i.

You met her shadow first.

(Let me set the scene.)

Seven years old, waiting at the bus stop, huffing crystalline clouds into the bitter morning air. Your fluffy pink boots were planted in the dirty snow; the other children chattered busily a few paces away. The cold sank its fangs into the back of your neck and ran them down your spine.

Then, from behind, her shadow fell over your small figure and the snow at your feet. Bled over and into your own silhouette like a spilled inkwell against paper.

She laid a jacket over your shoulders. You spun to look up, wide-eyed, at your savior. Ivy.

The dark sheen of her hair tossed off the dancing sunlight. She seemed about sixteen. You looked a little cold, she said.

The briefest of hesitations, then: “Thank you,” you tried. But then the school bus pulled to a stop by the curb—the crowd of children swept you onboard in a flurry of small stomping feet—

By the time you stumbled into a seat and pressed your face to the window, Ivy was already gone, the snow still pristine beneath where she had stood. Your shoulders were bare once more.

ii.

From then on, Ivy became a fitful constant in your life, slipping in and out of your memories like a cat behind corners. When you first started memorizing your times tables in second grade, she sat down in the other chair and flew through the problems with ease. You couldn’t keep up, so you just gaped and stared. 

Once she finished, she slid pencil and paper over to you, the answers blank once more. 

Your turn, said Ivy. She grinned.

She was composed. Effortless. You walked in on her doing her makeup for homecoming in the bathroom, once; she turned to you, all ebony hair and smoky jade shadow. How do I look? she asked, flashing dimples. And you couldn’t quite figure out how to say, “Like my dream.”

(It would have been the truth. Sometimes when you close your eyes you can still imagine her ghostly figure, racing through a labyrinth of towers and trees; her laugh echoes on the wind, and you know her beauty like the back of your hand but you can never, ever quite catch her.)

She was indelibly vivid, brilliant and warm. The kind of person who’d drop everything to help a senior citizen across the street. The kind of person who’d bite back at anyone who took a jab at the shape of her eyes or her middle name. The kind of person who’d fold a hundred paper cranes and send them flapping around your bedroom with one gentle brush of her fingers.

Your favorite moments were when she’d look down at you, whisper like a song: I see myself in you.

iii.

You were twelve years old, in bed, staring at the fluorescent stars scattered across your ceiling. The blankets rustled as Ivy slid under them to lie back to back with you. The two of you were misshapen parentheses in the night, curled around something vast and unknowable.

“How do you do it?” you whispered into the quiet. “How are you so perfect, Ivy?”

The only response was a slow sigh, so gentle that it might as well have been a breeze through the window. As you drifted off to sleep, her response was the last thing to swirl around the foggy edges of your mind: All you can do is hope to be, you know.

(And you did. In the years after, you hoped and hoped to be like Ivy, tugging at the folds of your face in the mirror, hunching over your homework as the hours crept on, trying to make them all love you with well-timed quips and flashing smiles. You hoped and you waited and the years soared by until Ivy was just a phantom and you were still you, like always.)

iv.

The evening of the day you failed your first test hummed with crisp winter chill. The cool gray clouds hanging low in the sky did nothing to block the punishing sunlight searing through.

Slumped on your desk, that day flashed across your mind. A 67%, scarred across a paper in ugly red ink. Your favorite sweater stained with papercut blood. The teacher stumbling over your name for the hundredth time. The hurt expression of your friend as you shoved past them, trying to hold back the burn in your eyes.

“Ivy?” you asked, muffled, into the desk. There was no answer. (You weren’t surprised.)

You lifted your head and caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror: a small defeated figure wilting in her chair, brow furrowed with frustration and something else you couldn’t quite name. For a moment, you couldn’t recognize yourself at all.

Ivy, with her shoulders squared and her cheerful face aglow, did not appear.

v.

She came back, of course. She always did. But every time you saw her again after that, she looked just slightly different: a little paler, a little thinner, like a candle burning down to the quick.

Coming of age gifted you a shake in your fingers and dark circles that roosted beneath your eyes. You wondered if you were too young to always be in motion. None of it was like the movies. 

You got used to the Sisyphean task of keeping your grades up: straining stagnantly, futilely, against the tumbling boulders. Your optimism was an old sweater fraying at the edges; you slipped it on in the mornings and prayed it would last until sundown. You quipped to your friend once that the future deserved a warning like those on car mirrors: Objects may be closer than they appear.

(How cruel the irony was: that growing into more only ever made you feel less.)

vi.

When you were small and they asked you how you saw yourself in ten years, your answer was always a little different. Kind. Focused. Brave. Ivy’d beamed down at you whenever you said that and patted your back once the adult had walked away. You can do it, she'd repeat, a mantra, a heartbeat. I believe in you.

You are sixteen years old now. You’ve finally caught up to her. Each time they ask you about your future now, the words aren’t there, only force of habit that turns your head to peer over your shoulder. Each time, you only catch the slightest ethereal glimpse of Ivy—eyes the color of a forest at midnight, a jawline sharp enough to cut your heart in half—before that flickers away too.

(How do you tell them that, when you close your eyes and imagine the future, all you see is swirling inky uncertainty? How do you tell them that the compass in your rib cage seems to be broken, because all it does is tremble and whirl in every wandering direction?)

This back is not straight enough. These hands are never warm enough. You, in every agonizing way, are not who you thought you would be.

vii.

You’re bigger than you were all those years ago, but the bed feels emptier than ever. It’s just you here now, curled beneath the covers. One stray parenthesis bleeding out into the dark.

You haven’t seen her in ages, but you still think about her when your head is racing and the night yawns long before you. Are you finally tall enough to make eye contact with her? Would she smile patronizingly or purse her lips at you, a tinny echo of her kaleidoscopic symphony? Would she disappear as soon as you looked and fade back into the recesses of your imagination? Would you even have the courage to face all that you’d ever hoped to be?

At any rate, the window is closed now. The night spins on. She isn’t here anymore.

(As if she ever really was.)