the first night, there’s a faerie on your bed.
she’s wearing a crushed velvet dress that is more the color of old memories than anything else. more the color of a lake at sunset, or what you imagined the moon looked like when you were little. and her eyes and lips are half-closed and the hem of her dress is riding up a little on her bare thighs and the lights around your bed are lighting up her rose-hinted cheeks in a way that seems ethereal.
this is not real, you know. it’s more a painting, or an album cover. a wish-dream.
the faerie girl opens her eyes, and whispers. baby, she says. baby, come here.
you do. you trip a little and fall into the bed, blushing in a way that apparently the faerie finds cute, because she touches your face like it is magic, not her.
baby, she says. baby, she whisper-laughs. baby, she murmurs, nuzzling her nose into your neck.
you’re drunk, you say, because she is, that leftover drunk that makes one feel more sleepy than anything else. she just smiles and curls herself around you like a blanket as a song you both love streams out of your phone. it whisper-yells something about not taking a confession the wrong way.
come over to me, baby, she replies.
you turn, halloween costume from earlier mostly gone. all you’re wearing is a black slip with lace on top, cherry-picking-red, and the silk of it brushes up on her soft body enough to make her smile and play with the hem. she touches your thigh at the place your fishnets ripped earlier in the night, and then decides she likes the texture, so she makes her fingers dance on the fabric, snagging her fingers up and down in a way that makes a noise like something popping. your heart strings, maybe.
this feels so good, so shivery and warm, that you let out a tiny noise.
baby, it is your turn to whisper in her embroidery thread hair.
and so you kiss her, soft to start, but clearly she wants more. the faerie cups your chin in one hand and kisses you hard like she needs you. you don’t know about that, because you are not the faerie, but you need her, so it seems right.
you feel the faerie smile into your mouth, perfect permanently-stained pink cheeks pinching around yours, and bite her lip, and now it is her turn to make a noise for you.
the rain starts up outside, and there is a song about maybe-love in your head and a girl on your lips and a faerie in your bed and your heart is warm warm warm like the lights around your bed.
and you stay like that, nose to nose and mouth to mouth and hands still making tiny, ripple-like circles on different fabrics and skin.
baby, she sighs, soft like velvet.
baby.
baby.
you wake up the next morning with a chest too tight, sun burning a bit too warm inside you, thinking oh. oh oh oh.
oh.
…
the next night, as you fold laundry, you daydream of all the beautiful moments that come with closing your eyes.
sometimes, of course, it is turning your face away from a toilet bowl full of puke, or a scab on your toe, or a heat rash blooming up your legs like poison oak, or a shower full of dead moths at a campsite in the middle of nowhere. sometimes, it is running away. but sometimes, it is savoring, you think as you separate out a wool sweater and it clings to your shirt, static fuzzy like the end of a movie on VHS.
wishing on dandelions in summer and squeezing your eyes shut so the wish feels more concentrated. running so fast across an itchy grass field at midnight that you feel like you are flying. dancing to the sweetest song you’ve ever heard in a room with the lights low and teasing and a drumbeat the kind that makes you feel like you’re in love already. like shutting your eyes and jumping off a cliff and feeling like you’re flying and hitting an ocean so cold it makes your brain go numb and keeping your eyes shut long past when you’d need to open them because you like the feeling of not being real.
you close your eyes as you finger the edge of a silk slip. black with cherry-picking-red lace.
savoring.
...
the next morning, you wake up still in the world of the dream and set your timer for ten more minutes of delicious sleep, but the magic of the dream is just out of reach.
the romance in it, once blooming like strawberries, suffocates once you try to taste it again. the strawberry sours and the pixie boy who spun you around and around and around in it doesn’t look at you the same way anymore.
you frantically start over, going back to the beginning again and again.
no, it starts like this.
you meet at the house show. you make eye contact and the music that has been hooked into each of you draws you close. your cheeks are watermelon pink and the pixie boy has eyes only for yours and the lights are dim and hazy and your neck is crooked and there is something on your eyelid and there is something not-music playing and everything is wrong. and you wake up to your alarm.
try again.
you meet at the house show. you make eye contact and smile and blush watermelon pink and this time you walk up to him. the music is swirling and the drums are perfect and somehow you’re holding a drink that tastes better than anything and he asks your name and you don’t remember and the bass is off and loud and annoying and you wake up to your alarm.
once more.
you meet at the house show. you make eye contact and smile and his cheeks are watermelon pink and he walks up to you and whispers, dance with me? and you do and he spins you around and around and you’re late to class because his curly hair and the control both feel so good against your hands when he finally kisses you.
…
you’re too busy to daydream for a week. when you do, it’s the immediate future. the shelves of the Fred Meyer that you’re planning on visiting. the timing of bus routes. when you can squeeze in seeing that documentary with your roommate. what order you’ll do your homework in.
real people things.
…
another night, you fall asleep wishing about the past.
you remember a girl who was just the smallest bit wild, unearthly, whose magic showed up in photos, a hazy sort of magic in some and a clear, sharp beauty in others, like those cold rainless days that somehow make you feel even warmer. she’s got freckles dancing off of her, and a perfect soft pink cupid’s bow, and when the light hits her spring-green eyes just right, they match those of the cats that seem to follow her around.
it’s eleven forty-five on a saturday night four years ago. the white comforters that you are bundled under smell like candles and the taste of too much chips and salsa is still in your mouth and you cannot stop thinking about kissing her, your best friend who you’re sure is a changeling girl. the movie you are watching is about coincidences and love and all you can think about is the way the heroine steps in to kiss her kitschy romance movie hero and just blindly trusts that he will kiss her back. you are millimeters away from testing out that move on the green-eyed, freckle-faced, raven-haired girl, the girl that can’t be real, lying tangled up next to you in a bed big enough that she doesn’t need to be this close at all. you are all want — wanting to kiss her, wanting to touch her more, wanting to trace a line across the bridge of her thin nose with your fingers, wanting to kiss the freckle behind her ear, wanting her to kiss you first, the want as familiar as the backs of your teeth. and you keep counting down in your head, 5 4 3 2 1 now, about to lean in, about to just do it.
there are a million of these polaroid-like moments. you counting down to a declaration of feelings that seem like they could swallow you whole if you let them, whether by kiss or confession. moments where you look at your past self clutching her heart in her hands and deciding whether or not to give it to the person standing in front of her. now, all you can do is move your past self like a marionette, waltz her over to some changeling’s mouth, beg her to kiss it. all you can do is watch as your old self steels herself to lean in and, like every movie you’ve seen a million times, beg the ending to change.
but it never does. and it never does. and, you realize one night, it never will.
…
you wake up to a song clinging to the inside of your head. the song reminds you of trees and faeries and magic in everyday life. you take a deep breath in and realize that this is the first day in many that you haven’t woken up feeling exhausted from chasing something too far away, too impossible. you stretch your arms out, grab a ray of light, eat it for breakfast sunny-side-up. your head feels fragile like an overcast morning, fog softening the worst of the noise and your thoughts. you exhale.
you spend the day doing that thing where you pretend you’re in a movie and the song is the soundtrack. you listen to it on the bus, hands full of grocery bags, and pretend you’re at the beginning.
you think about the restlessness that comes when you remember that you are a living being, and you drink some water to quell that itchy feeling. for once, it helps.
the climax of the movie-in-your-head comes when you’re cooking lunch. you dance to the chorus as the water for pasta boils, adding salt at the last second before you forget.
you fall asleep to the ending of the movie and the song. days like this let you relinquish control of your own brain, let you think someone else’s thoughts and worry about a life not your own. let yourself be magic for once, rather than someone else.
let your world be real.