[open] loneliness has always been with me, any

[astra]

She wishes he would calm down.
His embarrassment is so potent that she’s almost choking on it.
She struggles to breathe around it when he asks if she’s okay and it’s all she can do to nod. She is too thoroughly distracted by his emotion that she can’t even conjure up a reassuring smile. A smile that might say look, no harm done. A smile that might soothe his troubled nerves.

Instead, it is a vicious cycle of her trying desperately to catch her breath around his emotions in her throat. She grimaces at them and immediately worries that her expression might be misconstrued for pain, that this might compound his feelings.

She shuffles away from him a few steps, testing to see if wedging some distance between them will bring her some relief. And it does, somewhat. Until his legs get all tangled up and he falls and his emotions come back even stronger. He laughs, a nervous sound, and she tries to laugh along but finds that she can’t. She just swallows thick and shuffles away a little further.

“It’s okay,” she says again, keeps saying even though it hadn’t made a difference the first few times she’d said it. “It’s okay.”

She drags in a desperate breath. “Please, it’s okay.”

maybe we were meant to be lonely

A      S      T      R      A