Até ali vivias perdido, debaixo das brumas, fugido da vida.
Fugias a uma e a outra, corrias ao som das badaladas sem ser Cinderela..
Para um dia te encontrares, meio vazio, e perceberes que o que falta na tua vida sou eu.
Por onde andei, enquanto me procuravas?

There was one thought and it tangled her up like a repetitive, half awake anxiety dream. Could love be continuous? Could you carry it unbroken from childhood to adulthood, wrestling it over the crags and pitfalls of adolescence? Could it come out the other side as the same kind of love, just expressed in new ways? Or were those two kinds of love disjunctive and creepily at odds?
Maybe it wasn't simply the answer that was baffling. Maybe the question was wrong. Maybe there weren't two kinds of love. Maybe there were a trillion kinds.. or just one.

She remembered the hard time he'd given her when she was younger. She'd dress up for a party or wear make up to go out and he'd tease her and torment her for it. He'd wanted her think she looked silly or ungainly, but she knew deep inside it was the opposite of the truth, and that's what made him do it. He'd pretended he was doing her a service keeping her head size in check.
He'd been ruthless about the boys who hung around her. He saw only their worst intentions because, like he once confided her "he saw them in himself". He'd always tried to dignify it as something other than jealousy.

She heard a song floating in from the café nearby. It was a Beatles song she used to love, "I'll follow the sun", and with her head on her knees, she let herself cry. They were tranquil tears, even philosophical ones, but deeply sad as they slid down from the corner of her eyes into her hair and ears.
She cried for the leavers and the left. For the people like herself, forsaking what few precious gifts thwy would ever get.

T. was her equal, her rival, her flip side and her best friend. In some ways, she found it hard to distinguish herself from him. They were the same age and for years they had been the same size. They'd worn the same pants. She felt betrayed when he kept growing after she had stopped.

"Hey" he said to her.
She hugged him, putting her chin on his shoulder and her face toward the wall. It wasn't the kind of thing they expected each other to do. It wasn't so much intimacy that provoked it, but the need to look at him any longer.She couldn't really feel anything of him or focus her eyes exactly. Her body was numb and her eyes confused her. "How are you doing?", she heard. In a moment of lucidity, she feared he could feel her heart pounding and she pulled away.
"Fine, thanks" she sounded almost rueful. She wanted to check his face but he was looking at her, so she didn't.
What was the matter with her? It was just him! He was the same old.. But it also wasn't. He was the strangest of strangers, in that he was also her oldest friend.

She remembered the time, years before when she'd drunk red wine, nearly two bottles of it. She was fourteen, and he followed her to the river because he'd felt worried about her. It was the day S. was still at the hospital in a coma. At first she avoided him, and then she told him to go away.
"I'm not bothering anyone", he had said, and sat down in the rocks, "Anyway, you don't rule the world".
Eventually, she'd come to sit next to him. He watched her, looking for tears but deep down he knew she was no cry baby. They sat there in silence and darkness with no moon at all for a long time. For hours it seemed to her. And when he got tired, he'd lain back on the sand and she'd put her head on  his stomach. He'd been startled by it but he hadn't pushed her away.
She was drunk, tired, sad and a little bit sick. He told her a couple of months ago that he still could imagine, even now, the heavy, warm feeling of her head lifting and falling with his breath. "You are the only good thing in the world" she'd said to him.
"I don't want to be the only good thing in the world", he'd answered at last, and she heard the words in the distance floating upward, between dreams and he must have suspected somehow that she was already asleep.