Jessa Hastings

Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

Emma Hak-Kovacs

My face falters. "Do you not read the society pages?" 

Tiller's eyebrows go up and he flicks BJ a look. "I can't say that I do, no-" 

He shrugs. "I don't know anyone in them.”

“That's —“ He and BJ catch eyes again, and maybe they're smirking over top of my head. “ — fine."

Time can be a bit like that, don't you think? It doesn't hurt when you're losing it as much as it does when you see in retrospect how much you lost.

Funny how life works, the people you find who become yours.

How many loves do you get in a lifetime? Fuck. It's undeniable now, isn't it—? I've had too many. None of them are the same, none have felt the same, and all of them I loved incredibly differently.

BJ, I love in an unquestionable way. I love BJ Like he's the sun. Blinding, bright, unbridled, unavoidable. He's the thing that sustains the galaxy of me. He drives the currents of me, he dictates the climates and the seasons. I feel his warmth on my face, and when he's gone, it's colder. He is the centre of everything, and the gravity of me is loyal to him above all.

And Christian, I loved, truly I did. I know he mightn't think I did in retrospect but here and now, I can tell that I did. I won't say that it was a pure love; it was painful and convoluted, but I did love him. I loved him like he was the nurse dispensing morphine to me after a surgery. He helped me, he numbed my pain, he saw me through it to the other side of betterness.

And then Tom, who always deserved more than could ever give him. I loved him like you'd love the hand of a person who reached down into the water to pull you back up to the surface when you're drowning. Sort of dazed and dreamy, enamoured in a rootless, drifting out to sea sort of way.

He is a star. Not the shooting kind. Not some flash-in-the-pan meteorite that burns up on entry into the atmosphere. And stars, they're undeniably beautiful, kind of magical. Only come out at the nighttime. Easy enough to ignore. In a sky full of them, a single star can be difficult to tell apart from the others. They don't affect our day-to-day lives, really. You might see it one night and not the next, and it bears no real consequence other than perhaps the sky is a little less wonderful on that particular evening. A star is a star.

But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, the star is also the sun.

He gives me a look. “You’re really pushy.”

"I am, yes," I concede. “It’ll grow on you." 

"No-" BJ shakes his head at the same time Henry scrunches his nose and says, "It won't," which is at the same time Christian — from rather far away — calls, "It never grows on you," at the same time Jonah says, "It actually wears you down a bit over time."

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