“OK, let me start over. What I was going to tell you was that I like you,” Luke said. “I mean, I think I’m in love with you. At first when I felt something, I figured it’s just that because I’ve done so much plant medicine that I can fall in love with anyone. But it just kind of got more and more intense and so I talked to Wolf about it and he made me realize that I just wasn’t admitting to myself that I was in love with you.”
Aria felt her stomach tighten. “Dude, what the fuck … you can’t just spend all this time with someone and not ever say something and never even act like it and then act betrayed when they get with someone else,” Aria said.
“Yeah, I know it’s stupid,” Luke said. He reached into his backpack. He took out a folded letter that was surprisingly neat, given that he had been keeping it in his backpack for over a week. He handed it to Aria. When she opened it, a red tail hawk feather, which he had folded into the paper for her, fluttered to the ground. He picked it up for her and began twirling it in his fingers to distract himself.
“Do you want me to read this now or later?” she asked.
“Whenever … No, actually, you can read it now,” he said.
Aria was surprised to see that he had written the letter in immaculate cursive.
To My Twin Flame,
I know you or my heart knows you.
I don’t know where my love started for you and I don’t know where or if it will end … Maybe in another life. Every night, you come into my dreams and then I have to remind myself that those dreams were only mine and I have to pretend that everything between us is normal. I don’t want to put pressure on you, but I want to be with you. I want you to be my goddess. I will love you when you are a Shakti and I will love you when you are Shiva. I don’t want there to be anything for us to hide. To me, you are like a powerful panther that also has the grace of a fragile doe. I know it’s not considered very good to mention how beautiful a woman is because it usually makes her feel like that’s all you care about, but I am going to take the risk and tell you that I think you are so beautiful that when I’m around you, I can’t breathe. I want to dance and play and be one with you. I think you could become my everything and I want to be everything to you. So if you are open to being my woman, just bring me this hawk feather and I will know it means yes. If not, you can keep it. Wolf said that a hawk feather is a symbol of courage and strength, which is what it took me to write this letter and what it would probably take for you to trust me with your heart. Either way, I want it to keep you safe. No matter how you feel toward me, I want you to be happy and I want you to feel free. I want you to travel the world with me. I want us to live the way that two people in love are meant to live. I don’t want to have any regrets, which is why I am writing you this letter, because if I didn’t say these things, I am afraid that I would regret it for the rest of my life. My love for you is an unending journey. But I’d rather take that journey with you than in my own head. Can you love me?
With unending love,
Luke
Aria read the words of his letter with deep heaviness. She did not think of herself as the kind of girl to miss something as serious as the affection he had so clearly spelled out in pen. She had imagined that her fondness for Luke had been deeper than the fondness that he held for her. But that fondness was like the moonlight as opposed to the sunlight. Moonlight was reflected. It was pale by comparison. The love that she felt for Luke was like the light that was reflected from a greater love calling to her from the other side of space and time. Her love for Omkar, on the other hand, was like the sunlight, hissing hot of its own volition, and she was blinded by that light.
Aria was silent for a few seconds before speaking. “Luke, this is a beautiful letter. I had no idea you felt this way. I feel really bad now.”
Luke stood up, still spinning the feather and running his fingers across the blade of it. He already knew the let-down that was coming. He could hear it in what few words she had said. “So that answer’s no, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I like you, Luke, way more than you probably know and more than I’ve told you.”
Luke cut her off: “You like me, but you don’t love me! That’s it, isn’t it?”
She answered him carefully, wary of the thin ice they had wandered onto. “No, it’s that I’ve met someone that I care about so much, I can’t – I just can’t fuck it up. It has nothing to do with you. If you had given me this letter a few months ago, I would have said yes to it.”
Luke looked up at the sky with anger, as if the sky itself had given him the bad advice to wait so long. “I don’t want this to make you hate me. I don’t want to lose you or whatever else might happen,” she said.
He sat back down beside her and forced his way past
