Originally published in print in February 2024.
It’s 7:25 on a Wednesday morning. Autumn air glides through the window, which is wedged open by a copy of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (unabridged). It’s your run-of-the-mill student accommodation bedroom; a small double bed shoved against a grey wall, a sink in one corner and a mirror in the other, bins, a coat rack, and not a whole lot of floor space in between. The walls are peeling, the room is drab. Someone has hung a garland of pastel tissue-paper flowers across the ceiling.
Two people lie together in the bed. A soft caress on their skin, the breeze loosens their hearts a little. Ada nudges Krystina awake with a tentative kiss and she groans sleepily in reply. They don’t have class until late in the afternoon.
Ada and Krystina are “just friends”, the way that plenty of people say it and don’t mean it. They are “just friends”, in the way that they are too scared to call it anything else. They like to be close, but they aren’t quite ready to acknowledge the reality of what that closeness might mean. Or at least, Krystina isn’t.
It had started out innocently enough; they’d met in the laundry room of all places. The whirring of the machines and the bright white light overhead made them feel like they were outside of time and space. Nobody else was there, and they’d wound up talking for ages. As they waited for their clothes to turn from dirty and dry, to soaking wet, to clean and dry, the loads that they carried inside of them also began to dance dizzily into a strange new place.
The conversation was suitably polite and awkward at the beginning; where are you from, what course are you studying, how are you liking Dublin? Krystina offered laughter to Ada’s customary sarcastic pokes, and soon everything was funny. It wasn’t that fake, I’ve-just-met-you-and-don’t-quite-know-to-act-around-you-yet laughter that is often coaxed out of someone’s throat to fill awkward silences. It was a real, genuine laughter, that comes only when you are ready to really look at a person and listen to what they are saying – and still choose to laugh anyway. Ada would wonder about this a lot; how had it come to be that she felt so comfortable around Krystina so quickly, when she found it hard to feel at ease around other people that she’d known for years. And her mind would always circle back to the same answer; she felt that Krystina was listening to her, and this was a surprisingly foreign feeling. It was nice. As she returned to her room, she was followed by a strong sense that something extraordinary had just happened to her, but she couldn’t place it. After all, had anything really happened?
But then they began to text. Once, twice, three, four, five times a day, and then incessantly. It wasn’t at all like those sorts of things you see in the movies, when two people meet by chance, and are quickly surprised to find out how well they understand each other, like no one else ever has before. And then they fall in love. Ada and Krystina didn’t understand each other a lot of the time. Ada never felt like she quite knew what Krystina was thinking. But she felt close, very close. Or at least, that’s how she wanted to feel. And she fell in love, despite it all.
It was the kind of thing where, when she looked into Krystina’s eyes, she would stare right back, every time. Ada thought of Krystina’s smile as she got ready for bed, the way it lit her face into an expression of twinkling bashfulness. A little kid who knew they’d done something wrong, but also knew that they’d get away with it anyway. Seeing it, even just in her head, made Ada smile too. When they had work to do, they’d hold hands under the desk, and at night they’d lace themselves carefully together, reconfiguring their sharp edges of spindly bones and knobbly knees, so that they might melt together into one unified shape of softness and sweetness. Two paper dolls folding back onto themselves so that they become one.
And Krystina’s smell… Ada had failed to notice it the first time she met her, and then, suddenly, it was everywhere! She began to compulsively spray Krystina’s perfume all over herself, too; without it, she felt all alone. Both of their skin dripped the scent of falling summer petals, now, on cold autumn mornings.
Ada fell for Krystina, the way she fell away from herself. There were times when Ada thought she was Krystina. Longing can do powerful things.
Could Ada see what was happening, there on that crisp yet sweet Autumn morning? Did she know that she was falling? But the falling was such a blur and it would be in vain to pretend that she had any semblance of control over it. She found herself in the air and thought, well, I suppose I’m in the air now. It sounds foolish, but for a moment she really forgot that the ground existed. She looked up at the birds and thought, maybe I can live here. She was a child who had just learnt to ride a bike for the first time, without daddy’s hand pressing into her shoulder. She had just tasted her first chocolate, not the bitterness of dark chocolate, but the silky sweetness of milk. Don’t we all try to shovel as much as we can in, before we learn the consequences, the very poison we’ve just put into our stomach? For a split second it felt so fucking good, didn’t it?
December 19th is Ada’s birthday. Krystina says she wants to bake her a cake. I’ll pipe pink and red roses on it, our favourites. By December 19th it will be over. Ada will learn that the day you start falling you make a promise, you take a pledge; that another day you will hit the ground, hard. Cold tarmac coming to meet a bruised cheek, it’s the fall of Icarus. It’s being too enraptured by the sun to remember that the stormy sea lies just below. Legs flailing hopelessly, your world is turned upside down, while the ploughman continues steadily to pull his horse and cart beside you. Icarus spattered away in the Springtime, but Ada will be greeted only with an endless stretch of winter. She and her mother will blow out her twenty candles alone and the falling snow in the garden will confirm that everything is blank. Krystina had made stars burst in the blackest parts of her brain. Ada will find it really hard to get back up without those stars.
But as empty as Ada is going to feel in those days, she will be comforted by the knowledge that something had been there, once. Maybe she will love someone else someday, but she will not love them in the same way, that is to say, without knowing what it is to fall. Loving Krystina will feel like forever ago. She will still love her.
WORDS: Deia Leykind
