They warned me about protecting my heart; I didn’t listen. I’m paying the price;  floating in space, tethered to you like the moon to her earth. Or is it the other way around? Because you're the gravitational pull, the tidal force that controls the rise and fall of my breath when you’re around.

It’s excruciating. I’ve developed a compulsion to laugh at almost anything you say to mask the violent ebbs and flows in my heart. You sometimes look at me like I’ve grown a second head knowing there was nothing remotely funny about what you said. But I giggle, nudge you, slap your arm, giggle again, until my antics make you laugh. "You're so hyper again, Rosie," you would say in an almost sleepy way and with that lazy smile, before nuzzling your cheek on my shoulder. It forces me to quiet down, control my breathing, and look at anywhere but you. Because I might forget. I might forget that there are oceans between us. 

“Do you know the red string of fate?” You onced asked me while in our down time by the beach, cheeks flush from the beer that was covertly hidden inside a thermal mug. “I think that’s us.” 

“You’re drunk” was my reply because I wasn’t sure if you understood the weight of what you said, and that seemed to have irked you a bit. Leaving me alone in my own thoughts that were just too damn loud for a company, I took your abandoned cup and drank the remaining contents; it was nothing but cherry cola. 

It wasn’t the first time you brought that up, one way or another. You took pride that we knew the same horse, that we once considered Auckland our home. You remember it to be of lush greens, the air smelling of salt, earth, and sun, and time ticking way slower than the world we were about to inhabit. Our new home; messy, crowded, girls sizing each other up and hoping the other would be kicked out–silently. Because we were all expected to be polite, in a country already too polite, too rigid, too hierarchical. Not like back home, I said, and you understood when no one else did. That knowing, almost conspiratorial smile, that we shared something no one else in the dorms did, still live in my memory as vividly as my first night. 

And it's always you who eagerly reminded me. All the time. Most especially when I introduce you to someone who could be new, who could be the next best thing who isn't you. 

“Rosie, Rosie, think about it. We really are destined to meet. I could’ve moved to Florida and you could’ve gone to university in Melbourne, but we both decided to audition to the same company, and now you’re here with me.” You nudged me a bit with eyes firmly to the person. “We’re like two pieces of a puzzle that just fits.” 

I’m stuck, replaying in my head those many moments. The first time you abruptly stopped walking, and when I turned around you had that impish smile. “You’re very gentlemanly,” you said before laughing at my confused face. “Look,” she said, pointing at how I was one step ahead and had a tight grip on her hand. “You’re my boyfriend for the night,” you said without weighing the implications of that, linking our arms together while deliberately ignoring calls for us to walk faster. 

There was a tightness in my chest that I suffered for a few days when you take time explaining our secret language to the world. “She’s my hubby because–”

No, please. That's ours. I couldn’t explain why I gave you the cold shoulder after the first time you divulged that to someone. You seemed lost because you knew it was directed at you, and that everyone around us walked on eggshells. And I hated it; I hated it mostly because I couldn’t keep it up long enough for you to at least ask what’s wrong with me. 

You brandish me like a trophy, reminding people around us that I am yours in every way except where it matters. My name, my stage name, both forgotten because you have a special name for me. Only you can use it, you declared without saying it directly. The way you enunciate the first syllable, with weight before you slide into softness as you end it, all yours. A moment of mistake felt like a