Dear Rory,
I'm sorry about what I said.
I'm leaving for LA in two days.
Can we talk before then, please?
We can just drive around as usual.
I don't know how to do this if
you're upset with me.
Call me please. I'm staying at my
parents' house...
i forgot to mention, this is set in 2022 rn ok ok ok also i lied. im a liar liar pants on fire. anw enjoy <3 ———
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I remember one summer when I had just turned ten years old waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and running to my grandma's room after a particularly bad dream. I snuck into her bed that night and a couple of nights after that as well. Every time she would tuck me in and turn the lights off, even in the middle of summer, the temperature in the room would drop considerably, or at least it felt like it to me, and I would find myself hiding my face under the bedsheets trying to find warmth before eventually running to Nana's bed because of the ghosts.
I genuinely thought my parents were haunting me. It took a while before I started dreaming of anything besides my parents getting hit by a car on a loop. I wasn't with them when it happened but I did sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the cop describe the accident to my grandma and my mom's older sister Annie in great detail after it had happened. It didn't help my wild imagination at the time.
For the longest time, I thought that cold, shaky feeling I got at night after waking up from a nightmare was my parents' ghosts. I thought that's what it must feel like to encounter the undead.
Now, as I sit outside a small café in a coastal town in Italy on a humid summer day, my whole body's frozen. The hairs on my arms rise and it feels exactly like I've just encountered a ghost.
Except, this ghost is a blonde five-foot-ten singer I haven't seen in thirteen years and never thought I'd ever see again.
I push my sunglasses up over my head, blinking repeatedly as I take a better look at her. It really is her.
She has bangs now covering her forehead. Her face has thinned, her features sharper with age. Her hair is also a lot smoother, no longer as coiled and bouncy as it used to be when we were teenagers. But it's her. It's still those blue same eyes, the colour of the ocean on a stormy day. That same light speckle of freckles on her cheek. It's Taylor.
"It is you, oh my god," she says, the first one to break the silence.
I nod lightly. It's all I can manage to respond with. I can't find my voice.
She looks away for a moment when the waiter comes back with her bottle of wine. She thanks him and turns back to me.
I haven't been able to look away the entire time.
I follow her gaze as she takes me in. She doesn't do it subtly, either, but I understand. My arms are exposed and her eyes follow the trail of ink that covers my right arm all the way up to my shoulder. I'm wearing a tank top so all the tattoos on my upper body are more or less exposed, and she's staring at them with her eyebrows raised.
