Pinky Promise

and other soft disasters.

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They pinky-promised under the street lamps, swearing they’d never love anyone else, then they screamed at each other in the rain an hour later. But God, they sure knew how to kiss in front of raging waterfalls. They’d blow pinwheels hard enough to make them spin. Their lungs were always empty, either from yelling at each other or trying to make the wheels twirl. But they were never empty enough to say, I love you. How his hands would get stuck in her mouth from feeding her too much cotton candy. How her tummy ache became a performance that everyone had to endure. Big feelings, fragile hearts-their love was the kind that spun like a ferris wheel, never quite touching solid ground. And he always got blamed for the tummy ache.

But he touched her gently. He held her in the crook of his arm like she was an egg. Picture a little boy with curly hair tip toeing across the linoleum. He did everything with one hand. He took a little bit longer to turn off the lights. A little bit longer to carry her plate to the table. A little bit longer to comb his own hair. She’d watch him with big eyes and blushed cheeks. In him, she saw a willow tree with tendrils stuffed by cotton clouds. She saw her favorite flower dance between his tongue when he spoke, like the little ballerina in the music box her Mother used to play for her.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

Sometimes, his arm would start to droop, but he never dropped the little egg in the nook of his arm. She’d curl into him as tight as she could-tighter and tighter until she started to crack. And the whites of her eyes spilled onto her cheeks, wide with the fear of losing it all. Their pinwheels stopped spinning-frozen in the dead of winter in 30 mph winds. And waterfalls ran down the cheeks of a girl with tummy aches and a crack in her forehead.

The boy still held her in the crook of his arm. He let the whites soak into the threads of his shirt, her yolk still jiggling in his elbow. Many years went by. The boy had grown even more tired, his arm had lost its feeling long ago and the girl grew sad. She could see him turning to an old man. A beard had grown, baby patches of gray smiling down at her. She pinky-promised him all the love in the world, swearing she’d never leave his arm. And his smile no longer reached to his eyes. And again, the girl was sad.

One day, the little thing in his arm wriggled and wriggled and wriggled. But the boy barely noticed anymore. So she kept wiggling and she squirmed and twitched. Until finally, she slipped from his elbow. She squinted her eyes tightly until little lines formed at the sides of them. A sweet slow motion fall from the top of the little ferris wheel they rode on together. Where they held hands and argued. Where she promised him a million kisses every single day and where he promised he’d always be her best friend. She could taste the cotton candy on her tongue, she could feel the sugar melt and the phantom tummy pains. Someone should kiss their lover under my falling tears, she thought. And the flavor of pinky-promised memories came to a halt as she hit the ground.

Everything was over in a moment. But death was cushy. It reminded her of cotton bunnies and downy marshmallows. Thoughts of sugar clouds and candy rain ran through her little brain. And the rain came. And the rain started to spill over her like a shower from God. The wind blew her hair into a thousand rollercoaster vines. And when she opened her eyes, all she saw was a drenched beard with galaxies of gray pushing her into the boy’s hands with a reverse-switch million pinky-promised kisses. She found herself on the pillow of her boy’s palm. And she never quite hit solid ground.

Because love is never meant to land. It’s about the fall itself. The tumbling, the spinning, the blur of cotton candy skies and pinwheel hearts. It was the space between the fingertips of a pinky promise that held a million words.

And that is all we ever are in love. Two souls caught mid-air, suspended by the fragile gravity of an almost forever, floating endlessly in the crook of an arm that never quite let go.