West's Valentine

West's Valentine

Part 1

Her shiny pastel-pink hair shimmered underneath the dark, blue sky as I reached for her hand. Her eyes swallowed my soul into their mossy abyss. These were just a few things I had fallen in love with before actually getting to know why she decided to stick with pastel pink or how many other natural and unnatural hair colors she had endured before settling on it. They existed before I found out the way her dark, green irises spilled secrets she had tried so desperately to keep locked away. This was before I found out our love would soon drive both of us mad. I don’t mean the kind of mad where at the end of a story, the character ends up in a mental hospital because of an actual illness. Neither of us had illnesses. At least not the kind we usually think about, but we were sick. We were sick of each other, of everything around us, and most of all of our love. Our love drove us to do things we would have never thought to do back when I barely knew her name and she never remembered mine. However, even then I was in love with her. Her name is Val; short for Valentine. She was born on Valentine's Day and, I guess, her parents thought they were being clever, but she hated it.

“Why are we here?” she whispered turning her head away from me.

I sat for a second confused as to what she meant. We were sitting on the roof of my parents' house; the place we would come to when we were in high school. Which was just over a year ago and we had been together since junior year. After a moment of conflicting with myself, I gathered up the courage to speak, “ What do you mean?”

“We haven’t came up here since the night of the Fourth of July. We were kids then. Don’t you think this is kind of silly?”

My heart fell to my stomach. At this moment, I felt more insecure than I have in our entire relationship. I just couldn’t believe she thought this was silly since this spot means so much to me. It was the spot we had our first kiss and since then there have been many other firsts, but I won’t go into detail about that. I held myself together and slowly brought back my self-confidence. Val’s moss-ridden eyes were staring into my soul again. I could tell she was still confused and maybe even a little nervous. Did she know what I was going to do? What I was about to say?

Continuing to hold her hand, I gripped a bit harder, not enough to hurt her, but just enough so she would not be able to pull away without force. Then I spoke softly, my voice cracking, “Val, this is a bit silly, but I love you with every vein in my body and some days it feels as though they will all explode. No one has ever made me feel that way in my entire life and I think that it means something; something deeper than my petty words could ever explain. Val, will you marry me?”

Part 2

As he lightly touched my pale hand, I couldn’t help but think about why he was sitting next to me that night. Puzzled, I looked up at him and knew exactly why I was there and why I hadn’t swatted his hand off of mine yet. His eyes were a deep, muddy brown color. A color he hated, but I loved and I loved it because of him. His eyebrows were clean and he always smelled of his personality; sweet but strong all at the same time. He took care of himself. That is what made me interested in him the day we met. He isn’t particularly “good-looking,” but I was definitely attracted to him. Maybe it was how he could make me laugh no matter how bad my day was going and that it made him grin like an idiot when I did. I wasn’t always in love with him. In fact, it took me forever to even remember his name, which is West, and sometimes I even forget it now. At the time, however, I would have done anything and everything for him and to be with him.

My sophomore year of high school I was the picture perfect daughter and student. I had gotten straight A’s the entire year and I did everything I was supposed to because that was all I knew. I was innocent and I had been my whole life up until I met him. He changed everything about me. He changed the way I thought, the way I dressed, and the way I acted. I didn’t change for him like girls always do in vapid high school movies. I evolved because that’s what humans do. He evolved too. We evolved as a couple. I knew what was happening between us would reshape our lives forever, but I didn’t care and neither did he. We were lunatics together. I enjoyed every single unproductive second I spent with him. I wasn’t always in love with him. In fact, the day I met him I had decided he was not for me and that is the most ironic part of this event.

That night, he took me up to his parents' roof; a sort of sacred place of ours. This made me shiver with worry. We hadn’t come up to this roof since we were kids which was only a little over a year ago. We were merely nineteen at the time, but I felt like an adult more than I ever had in my entire life. Without reluctance, I speak, immediately regretting my measly question, “Why are we here?”

At this moment he seemed incredibly uneasy and uncomfortable, maybe even confused. “What do you mean?” he cross-examined my question.

The words leave my mouth before I could even think about them, “We haven’t come up here since the night of the Fourth of July. We were kids then. Don’t you think this is kind of silly?”

A bead of sweat was now dripped from his perfect scalp line onto his well-groomed eyebrows. Why was he so nervous? Oh, no, this is making me nervous. What is happening? I stared back into his muddy pools of desire and now I’m just sounding cheesy. I stared into those big, beautiful eyes I fell in love with. I had never seen him so nervous before.

“Val, this is a bit tawdry, but I love you with every vein in my body and some days it feels as though they will all explode. No one has ever made me feel that way in my entire life and I think that it means something; something deeper than my petty words could ever explain. Val, will you marry me?”

I took a deep, unaltered breath.

“No.”

13

West’s eyes filled with tears at the end of my unpleasant syllable. There was no doubt in my mind that I loved him, but I no longer loved him in that way and it felt horrible knowing that I let our relationship drag on for so long, but I just wasn’t ready to let him go. After my answer, I immediately knew that I lost him. There was no turning back after this.