[open] loneliness has always been with me, any

[astra]

She thinks she can taste his amusement. The laughter comes out of his mouth, certainly, but she thinks she can feel it swell up on her own tongue. It blooms and blossoms but does not burst out of her. Had she opened her mouth, though, no sound would have come out because it did not belong to her.

She listens intently to the stories he tells. How he’d gotten trapped in some other time and how someone had tried to eat him. Her confusion is her own. The flicker of terror she feels building in her chest, dampened only by the joy he feels in telling it.

“I’m glad she didn’t eat you,” she says, briefly overwhelmed. It’s nice, she thinks, to have someone to talk to. But he has more to say than anyone else she has ever met and she struggles to keep up. Blinking rapidly as he regales her with his stories and then, abruptly, calls her pretty. It’s not something she’s ever heard before and the embarrassment that pools heat in her cheeks belongs to her alone.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, his goofy grin eliciting a soft smile in return. She likes him, she thinks, now that she can see past all of the emotions that had rolled off him in waves.

She nods her understanding, comforted by the fact that his mother had meant no harm when she’d named him. Not that it’s really any of her business. If he’s happy with it, it shouldn’t matter to her at all.

He calls attention to her breathing and her own embarrassment compounds. She glances down at her own chest, like she might see the air trapped there. “I’m okay,” she tells him, hesitating before she looks at him again. “It’s just… I can feel everything you feel.” A strange thing to have to admit.

maybe we were meant to be lonely

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