#fliptabled

And even as your features relax, your muscles unwind, your thoughts slurr to stillness, a smile remains.

It’s dark out there, pitch and hostile, the eclipse still overpowering and ever present. But it already lingers in the air, the turning away. The end of the longest exhale before the truest sigh of relief, the touch of starry arms cradling the sky, the warm veins of the northern lights meandering where the sky cracks.

You see it in opal eyes, in the glow they offer upon virgin blonde hair. You see it in open smiles and full tables. You hear it in foreign conversations behind closed doors, in Anime openings screaming from upstairs, in no longer hushed steps, patting down carpet that has seen too much lately. You feel it as the leftover warmth on plates and cutlery when you go to refill their food, rumbling piles of meat soothing you to sleep and, later, as the lavender who will crouch across you on the couch, and paint you the most beautiful book of stories you’ll hear.

If there’s one good thing to take away from this disaster, is her willingness to stay, the many words exchanged in cosy solace. Together, your sister-in-law and you gather a photo album in spoken form, tears and colorful descriptions imprinting the pictures of him and his many loving traits into the air. Your mutual love for him is a good starting point. Rose talks of his teen years, awkward exchanges in the name of friendship and mutual support, of endless hours spent in some alien falling world, trying not to regret their temporary immortality too much.

In turn, you talk of the grown up who’s never really lost that boyish charm, instead weaving it with charisma and a thread of gold that is only his. You speak of him like a beacon, like a foundation, a speckled lighthouse among a thriving garden or ocean, the boy who’s too good to turn away someone in need, who helplessly falls for kindness in return even as he’s convinced he should stay down, who accidentally builds a shelter of strays amidst the pain and depression and frustration at some great wrong done to him. You argue how, up till then, maybe he’d felt like a stray himself.

Soon, even his lack of presence becomes a foundation, the weight of him being just a little far away motivating you to share wistful thinking, and speculation. You eagerly drink ever bit of information she gives on the Beautiful Stranger Angel, the sprite who mirrors him so perfectly, but you also know her to be unbearably cryptic. Nothing experience won’t teach you, she says.

She speaks of her job, the monotony of her life without him, and she shares, in embarrassed secrecy, just how much her outlook on life has changed, just from the hope he spills even unknowing. As you spin new tapestries of this bright future waiting, you know you’ll always want to keep making room for her in your world. You know you want her to live as he does. Sometimes you stop to listen to their voices, muffled but so real, bright like your own tone. The moments you go to deliver food, to check on bandages, to spill free ‘I love yous’, become the fulcrum of every hour’s pilgrimage, an almost religious communion you drink up with wide smiles and prickly eyes, and you catch her dabbing carefully at her make up after every time.