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“Cotton candy?”
“What?”
You hummed as you raised your eyebrows, hiding that smug smile of yours.
Dissatisfied with the answer, I turned around to face you, but all I saw was your back. I knew you were smiling, because you didn’t know that the stall in front of you has a mirror attached and it reflected your smile right when you went passed it. I took my cotton candy and thanked the man—the only Russian word I seemed to be fluent.
“What’s wrong with it?” I stood beside you, refusing to let go of the argument.
You chuckled. “Nothing,” you said, finally looking at me. But your face was hidden behind the shadows of a million colors behind you. You had said that the carnival would be small and boring, but I was fascinated by how different the taste of the simple food was. Even the candies tasted different. Even the cotton candy tasted different. You picked a huge amount of it and you put it into your mouth. “Strawberry,” you hummed.
Under the lights from the carousel, I saw it in your eyes that you were having a trip to your past. I wondered if young Oksana used to visit this kind of carnival with her family. I wondered if her father had bought strawberry cotton candy for her. I was temped to ask, but I knew you would tell me if you wanted, so I took a huge bite of the fluffy sugar instead.
You then took my free hand and guided me to the shooting stall. I knew what you were thinking. You glanced at me and smirked.
I was still fascinated by your ability to switch to the native language you had sworn you would never use again, but you had decided to show me anyway. I was sometimes taken aback by how you switched to English as soon as you spoke with me, because I needed to get used to the you in different languages although I believed that every version of you was just the faces you needed to be able to adapt in the past.
You paid an extra bill to the muscular man behind the counter. I didn’t understand your words, but I understood that you made a deal with the man. You turned to me and said, “I told him if we could hit all of the targets with twenty bullets, he would give me the biggest bear up there.”
I glanced at the brown sad bear hanging.
“And also his knife,” you smirked. “I wanted it.”
I then saw the man. He was clearly underestimating us. He muttered something, but you ignored him as you took the remaining of my cotton candy and threw it away. “Show him what you got,” you whispered.
I snorted. “Show him what we got,” I said.
With that, we grabbed the fake guns and hit all the twelve targets in a flash. I missed one, but we had more than enough bullets. You acted all cool, but you couldn’t hide your pride. I didn’t know if that pride was for me or for us.
The man left his mouth open before cursing loudly. He took the bear and handed it to me. I stared at the bear’s sad eyes. It was now free, but it was still sad. I wonder if it understood the meaning of freedom. Your laugh brought me back to reality. The man unwillingly gave you his knife. You glanced at me, raising your eyebrows with the same smug smile.
“We’re amazing,” you said.
I chuckled at your cockiness and you used that chance to put my hair behind my ear. When I looked up to see you, you smiled at me. Your eyes softened as you let your fingers stroke my hair. “It suits you,” you said.
“What suits me?”
“The joy,” you answered. “You deserve it.”
That hit me. I let out a small gasp. “Do I?” I whispered. I wondered if you could hear it in the middle of this carnival, but you nodded.
“Yeah, you do,” you said as you brushed your thumb on my cheek.
I just realized that tears had started streaming down my face. Your face was blurry now. I hated it when I couldn’t see you.
You took the bear out of my hands and put it on the ground. Your hand slid under my chin and you kissed me.
You kissed me, your hand on my cheek.
I kissed you back, my arms throwing themselves around you.
You kissed me, your hand messing with my hair.
I kissed you, my arms refusing to let you go.
When our lips separated, I grabbed your hands, suddenly afraid that you were not real. I looked into your hazel eyes, suddenly afraid that you were someone else.
I love you, I screamed in my mind. I knew I had never told you that, because we always knew that we never needed those words, but maybe, maybe we should have said it at least once.
Before I managed to say it, you said, “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“The Ferris wheel,” you raised your eyebrows, as if it was obvious.
I raised my face to see the said object. It was right in front of us. I saw lines off lightbulbs decorating the wheel.
“Come on,” you said as you took my hand.
“Wait. The bear,” I said, eyeing the stuffed animal on the ground. I thought the bear would be sadder if we left it. Maybe it hated being alone. It had been alone, hanging from the tent of the shooting stall for days—maybe weeks, and now it would be alone again on the ground.
You chuckled. “It can wait there. We’ll get it when we get off.”
I wondered why you were so confident that no one would take it, but when you guided me with your hand holding mine, I realized that you just did not want a third wheel. You would not share me with anyone or anything, even with a sad teddy bear.
You led me to a red car with white lines—the classic carnival colors. The wheel moved as soon as we sat down. I watched the bear getting smaller and smaller on the ground. I wondered how it felt over there, watching its owners ascending.
When the car reached the top and started to descend, I turned to look at you.
You were staring at me, smiling.
“What?” I asked.
You did not answer. You offered me the knife instead. When I took it, I just realized why you had wanted it. You must have liked the carvings—the sun and the moon.
I chuckled. “You could just buy it from him,” I said.
“No, that would be boring. I always wanted to see you with the guns anyway,” you shrugged. “And showing off always feels great.” You smirked when I looked at you.
“You and that cocky attitude,” I said as I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, you love it.”
“Do I?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Since when?”
“Since the moment our eyes met.”
Then our eyes met.
Oh.
Oh.
“Are you ready?” you asked again.
Those hazel eyes. You missed me as much as I missed you.
Everything hit me at the same time.
It had been years since you had drowned in that river and I had failed to save you. I had bought the teddy bear because it had reminded me of you. I had bought the knife because I had thought that you’d like it.
I just remembered that I had rented a room next to a carnival. All of these lights were seen from my window. I had been thinking that visiting your country, being surrounded by the people and the language, would make me feel a little closer to you, but instead, everything reminded of how all of these meant nothing without you by my side.
So I finally took my final step—a final act to reconcile with you.
With that knife, I cut open my artery. “It’s worse when I push through it slowly,” I remembered your words, so I tried to slice as slow as possible, feeling how the knife ripped my skin, my nerves, my flesh.
But I didn’t know how to describe it. It stung, but it felt like ecstasy. I chuckled as I silently drowned inside the bathtub in my room.
As I felt my mind going further and further away, all I remembered was your eyes. As I drifted away, I thought about a million memories—or maybe fantasy—of us.