Today she feels more complex than usual, both to herself and to him, though he’s already forgiven her, as she holds his guitar while lying on his bed, afraid to take a strum since she isn’t sure how, just grips the neck, rests the guitar’s back across her stomach, and outside a storm is coming, flat grey through the paper-thin windows, and she’s silent, eyes drifting slowly shut, so he thinks about the last few hours, thinks, she read the past today, and that he likes that she feels more complex.
Today I feel more complex than usual, she says it out loud now, speaking his thoughts, and he can only stare at her in serene awe, although she looks sad about her newfound complexity despite his attempts to make her feel good, or at least better, and he’d like to know what she’s really thinking, what those words mean to her, a desire which causes him to start biting his nails, which she surely reads as him trying to figure her out, since they’ve spoken about this nervous twitch before, but she can’t be figured out today.
Around half an hour later as she sleeps in his arms, he thinks, she’s afraid to love me, might never be able to love me, and in precisely this moment, she says the words, I love you, not in a sleepy whisper, but with a full voice, and he wonders if she might be dreaming, considers that even he might be dreaming, as this culmination of things, thoughts and ideas send him into a calming, empty sleep, not because he feels that something divine and extra dimensional has transpired, but simply because whatever this is has never happened before.
