Don't Bring Tomorrow [Love Club]

[chelsey]

By tomorrow we'll be swimming with the fishes Leave our troubles in the sand And when the sun comes up We'll be nothing but dust Just the outlines of our hands

Shattering Caly’s bedroom window in the middle of the night was - believe me - an accident. But, desperate times call for desperate measures, and when you’ve got good aim and a throwing arm that’s stronger than you previously thought it to be, accidents are bound to happen.

“Sorry!” I shout-whisper to her, as if my soft voice can muffle the wreck. The pebble I jettisoned toward her bedroom window and the resulting fragments of glass drizzle down towards me from her house’s second floor. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to see if you wanted to - if - do you wanna go get Tags?”

Accidents, especially, are bound to happen when you’re not being careful. When you twirl life around like it’s some stupid baton and you’re a pageant girl parading around on stage, instead of the double-edged sword it really is. Stupid. “I swear, I’ll pay you back for the window,” I tell Caly on the way to Tags. “I just really wanted to hang out with you guys tonight.”

Life in general is pretty accidental. Earth, most likely, was an accident. Or a mistake, but the two are sometimes interchangeable. What came first: the Universe or God? Did God create the supernova that became our reality? Did our reality explode into a cloud of energy that became our God?

Or, maybe, there is no God. As the three of us roam the empty streets - running, laughing, singing - our world feels both too small and too infinite to have any space for God. That’s no accident. In our world, the only gods parading around with double-edged swords are Caly, Tags, and Thea - and what a show we make.

Just before sunrise, we find ourselves on some cliff by the sea, marooned between the black ocean and the flickering lights of Four. My back seems to be permanently imprinted onto the spot of grass I’m laying on, and I’ve got both of my hands resting behind my head as if I haven’t got a care in the world. My eyelids are sagging over my vision, begging to be closed, but I pinch the back of my scalp to keep me from falling asleep. From seeing what happens when I close my eyes.

Because Gods are also good with breaking things - and I’m not just talking about the window-breaking-sort. Promises. Deals. Relationships. Hearts. Julien Baptiste’s eyes are a ghost the whole night, and it’s hard to convince myself that I don’t care about him when I keep myself up - and drag my friends into doing the same, insane thing - just to keep myself from dreaming about him. Because, if I’m gonna dream about anything, it’ll be about a day where no one feels expected to repair broken things. Where the only broken thing I’d ever have to fix is Caly’s bedroom window, and not Baptiste’s lonely soul. Where maybe even broken windows and lonely souls seem irrelevant and tiny and stupid in the grand scheme of things.

Sunlight slowly stretches out over the thin horizon, a tiny glow at the core of darkness. Goosebumps crawl up my arms at the sight. “Today’s gonna be a good day,” I tell my fellow friends/Gods. “I can almost guarantee it.”

Gods, as I’ve come to learn, are good at breaking things. Promises. Guarantees. An entire city, even.

When I wake up, I do so without even realizing I’d fallen asleep. The earth beneath us rumbles, quivers, and - somewhere beyond us - I can hear a collision.

For a moment, I have the decency to believe that I’m dreaming. But reality crashes down on me, like how it does towards the buildings and streets and everyone else. The ocean swallows them all whole, not even bothering to take a breath, and all I can think about is the debris of Caly’s broken window being swept away from the water and how a broken window might not be such a big deal after all.

“We…” I hear myself say, but I can’t finish it. We’re safe. We’re here. We should do something. We can’t. At the end of time, the three of us are still standing together, as if destiny herself preordained it.

That cannot be by accident.

[✨ zozo.]

C A L Y P S O.

Her hair is getting long again.

She remembers holding the scissors to her chin and pausing to breathe. The girl in the mirror looked like a stranger, blurred and grey and devoid of fire. Like watercolours, she leaked from her bold outlines and drank up her grief and brought her fingers together, nails on a chalkboard, scissors on hair, it all sounds the same. A chill of shock wrought through her spine as the wisps fell to the bathroom floor and she shook it off, snipping again and again and again until the ends rested at her shoulders. Cutting her ties from the docks and setting sail toward a house in her bones she can't quite call home anymore. Cutting away the fingers that once danced in her curls.

Maybe she'll grow it out. Let it spill down her back the way it used to, watch it float in front of her eyes when submerged underneath the ocean, have it fly through the air when the familiar ocean breeze swept through the district in fall. She dreams of those times. Bruised knuckles, wickedness, falling off the shore pontoons and into the ocean. Screaming her heart out as salt filled the gaps between her bones, confessing her love for a lost soul where nobody could hear her.

But she's passed that now. Days turn to weeks, to months, and she grows.

A shatter, glass raindrops tinkering, a small object clattering underneath her bed. Nino, again, his alcohol-fuelled actions taking him one step to far. Or not.

Instinctively her hands fly to the nearest weapon and her breathing ceases, lungs slowly filling with anxiety that drowns out the air within her chest.

"Sorry!"

The girl at the window exhales. The knife clatters to the floor.

"Thea!" Caly shrieks, hands still trembling, the ghost of her knife's handle clinging to her palm. "My Dad is going to kill me!"

"I just really wanted to hang out with you guys tonight."

There's a sadness in Thea's voice - Julian, she'll kill him. Calypso thought she was done with killing boyfriends but this one ripped out her best friends heart and dropped it in the dirt and it makes her blood boil. Her own heart aches - for Thea, for her family, for the girl she used to be. For a ghost she farewelled at the bottom of the ocean.

And she smiles, all the while shaking her head at the shards of her window scattered across her bedroom floor. Feet find shoes and limbs find clothes and Caly swings herself through the hole in the wall and clambers down, ignoring the shackles of exhaustion that cling to her and dances underneath the starts instead.

The ocean had shrunk back from the shore like it was afraid of every grain of sand that it littered with kisses, now petrified of the taste of its lover. She had stood on the rocks the day before and watched as it crept away like it was afraid of her, the tattletale standing in the rock pools, and what she could do. Had done. Will do again.

(Good. It should be.)

The ocean doesn't know that she's afraid of it. Maybe it has forgotten the sound of her screams as it swallowed her from the inside-out.

It came back, eventually.

(He didn't.)

Good. She doesn't like change.

And they watch from their heightened thrones crafted from the night's inspiration as the world collapses. Calypso shakes, the world follows. A blue smudge across the morning sky tainted purple, pink, yellow. The ocean strikes back, consumes the shore and the sand and everything from it, a kiss so violent from a love so deep. It swallows streetlight and benches and shacks filled with fishnets and Caly's heart thunders. I love you, the sea screams, an echo of her broken heart. I love you, I love you, I love you.

She clings to her second family with white-hot fingers. Lips tremble at the thought of her home, her parents and sister sleeping silently and the nightmare they'll wake up to.

(Will they wake up?)

"My God," she breathes. 

(Will she?)

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