The Truth Untold

"What are you doing?" I whispered under my breath, as Carmine's presence drifted from being right at my side to there being a growing gap between us. I thought we were simply making our way to the set after arrival, but as he scratched the soles of his shoes to the concrete at the side of the building entrance I found he had other plans. It's hard to say what those plans were, so I had to ask.

"This is it. This is where I was standing." He announced. The content of those words wasn't enough for me to understand what he meant, it came to me as a language I couldn't speak. He faced his body straight to the north, adjusting it to an exact pin point location by tiny adjustments to either side, until he was fully satisfied. Once he was, the sun rising couldn't glow as much as him.

"That's where you were standing when what?" Him providing only strands of words that I couldn't piece together to a full story made me anxious. I felt in suspense, and had a thrill back and forth from my head to feet like a ping pong ball that could only pick up speed and never slow down. Part of me liked it, but part of me hoped he could get to the point. If he gave me too much time to think about it, I'd create fairytales out of thesis essays. I'd create fake based on one line of real.

"This is where I was standing when I fell in love with you." Carmine didn't make eye contact with me. He faced the same place from the start once he got there. There was nothing in front of him worthy of smiling so brightly at, but he played something in his head that made him smile anyway. Maybe those fairy tales wouldn't have actually been fairy tales. "From here, I watched you dance in the rain, without a care in the world for anything else."

I've said my heart was beating out of my chest countless times before, but for a circumstance like this one, even that was an understatement. Combine them all together and it still would be. I couldn't calm my talk. It was a whirl, and just about everywhere. "Are you even being honest? How could I believe that? Why did you reject me then? Did you not understand what I was trying to tell you? But you implied that I was crazy to hope you'd like me back!"

"I understood you very well. Your eyes speak when your mouth doesn't." The way he spoke was like he could still see that moment right in front of him and the same thing could apply to his expression. "I never meant to imply that we were impossible. I remember, I was going to say 'you didn't think that it wasn't mutual?' and that 'this is for work and only for work', but I couldn't admit it, because when you have fan's opinions on your choices, it's hard to disappoint them. Our job is to make them happy."

"Then what changed? Why is it okay to tell me now?" I swished a breath of air between my cheeks, like you would mouthwash. His words were a gift in a big cardboard box and my mind was the last remaining of the gift wrap that couldn't stretch its way around it. How could I accept words like this out of nowhere? It's everything I ever wanted but it was a lot to comprehend.

"I can't hold it back anymore, Arizona." He admitted. He stepped out of the spot he was so loyal to standing in to be closer to me. "I can't keep watching you look down on yourself when you're so worthy to be loved. Everyone would know you're beautiful if they weren't blind. If they'd only open their eyes. I've been afraid that a public life like mine would rip up a private life like yours, but how can I watch you do that everyday? I can't do it. Not anymore. Not ever again."

"Carmine, no." Tingles were all over my skin. Some force was pushing me from accepting his reasonings right away if he didn't prove it to me so deep that I couldn't believe something else if I tried religiously. "I'm not beautiful. We were thrown together to begin with because you had a mission to make me pretty."

"I had a mission to please my mom, dimwit. Not make you pretty. I know I was rude about it, and yeah, at first, I viewed you being part of my life as another thing I had to worry about. I'm a busy person. But I got the chance to get to know you, and I started to care. To love." Carmine's hands were on both of my shoulders, and with it, I felt obliged to look up at him as he talked. He was so hypnotizing that I couldn't look away. "I didn't care to make you beautiful. It wasn't like that, because honestly, I like the way you are. I just wanted you to be confident. To let you know it's okay to take care of yourself and to smile when you look in the mirror, and overtime my heart ached if you didn't. Do you really consider your features to be flaws that are ugly? Those 'flaws' if that's how you choose to call them are what make you beautiful. When are you ever going to believe me?"

I didn't have an answer for him, so I responded with more questions. "Why aren't you like the rest of the world? The ones that the only time that they would spend on me is to find ways to get me killed, and besides that none at all? Why did you start to like someone like me? Why are you different?"

I didn't understand why I was on the verge of tears when he, someone so angelic and in the line of perfection itself would pay attention, let alone claim to love someone like me. I got jealous and I loved in secret for what feels like a lifetime, but when it arrives it's a jewel that feels too pricey to take in with open arms.

"A man that prioritizes can make time. Time is suddenly in his hands. By that power, I learned the you you are for you, and along the way I wanted our hearts to beat in sync. I wanted our warmth to be the only one that filled the room. I wanted a type of happiness with you that I've never had. I wanted to experience love for what it is as our story." He wiped a tear away from my eye before I realized it had fallen, with the mid-joint of his finger. I could tell before he started his next bunch of words, he wanted me to laugh instead of cry, and I knew he'd succeed to at least an extent. He always does.

"You're the kind of girl that could make a complete fool of herself out in public. Right here, in this place, you danced in the rain with people staring at you sometimes, and you continued like no one was. You can do the stupidest stuff in the middle of the mall that I swear if you did it again will knock down an entire rack of clothes. You can do all the things that I wished I had the gut to do and used to do before I started to care what people think. You live like no ones opinion mattered even in your situation, but at the same time, you're the kind that gets suddenly shy of a fast food crew and that says thank you way too much, and to me? That's the most adorable thing in the whole world."

"That's thanks to you, you doofus." I was somewhere between laughing and crying, like that rare kind of weather when the rain would drizzle just slightly, but the sun was out and the sky was clear and blue. "I've always been careless, but I grew up in a life that I couldn't be, but because of you, I found the strength to be myself. The me that is true. The me that knows carelessness isn't always bad if it's what's real. If that's who you are."

"You did that because of me? That's always been in your reckless little heart. You can't give me that kind of credit, but if that's what you say," He chuckled in between words, but without sound, the only evidence of it the breath of air out of his nose and the growing grin dancing on his lips. "Can you be proud of your beauty for me too? Until you can do it for yourself, do it for me? You've seen it haven't you? That with everyone with the face for the trends, people get bored? Deep in our heads we do like what's different, we're just quick to be brainwashed by what society says. Embrace what you keep calling flaws, Arizona."

I didn't return a word. It's not because I didn't want to promise him. I would definitely work on it. If even one person can show they appreciate me then that's more than enough. More than enough for me to be okay with the world to continue spinning as it does, and more than enough for me to stop wishing that everything around me would freeze. He could see me voiceless, peering into more of what my gaze on him could mean. When he couldn't guess, he put the story behind his wandering eyes into question. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I like it when you call me by my name." I told him. Admitting it made me feel like I was floating far off the ground, or defying the law of gravity. Shyness, but a different kind, one that was exciting, compelling and dramatic but in bright vivid colors, invaded every living cell. Every atom that made me who I am.

The red sky looked altered this early morning, like it made a complete transformation. I once thought it shined up there to voice disappointment when it peered down at us. How useless it felt as it watched human-kind make worsening dumb decisions. How much it prayed that we could change, and how frustrated it got at us that sometimes it had to cry over the population being strong-willed in every wrong way.

I mean, it is red after all.

But today I sorta just maybe kinda love the sky.

The dead leaves that had fallen but crunched under our feet, the skyscraper-height rock we once passed by together, and the worth behind my name, I love those too. - Rosy cheeks, specifically his, how could I say no?

Even if they're red, I think they're beautiful. Or more like because they're red, they're beautiful. They've been beautiful all along. All this time, as I refused to appreciate it.

"Then I wish I spent more time calling you by it, Arizona." Carmine walked ahead of me after a skim of his fingertips to my shoulders, this time exaggerating the very word I was fond of. He headed off to his entrance, glancing at his watch, and for the first time, I didn't understand how I could hate such a color all my life.

It's been the color of my beating heart. Without it I couldn't love this mightily, this boundless and this blissfully.