blackheart ➵ m. clifford

➵ twelve

➵ michael

 In our world, every person has their own definition of beauty, whether it was inside or out. It could be long blonde hair and rosy cheeks, or the words that spilled from a pen. Beauty could be the glow of wonder in the eyes of youth, or the tattoos that scrawled across the skin of people who adored them.

My definition of beauty was snow-white hair falling over the lapels of my leather jacket, hugging taunt shoulders with the pockets filled with her fists, and my definition of beauty was the grin that almost split her face in two. My definition of beauty was the admiration that made her eyes twinkle like all the stars had been pulled from the sky and into her irises, and my definition of beauty was the words she uttered as the world beyond the clouds turned from periwinkle to lilac to peach to golden and to an iridescent blue that swallowed the flicks of flames that fluttered away from the bonfire.

Fuck, she was beautiful. In the way her fingers would twist in timid knots, and how her laugh seemed to erupt from the deepest caverns of her chest. I could write word after word, sentence after sentence, about how beautiful this girl was.

Sometimes I wondered if Jett was just a figment of my imagination, that it was me that somehow had two worlds inside my head. She was glorious and wonderful, and so far out of my league that even a fucking rocket wouldn’t land me in her orbit. I was just a kid who liked art a little too much, listened to too much rock music, and obsessed over girls like they were the Gods that ruled the Earth. All in all, I was just a kid, and I knew absolutely nothing about beauty.

But I knew about Jett, and I knew that she didn’t like sweet or salted popcorn; she liked toffee popcorn, and I knew that she named all the stars that cast across her ceiling. I knew that her hair was naturally whiter than the first snow of winter, though she liked to tell people it was dyed so they didn’t get the ‘albino’ theory into their head. I knew that she liked to be called Jay, but she liked to be called Jett more – but only if the name was leaving my lips. I knew her shirts were two sizes too big, because she liked to tuck her knees under her shirt when she was sleeping.

I knew a lot, but there was more.

And that was what was beautiful.

Jett Stanley was an intricate, dynamic human being, a kaleidoscope of a girl that was split in half. There were two sides to every story, and Jett was a story and a half, a whirlwind of an adventure that I couldn’t quite keep up with, but I couldn’t stop turning the pages. She was broken and she was shy, but she was so fucking confident that it was so confusing to me. Sometimes her eyes would be on her shoes, and other times she wouldn’t dare be the first to break eye contact. I couldn’t describe Jett as anything other than complex.

The licks of the flames turned her skin the colours of embers, glowing and flickering like butterflies with burning wings. A pout was set on the quivering flesh of her lower lip, and the cold was shaking her little bones. Sam and his girlfriend – everyone called her Sam Two – were sprawled out on the grass beside us, and Luke was observing from beside them, Calum to his right. There must have been thousands of people here, wave upon wave of men, women and children filling up the ocean of the recreational park.

There were squeals and screams echoing around the fairground on the other side of the field, and there were queues ten people deep for the hotdog stands or the candy floss wheels. Security was dotted along the ten-foot fences that lined the area, and people were still filtering in through the gates like little ants. The bonfire was at least fifteen feet tall, and I could feel the heat on my skin as it seemed to get bigger and bigger.

“Aren’t you cold, Mike?” Jett nudged me, my eyes snapping up to look into her golden ones.

That was another thing I liked about Jett; her eye colour. Once, Luke had told me that they were brown, and it had infuriated me to the point where I could not form a sentence in retaliation because he was using such mediocre words to describe something that was far from mediocre. They weren’t just brown. They were rivers of caramel, tainted with honey and ringed with the most glorious of chocolate, and they didn’t deserve to be called brown.