Yesterwary

Demi stared up at the sky full of nothingness, clutching Margo’s book to her chest as she lay on the library roof.

“I miss you,” she whispered, clamping her eyes shut as tightly as she could. She immersed herself in the sounds of Yesterwary. There were at least two babies crying in the distance, from the orphanage she assumed. She could hear the grunts and calls of numerous farm animals. She could even hear the endearing chirps of crickets. But through all of these noises, a resolute, deafening silence flooded the air with the weight of a thousand broken hearts, and it made Demi’s chest ache as if her ribs might burst through her lungs.

“Figured I’d find you here,” a soft, familiar voice called from the door.

“How’d you know?” she asked, continuing her upward stare as Bastian situated himself beside her.

“I didn’t,” he admitted shamefully. “But you weren’t at the restaurant, your apartment, or the orphanage. If you weren’t here, I was going to gather a search party.”

Drying her cheeks on her sleeve, Demi could no longer tell if her face was damp from tears or weather. “I miss the stars,” she said, more to the sky than to Bastian.

“I don’t even remember what they look like,” he noted.

“They’re beautiful. But,” she said, glancing down at her sister’s beaming face on the back of A Wary Yesterday, “stars are the saddest kind of beauty.”

“Why’s that?”

“They bring such life to the darkness, and yet most of them died out long before we ever thought to notice them. Margo always said, ‘the beauty is in the distance.’ But I think you can be too far away.”

“Is that what we are? Too far away?”

Demi remained silent, remembering all the nights she had spent on the library roof with her sister, reading books that still contained all their words, and never once imagining that it could have been stolen away so easily.

“On the flip side,” he said, nudging her with his shoulder in an attempt to lighten the mood, “if you were to get too close to the stars, they’d melt your skin off and you’d die.”

“Bastian?” Her gaze was trained on the sky. She had barely comprehended his words.

“Mm hmm?”

“Why are you here?” she asked, glancing at him from the corner of her eye.

“I wanted to see you,” he whispered, almost embarrassed. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Oh, that’s… No, I mean, why are you here? In Yesterwary?”

Bastian looked over to her, eyebrows lowered. “That’s not really something you should go around asking people,” he clarified.

“I’m not going around asking people. I’m lying here, asking you,” she said, almost pleading. “You’ve been here your entire life, haven’t you?”

“No,” he admitted, “not my entire life.”

“Oh,” she said. “At the orphanage… It just seemed like…”

“I grew up here. But I found myself back in the old world when I was nine.” His voice was barely audible.

“But you said—”

“I know what I said.” He cut her off, eyes fierce as he met her gaze. “As far as I know, nobody else has ever been able to get out. At least… if they have, they’ve never come back. Moira was the only person who remembered me from before. She promised she wouldn’t say anything.”

“How’d you get out?” Demi questioned anxiously. If he’d gotten out, that meant maybe others could have gotten out. Maybe she could get out.

“I was put into foster care as a baby. I probably shouldn’t remember it, but I do. My first day in the system, as soon as I left the hospital, I ended up here. The nurses at the hospital were the only people keeping me in the old world,” he recalled, staring distantly as he leaned his head against the cool, stone wall. “I wanted to be a nurse, you know. Because of them. They didn’t have to love me—some unwanted, nameless baby. But they did it, anyway. They’ll never know how much of a difference they made.”

“You could still be a nurse, couldn’t you?” Demi asked.

“Not here,” he whispered.

“Right… No second chances.”

Bastian nodded, and continued the recount of his life. “I spent nine years in the orphanage, here. Then I was adopted in the old world. They were great people. They loved me, even though I wasn’t really there. They got me out of here.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“I just missed it so much,” he said, voice dry and salty.

“Bastian…”

“I spent years in therapy because of this place. They tried to convince me that I’d developed this alternate world in my mind as a coping mechanism for being shuffled from home to home. When I said I didn’t remember being moved around, because I was here, they said that was the point of the coping mechanism. They admitted me to a psychiatric institution when I was fourteen, because I wouldn’t believe them. The last time I saw my parents was the day they admitted me.”

“Seriously? That’s how you brought yourself back?” Demi’s voice wavered in anger. “Why didn’t you just pretend that you believed them?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to warn people so they wouldn’t end up here. But no, I didn’t actually come back until I was sixteen.”

“They still loved you, then? Your adoptive parents?”

“Not quite. But you can’t run out of love if you don’t waste it. I guess I was just saving mine up for someone who I thought actually deserved it.”

“And you found that someone?”

“Yep.”

“But they didn’t love you back?”

“There are other ways to run out than wasting it all on someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

Demi stared hard at Bastian’s face, catching a glimpse of something she hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t that he had given all of his love to someone who didn’t love him back. He had given all of his love to someone who wasn’t strong enough to carry on loving him.

“You lost someone?” she asked.

“Everyone loses someone.”

“But you lost the person you gave all your love to. The only person who was keeping you in the old world.”

Bastian looked down at his hands, rolling them over in each other as if he wished there were a third one between them. Biting his lip, he looked to the sky.

“Tell me about it?” Demi asked, leaning her head on Bastian’s shoulder, which was really just an effort to let him cry without feeling noticed.

“She was an attempted-suicide. I met her my first week in the institution,” Bastian whispered, struggling to force out the words. He had never spoken them before. “She didn’t think I was crazy. But it felt like she was the only thing keeping me sane.”

“What happened?”

“They were running a trial for an experimental drug. Her family signed her up, even though she was already making progress with her treatment.” The words were choppy and painful, each one a tiny dagger carving into his already-shattered chest. “It messed her up, made her really sick. She started having seizures, so they put her on more medication for those. Then her liver started shutting down.” He paused long enough to clear his throat. “They didn’t let me see her, even when they knew she was going to die. Losing her destroyed me. Losing her sent me back here.”

“What was her name?” Demi asked, wrapping one of his hands in her own.

Bastian was silent for what felt like decades. He had never spoken his lost love’s name within Yesterwary, and hadn’t ever intended to.

“Anya.” The name floated past his lips, and took with it a weight that had been anchored in his chest.

“I’m sorry you lost her,” Demi said sincerely, pushing back the tears that were welling in her own eyes.

“Everyone loses someone. In the end, we all become the one who is lost.” He spoke a truth that had never crossed Demi’s mind, and it sank like shards of glass in her gut. With a sigh he carried on. “Anya’s the reason Adrian and I don’t get along. He was in the same institution. He loved her as much as I did. But… she didn’t even know he existed. He ran out long before she died.”

“You could still get out, though,” Demi said. “Someone could love you. It’s happened before.”

“I don’t know that I want to leave.”

“Why not?” she snapped.

“I had an entire seven years in the old world, Demi. And a good portion of it was spent protected by white walls and barred windows. I wouldn’t know how to exist back there.”

“Nobody else knows what the hell they’re doing, either. I promise. You’d fit right in.”

He wrapped his free arm around her, pulling her close. Maybe, if they stayed that way long enough, they could become one person, and feel slightly more whole.

“Bastian?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“How long does it take to get used to the emptiness?” she asked, pawing at the cracked skin over her heart.

His eyes flickered to her chest, and then down at his own, before finally landing on their joined hands. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

Demi snuggled in even closer, yawning as sleep tried its hardest to take over, but something very rectangular and hard jabbed into the side of her head from the breast-pocket of Bastian’s jacket.

“What is that?” she asked, slightly irritated.

“Oh,” he said, pulling out a plain, brown-papered package and shyly pushing it toward her. “Your dad mentioned that it was your birthday.”

“What?” she asked, confused. Demi counted over all the time she’d spent in Yesterwary. Her birthday should have already passed by now.

“Yeah,” he said. “So… Happy birthday.”

“It’s not—”

“Please, take it.” He cut her off.

Demi sighed, and tugged at the corners of the frayed wrapping, until a book peeked out from behind the paper. It was the blank book she’d picked up from Bastian’s personal collection her second night in Yesterwary.

“Thank you,” she said, gazing down at it and desperately wishing she could open the cover to find it filled with words. “That’s very kind.”

Bastian nodded silently, as she placed to book to her side and laid her head back down to his quiet chest, eyelids drooping as sleep began to win the battle.

“Tell me a story?” Bastian whispered.

She fluttered her eyes open to the other book that was lying next to them, Margo’s book, and recalled the first story she had ever told Michael, the one she hadn’t wanted to tell Bastian at the time.

“Forever and not long ago, there were two sisters. They loved each other very much. So much, they should have hated each other,” Demi recited, hoping her listener didn’t mind that she was drenching his shirt with silent tears. “The sisters were very fortunate to have each other, because their parents were invisible. They were there, of course, but they were very difficult to find. The older sister was amazing, and wonderful, and brilliant. She took care of the younger sister, and tried to teach her to be just as amazing, and wonderful, and brilliant as herself. She claimed to have succeeded, but the younger sister strongly questioned her judgment. One day, the older sister had to go away, but nobody was allowed to be sad. It was a happy occasion. Her amazing, wonderful brilliance had finally been acknowledged, and she’d been given the chance for her dreams to become life.” Demi’s voice cracked as she got through her story. “But she didn’t get to live her dream. At the hands of a stranger, in ashes and embers, she returned home too soon, and she would never return home again. The younger sister was left alone in the world. Her tears pulled her into darkness, and her chest cracked, and her heart ceased to beat.”

“Demi, I’m—”

“But…” she continued, adding on to the original story, “her broken heart led her to a peculiar and fantastical place. The place was meant to be empty of happiness and love, but the younger sister was so fond of strangeness that she didn’t care. She thought it was beautiful. You see, she met a very odd boy in this place, a little sliver of light in the shadows. He took her to the library, and he made her terrible pork chops, and he let her cry on his shirt. So, all in all, it was a pretty happy ending.”

“I like it,” Bastian whispered. “Demi?”

“Hmm?” Demi hummed, trying hard to fight off sleep, to stay in that moment just a bit longer.

“You were very close to your sister. But… was there no one else you loved?”

Demi thought for a long while, remembering staring out her bedroom window for hours while the neighbor-boy played basketball with his friends. As she’d gotten older, she’d tried her best to take Margo’s advice of ignoring him. ’He’s not worth your attention, Demi.’ But something had always kept her from moving on.

“No.”

“You don’t have tell me, that’s fine. But please don’t lie to me,” Bastian said quietly.

“We grew up next to each other,” she sighed passively. “It was just puppy love. He barely knew I was alive.”

“In the old world, we’re taught to believe that some loves are more relevant than others,” he said, gripping Demi’s hand tightly. “That some are more real, more important.”

“Do you believe that?”

“People show up here every day because they ran out on neighbors, strangers, celebrities, and gods…” he said. “We can try to categorize it all we want, but Love doesn’t give a shit who you waste it on.”

“So, you don’t think I’m here because of Margo. You think… I’m here because of someone who didn’t even know my name?” she asked.

“No. You’re here because of you. Contrary to popular belief, we choose who we love. We can’t force them to love us back, but it’s our own fault for continuing to love them when they don’t.”

Demi closed her eyes, trying to hold back the watery evidence that she was hurt. Bastian tilted her face up toward him and brushed a tear from her cheek, which had managed to sneak through her lashes.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think he’s a fool for not loving you.”

Demi lowered her eyebrows and looked up to meet Bastian’s longing gaze. “Bastian—”

“You’re extraordinary.”

“If by that, you mean ‘ordinary beyond the fullest extent,’ then yeah,” she agreed.

“You’re not ordinary. You’re the first person I’ve met who has found beauty in this place. Anyone who is capable of doing that doesn’t belong here. You deserve better than this. You deserve to love and be loved.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Maybe. But I don’t care about everyone. I care about you.”

Her jaw fell, searching for the words. “Can you care without love?”

For a brief moment, within the short distance between their faces, Demi thought she was certain that time had taken pity on her, and had permitted her to stare into Bastian’s eyes for several lifetimes.

For a brief moment, while the warmth of Demi’s breath mingled on his lips, Bastian thought he was certain that love had taken pity on him, and had permitted him to evoke the phantom of a rhythmic beat inside his quiet chest.

And in that brief, everlasting moment, which could never truly last forever, they thought they were certain that they had found love in the place that love had left behind. But thinking one is certain, and being certain are two very different things.

The problem with thoughts is that they tend to be greatly influenced by your mind, which is, generally, very good at convincing you that you know far more than you actually do. And your mind is, sometimes, greatly influenced by your emotions, which tend to adamantly reject the notion that facts and wishes are not usually the same thing, even though they are, often, quite the opposite of one another.

There, in the false certainty on top of the library roof, Bastian and Demi’s lips met, and their bodies intertwined, and they became a part of each other. And they wished more than anything that their certainty had been true, but they found that an act of love, even without the love, could still be quite lovely, indeed.

Upon the mass of clothes Demi and Bastian held each other, wrapped up in nothing more than an oversized trench coat, an odd-looking overcoat, and glistening arms.

“I will spend the rest of my life wishing I could love you,” Bastian whispered, leaning his ear to her silent chest, “but I will never be able to offer you anything more.”

Demi wished, now more than ever, that her heart wasn’t broken and still. “Maybe they ought to change ‘the land of fallen hopes’ to ‘the land of lost wishes,’” she whispered, staring up into the starless sky.

“No,” he said, lifting his head and tilting her chin toward him so he could see into her eyes. “It’ll never be lost. It may never come true, but I will wish it until my days run out. I will gladly live life without love, if it means I get to live it with you.”

Of course, that exact mindset was the entire reason Yesterwary existed in the first place. But that’s irony, for you. It’ll take any chance it gets to stab you in the heart, and leave your chest cracked and ruined. Or is that life? Or is that love? All three, perhaps.