opposites attract

"valves, ventricles and veins"

-morrigan

the stars grow tired when the sun wakes up. the moon fades and the light of a billion candles strike the sky, but not before that canopy of grey envelopes the clouds and settles. waiting to be lifted by the promise of a new day.
the world - she thought - has a funny way of showing us how life works.

-isla

isla worked her way around the library. in the dead of night, with several books balanced precariously on her left hand, while she searched for another with her right.
"the original abc's of cardiothoracic surgery"
"median sternotomy and other incisions"
"stenotic arteries and clogged valves"
"mechanical valves inside the body"
" pumping and massaging the heart"
all sat wobbling and balancing on her palm.
isla drew a path across the ones she didn't need with her index finger, running the tip of it over the bumps and broken, used spines of neatly shelved books all stuffed next to eachother.
"valves, ventricles and veins"
she picked it up and added it to the growing pile of pages tucked snugly beneath her chin and headed towards an abandoned table littered with empty takeaway coffee cups and scrap pieces of paper. she set all of her stuff down, took her backpack off and swiped the trash into a plastic bag lined bin with one arm; a satisfying rustle when everything hit the bottom.
isla sat herself down with a sigh, opened her copy of "median sternotomy and other incisions" and started to scribble down diagrams, labels and phrases illegibly on a lined page from her notepad. despite her messy handwriting, however, isla was a compulsively neat person. everything was filed. organised. clean. perfect.
of course, if she wanted to be a surgeon, everything would have to be perfect. she would have to be perfect. and she would be. she would work and struggle and strive until she was perfect. as all cardiothoracic surgeons are.
she'd dabbled in neuro surgery for a little while. it was more precise, it was cleaner. the brain, after all, is where everything starts, where you think and how you feel and how every single nerve in your body is activated. although cardiothoracic surgery, she decided, was the way forward. it was her "calling". she could study it and work with it and understand it better than she could ever understand any person, any other body part. which, she mused, was ironic. considering the heart is the most complicated organ to understand (feelings wise and ten-blade wise)
she flipped through the book, she listed down concepts and theories.
and then she looked up.
and she saw a girl.
she saw a girl, who at the very same time, looked up and saw her.
she saw a girl with short light hair and pinkish cheeks, who was flipping through her own book and surrounded with empty coffee cups that seemed to be her own.
the girl saw her, and gave her a smile, with dimples flashing and her teeth showing and her eyes squinting through the bright grin she was showing her. and through her round, broken-in-the-middle glasses and messy, frizzed up hair, her eyes looked to be an unbelievably light .. green? blue?
she pushed her broken and taped together glasses up further on her nose with the back of her hand and looked down at her book again, and then grabbed all of her work and stuffed it into her bag hastily.
isla blinked once and the girl was up, the girl was wiggling her fingers in a makeshift wave at isla, who she didn't even know, and the girl was walking away and bouncing down the stairs haphazardly.
isla blinked once and it was like it hadn't happened.
her eyes flickered back down to the paper and she continued. she carried on listing her workings and mapping out the circulatory system in her notepad.

after isla was too exhausted to resume her notes, it was well into the early hours of the morning. everyone had vacated the library long ago; before she'd shown up even, before she'd noticed the light haired girl that had looked at her and smiled.
she packed up her things (filed, organised, neat) into her backpack and she stepped down the stairs with her back straight and her palm wrapped around the banister, and strode through the two library doors with the three books from that day that she hadn't yet read weighing in her backpack, brushing a braid away from her face and behind her ear whilst crossing campus to get to her dorm.
the girl from across the library playing over in her head until she finally slept, and woke up on a sunday morning at eight o'clock on the dot. perfectly on the hour.

-m

her eyes were burning. it felt like every time morrigan closed them her eyelids would glue temporarily shut and her eyelashes would fuse together, which sharply contradicted the insane amount of caffeine coursing through her bloodstream that was making her nerves jump, squeal and itch with every step she took to her dorm across campus from the library.
the library where she just saw the most beautiful girl she thought she'd ever seen or ever would see again, with gorgeous dark hair knotted into tiny braids that were parted just to one side and beautiful big hazel eyes that were haunting her even in her state of exhaustion.
a girl that she would probably be hung up on for the rest of the week, a new love that her friends would tease her about endlessly. this week's obsession, they'd say. today's faze.
and they were probably right, she was a hopeless romantic after all. hopelessly hooked on the idea of love, the idea of having a person.
she'd come to terms with liking girls not long ago, maybe a month. she hadn't even come out to her closest friends, she'd had boyfriends who she thought previously that she loved, attachments that she'd formed which ended up being not much more than glorified friendships, or him turning out to be an adulterous manwhore (she never got so upset at the cheating, more because it made her feel undesirable, and because it was a promise broken than the fact he slept with another woman)
morrigan was a literary and art student. she aspired to write novels, and poetry, and paint the most beautiful things that made people want to study her work vicariously and inspired them to do wonderful things over their own.
she flopped down against the bed, heavy, burnt out, buzzing, and passed out in her skirt, shoes and jacket as soon as her body hit the mattress.
morrigan woke up at 12pm sunday.