Page 92 of Impossible

“I marked some of my favorites for you,” I offer lamely. It’s a pretty severe understatement forI spent three hours trying to choose poems that wouldn’t overstep or make you feel weird or be too overtly sexual or that you might find boring but also still somehow say hello I would like to love you, if you’ll let me.

She cracks the spine and I watch her lips part slightly as she sees my writing on the inside cover. This book has been with me since I was a kid under the covers with a flashlight, reading past my bedtime. There are penciled-in thoughts about love; Leon with his blonde hair and easy manner, Risk with his frightening, frenetic zest for life, the eroticism of nature and how unfair being an alpha is, held to standards so dichotomous I used to think they’d make me explode. Idolizing Hollis from afar, then from much closer, thinking I wanted what he has, then realizing what I really wanted washim.My former pack, all the ways I tried so hard to be what they wanted me to be. All the ways I failed. Indie’s eyes drag over my penciled words, her fingers fanning the pages until she comes upon the first pink sticky note.

my mind is

a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and

taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and

chipping with sharp fatal tools

It’s the best description I can offer for the bond. Defenses against a reality too painful to call your own. Changing you, shaping the marks you leave on the world.

She flips again, this time landing on Leon’s favorite—I marked it for her to read, knowing his nickname for her came from it:

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

“Oh,” she says again. “Little birds.”

“Like you.”

I wonder if she hates it.

When she turns to look at me, I know she doesn’t. Her eyes look like my heart feels after reading a poem that hurts in a good way.

“Don’t feel the need to read the whole thing at once,” I say. “Cummings deserves some sitting with.”

Her teeth work her lip and I want to reach out and graze it with my thumb. I don’t want her to hurt herself.

“Thank you isn’t enough,” she finally mumbles. “All these beautiful words and all I have is ‘thank you’. Seems silly.”

I smile.

I put the car in drive and she’s silent, looking at the book from every angle, taking in its ragged edges and dog-eared corners.

“This is yours,” she says eventually.

“Yours now.”

“Are you sure?”

“I first read it when everything in my world was exploding. If you can decipher my disastrous handwriting, you’ll see. I figured your world is kind of exploding right now too. Maybe it could help.”

She keeps reading as I drive. Not the poems—just the inside cover, with all my scrawled teen angst. I re-read my musings before I gave it to her, making sure there wasn’t anything too precious. Some are embarrassing, some tender, but I want forever with Indie. I want her bonded, existing inside me all the time. There isn’t anything I’d hold back. So I didn’t erase anything. She chews her lip and furrows her brow as she reads my softest thoughts.

“Your parents were awful,” she finally murmurs.

I smile. “Yeah. Yours too.”

She smiles. “Yeah.”

“They disowned me when I was seventeen.”

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