengthened when her fingertips brush against his.  

She reminds him of poetry written in the Quran, how every word is precisely noted with each accent so that it can be spoken perfectly. She is the flow of the script that travels left along the page, the gentle ink clinging to the paper. It doesn’t matter how many times he reads her, he falls more hopelessly for her words, her motions, her existence. 

They are lost in the somewhere in the middle of their journey, a path that balances precariously between life and death. There are flowers on each side of this lonely highway they travel along on Vivi’s motorcycle. Wisps of her hair curl under her helmet, leaving her neck bare for the sun to caress.

Anoma rests his head down on her shoulder, the mouthpiece of his helmet creating a barrier between his lips and her famous yellow sweater. Vivi doesn’t know it, but he presses a kiss there. One that’s for him to know and keep between them.

The engine roars beneath them and they dash forward as Vivi kicks up the bike’s RMPs. The wind whistles on all sides, the flowers speeding past as they explore the world before them.  Sunlight bounces off faded blacktop, the white parted lines difficult to see for any driver. Vivi stays to her side of the road despite that she could use the entire thing.

Closing his eyes, he feels the way life surges through her, in her very existence because she’s far too stubborn to stop. It’s in her heartbeat, her breath, her blood coursing through her veins. It sparks under his fingertips as he holds onto her, a wonderful contradiction to the death frozen in his hands.

He takes a breath, a reflex from when he was alive and pats her stomach two times. She nods and starts to slow down the bike until they stop by the wayside. Surrounded by flowers and sunshine, Anoma wonders if he’s back in paradise, in heaven where the world was so bright. But--

But he knows he’s not because paradise doesn’t have Vivi. Doesn’t have the way she takes off her helmet and shakes her hair that’s been sticking up in every direction. Doesn’t have her smiles or grunts she makes as she stretches. Doesn’t have--doesn’t have--well, doesn’t have her at all.

Vivi walks forward and spins in a circle, inhaling the fresh air. Anoma hides a smile under his scarf. He used to think paradise was the end, the final destination that required nothing else, but here he finds himself walking in a field of flowers with a person who is only beginnings.

She is reason and absurdity. Question and answers. Everything in between.

“C’mon,” she says, yawning wide and beckoning him to follow. “Let’s see if there’s a creek around.”

Life and sunlight and good things outline her being. The blue sky is her backdrop, the green grass her path and Anoma has never been more happy to follow.

Guh