#winkai

Samuels: Nice.

Kai: Ally is “it happened once in a dream.”

Ally: ...k

Kai: Winter is “if I had to pick a family member.”

Winter: awww

Kai: And Beverly is “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it.”

Beverly: Cool.

Kai: Gary is...eagle two.

Winter is cold as the season and as cold as she needs to be, but sometimes, against her will, he melts her. For weeks she sleeps in his bed, curled into his side with only his whispered words warding off the image in her head. It’s not how you should remember anybody, no matter what their failings. She can smell the rot everywhere, in the sheets and on her own skin. “You have to trust me,” he says, and she does because he’s the only thing left of Home. As long as they’re together, she can pretend they’re still kids and nothing bad ever happened. He’s always taken care of her, kept her secrets (even the scary ones) and if he says things will be okay, things will be okay.  He’s the smart one after all, the one who saved her life. It’s not what she believes in, weak women hiding behind men, trusting them implicitly to hold things together, but this isn’t about gender. She is Winter and he is Kai and neither of them are like other people. They’re the kind of people who change the world.

Spring semester is restless and all the lectures start to sound the same.  No one notices the difference in her.  She sits in independent coffee shops and listens to her friends talk about what’s problematic in the latest television show, dissecting theories and the politics of gender identity and this is who she was before but so what? So what if people talk and talk forever if no one ever does anything? Years later, they’ll find partners and spawn children, have the zombie stare of that woman she saw breastfeeding in the park, the baby leeching the very life force out of her while she smiled complacently.  None of this means anything.