plz read the authors note at the end

November 15th:

Mara will consider herself a feminist, even frequenting a few rallies back when the world was so black and white. But right now, curled into a ball on the withered couch, Ryn trailing her fingers through Mara's soft locks, she wishes to be anything else. One week out of every month, unless blessed from above, being a girl is the most horrendous thought.

With the territory comes heightened emotion and a sense of longing. The group is scattered around the flat, with Mara and Ryn occupying the decrepit couch. Cairo is on the floor, his hair having been buzzed by Ryn that morning. He is grading papers for his elementary class, twirling the pen between his fingers. Absentmindedly disregarding whatever the girls are on about.

Cairo moved to the states with his father months after his mother and eldest brothers passed. His father, grieving over his loss, had put so much control on Cairo that he disobeyed. Tattoos, getting high in the basement and buzzing his hair was the first of his opposing antics. Falling in love with a girl who had no real aspirations of a risked future, just experiencing at the second, was his atrocity.

But Cairo loves Ryn with everything he can, and that is that. It's why he is so comfortable listening to the two girls talk about their periods, quietly ignoring them.

"Ryn," Mara says, distress laced in her voice, "I kissed him."

"And," Ryn snorts, brushing her fingers over the nape of Cairo's neck. She does this to assure him she is still around, something she has learned early on he needs. Though Cairo never talks about his antiquity, what Ryn does know was horrific. That's why she will reassure him she is still here with a brush of her fingertip.

"And I felt something," she cries, pinching her eyes shut.

"You liked it?" Ryn taunts, flicking Mara's forehead. They are a comfortable bunch, the mellow music lullabies in the background. It is midday on a Saturday, and while Mara is beyond emotional, Ryn finds it all entertaining. Cairo, only in the way he could, manages to drown out their near proximity. He'd learned how to create his own haven at the age of six and adapted it along the way.

"Yes, I liked it," Mara hisses, furrowing her eyebrows. Ryn had plucked them earlier, still stinging a tinge, red around the edges.

"Then tell him," Ryn tsks, pushing Mara off her lap. With a frown, her eyes fly open to see Ryn scowling at her. With her arms crossed firmly over her chest, Cairo takes this minute to glance up.

"He loves you, Mara," Cairo includes, grabbing the two's attention, "you have to be blind not to see that."

"But it isn't enough, Cai. I will never be...normal," she frowns, picking at the scarred skin on her wrists. 

This is her vulnerability, thinking that Elias will never love the same person. Does he like the variant of her that is the stars, or the version of her that is anarchy. Can he love her when she stands on another edge of a cliff? When she runs into the middle of a street without fear?

"I know what it's like to be him," Cairo interjects. "After I watched my family dissolve, I was afraid of love. I didn't want to let anyone in and built up these walls to protect myself. But then Cathryn came," he shrugs, smiling softly.

"He's guarded," Mara sighs, "and I hurt him once."

"And you'll hurt him again. But when it's real love, then it won't matter in the end," Cairo states resolutely. "You say he's guarded, but he's let you this close."

"When did you become so wise, babe," Ryn snorts, leaning over to kiss him on the lips. Mara doesn't even find it attesting, so used to their open adoration. You can see it in their eyes, the first act of true love Mara ever saw.

"They say trauma ages you," he chuckles darkly, flicking his pen across one of the papers and setting it onto the pile of graded ones. Mara doesn't know a lot about Cairo's history, even less than Ryn. What she does know is what he expresses on his back and arms. His novel in black ink permanently etched onto his cocoa skin.

"Awe, babes, join the club," Ryn rolls her almond eyes pushing her bangs away from her face. To anyone, it will appear to be mean, but Ryn veeres most melancholy. It makes Cairo feel normal in some sense, his first attraction towards her.

"So what should I do?" Mara says, her chilling eyes flicking between the two.

"Tell him," Ryn states plainly, her hands brushing Cairo's shoulders. He is placed at her feet, sat on the carpeted floor of their living room. They only have a couch and the tattered armchair, which is now littered with all of their backpacks, even Mara's knit backpack, which she found.

"Tell him?" Mara bites her lip, uneasy. On some level, she's been in love before with Liam. But it wasn't really loving, more obsession with the concept of him, the anecdote of exposure. She liked being his possession, in her adolescent mind, she was in love. Whilst, Liam, was in love with the idea of her. She was never on the same level with him, always below his reign.

With Elias, the attraction has been mutual.

"You're scared because you don't want to become your mom," Ryn points out, her eyebrow raised in question. "Fuck your parents, Mara, and move on."

---

She goes to the seashore, which she realizes has become her sanctum. The night is present, the stars above in the sky, but she isn't watching them. Staring out at the ocean water of deception, she is lost in her rampaging mind. All of their thoughts surfacing with the silence encasing her, only the sound of the fluctuations.

When Mara was young, she would borrow seashells from the water shore. Extensive ones that barely fit into her soft palms, stuffed in jean pockets. Hiding them in her wardrobe, the one place her mother never checked, she would listen to the crashing waves in their hollows. Believing she'd brought the ocean home with her, the sense of calmness.

One day she hadn't been careful, leaving the whalebone shell on her desk for anyone to see. Darla had discovered it, crushing Mara's dreams by telling her it was just ambient noise, not the ocean swells. She had only been four at the time. Her novice blue eyes, full of rarity, were stamped on by her adored sister.

In a way, Mara has always resented her family, the people whose blood she half shares. Her father, who she thought was her father, never attended any of her daddy-daughter dances. Her sister was never there to guide her, and her brother never noticed her. It took her first manic episode, her first time nearly drowning, for someone to see. After that, it was an addiction, doing the most so someone would notice her.

Being bipolar only added to the satisfaction, an excuse for her rage.

She'd become Mara, a girl with no will but that of destroying everything she had known. She was so focused on shedding herself from the Gray family name, that she lost herself along the way. Her obsession with her family had sacrificed a piece of her that she would never get back, that she was too blind to mark at the time.

Standing up against the crashing torrent, bracing herself against the wind, she screams. Letting her voice be carried into the empty night with her lungs straining at the force. She doesn't stop when her throat throbs when her eyes swell with unshed tears. Not when the waves respond by crashing loudly at the shore, a flash of lightning inflaming the dank sky.

"Why me," she bellowed, letting herself be emptied of all this anguish, pain, guilt. "Why me," softer this time, barely a hushed tone above the air. "Show me a sign that it will get better."

She sobs, falling onto her bruised knees while the waves respond by growing heavier. Eradicating her footprints where she had stood as if telling her that she can always start again. That she has a second chance if she will only notice the signs, through her anguish, the light of his will.

Then it begins to shower, soft droplets of the night's tears that grow harder. Sopping her clothing with its downpour, letting the droplets coat her skin and hair, drowning her. Mixing in the salty tears that brandish her skin, a laugh forms through all of the angry passion. Opening her arms in a wide expanse, she lets the petrichor engulfed her senses as she treasures.

The day she showed up at his house in the rain, meeting him through the violence. When they danced in the expanse of his kitchen. His hand fanned over the small of her back, holding her close to his pounding heart. The light of optimism broke through the disturbance in his eyes, coherent laughter.

The way his parents had watched them with such adoration. The overwhelming sense of home when his mother, Ella, held her close. Elias was her person, the one she sought out in the commotion, her lighthouse through the storm. Had she seen his light early, searched for him in her drowning-

Though she hated her family and all that they put her through, they did teach her something. Mara grew up seeing what she would never want to become, a love she would never want to have. Mara grew up learning that she would never become her family in search of something more.

And it took her all this time, all these wrongdoings, to find it. She had been meant to walk into the library late at night. With no thought in mind but the search for a book. And she was meant to find him in the halls, in his room. Find him through the storm because he is her refuge, her haven.

She will just have to tell him.

---

Authors Note:

Like, comment, follow.

- Nia

Edited 4/11/22