Only Love Can Hurt Like This

People say love is a difficult thing, you never know when it's truly real. So how is one supposed to react when love becomes a hedgehog that follows you around relentlessly? Just as easy as unwantedly falling in love, this animal makes it even harder to ignore. Miyah should've known from the first encounter, this wasn't going away anytime soon. She stared from afar at the boy she longed for the day the creature nudged at her ankle. The hedgehog had a pinkish hue when Miyah picked it up. When she picked the small animal up, her heart lurched. As if all those feelings she was trying to bury were pulled to the surface, she nearly dropped the delicate animal. She set it down gently. "What are you?" She asked the small creature. The hedgehog skittered and nudged Miyah towards the boy she had been staring at. "Him? No little buddy. I can't. He wouldn't like someone like me." She said quietly. A magpie landed on her shoulder. "Oh? Another animal buddy?" Miyah asked. She allowed the bird to hop onto her finger sitting it on the ground next to the hedgehog. "I don't know what to do." She said. The magpie chirped. It took flight, swooping around the same boy-who was talking to another girl-and landing back next to the hedgehog. Love and grief were hand and hand with this. And the complications of Miyah's feelings. The love she felt so strongly, yet the grief of feeling like she would never be chosen. It went on for weeks before Miyah even got the chance to speak with the boy directly, a dumb conversation about being the oldest sibling between the two of them, and something clicked when she heard him laugh. The pink hedgehog nudged at her ankle again, more persistent this time, despite her trying to nudge it away. For weeks the hedgehog glowed a rose gold hue, shiny and bright. Even when Miyah tried to dull it, tried to not let such feelings show. It only got bolder and bolder with each dating accusation, the magpie landing on her shoulder every time she had to shut one down because she thought he didn't see her like that. Miyah soon started becoming friends with the boy, Dominic was his name. And she could go on a rant about what she enjoyed about him, his curly hair, his braces that made her realize how pretty a color blue really was, the way that he wore his glasses. The way that he would rant to her and explain something that she knew nothing about and she would listen. Because each time That hedgehog nudged at her. Even when it curled into a ball when Miyah got shy because of a random flirty line he would drop on her, or the time that he got his braces tightened and he had the color changed to orange, because she mentioned that it was her favorite color. The hedgehog got bolder and bolder, Miyah found herself writing love letters at night when she couldn't sleep, she thought of him. She had never even thought of writing love letters before, and now she had a notebook full of them, that he would never see.One day, after months of knowing eachother, a new school year rolls in, and Miyah finds herself caught at a crossroad. Dominic tells her that he thinks he has a crush on her. Miyah doesn't think, outwardly she seems unaffected. But that hedgehog gets to nudging again, but the magpie pecks at her as well. What if she's not good enough? What if she's a bad lover? What if she ends up not being consistent enough to be a good girlfriend? All these thoughts swirled in her head. So she didn't answer immediately, couldn't. So she did what she could. She wrote him a note, and with her face on fire she hands it to him, and tells him not to read it until he's back in class, away from her. She doesn't know what the response will be, she did try to warn him that she wasn't the best person when it came to managing other's emotions, but she would try. No one had ever made her WANT to try to understand their emotions to know how to comfort them when distressed. ‘What was Dominic doing to her?’ she asked herself.

Dominic read the note, and immediately texted Miyah. "So are we official?" he asked. Miyah could almost see the way his hands were probably shaking when he wrote that. He was a much more openly emotional person than Miyah.

She typed back "If you want us to be." And that was it, they were dating. It really didn't change much about their dynamic except small moments, like when Miyah would play her violin, just because she knew he was listening, or moments where he'd lay his head on her shoulder when they sat next to each other doing assignments. For the first time, grief had lightened up, the hedgehog was thriving, bold, pressed against Miyah's chest like a high she didn't want to come down from. But of course, for everything that goes up, must come down.

For the first time in any relationships Miyah had been in, she actually imagined a future with Dominic. She was genuinely in love with him. He would still give her butterflies whenever he talked about his hyperfixation, the friendly competition of playing chess together. She thought everything was perfect. Then came the end of the school year. She switched schools for the next year. That was already devastating enough, but she kept texting him. It took him a bit longer to reply, because he had stopped checking the platform that they used to use. But it was okay, she told herself. He still responded, they were still in a relationship. But that wall of stability came crashing down in one little sentence. "This isn't working, we can't talk consistently anymore, and you're at a whole new school." Miyah read the message over and over again, as if she kept reading it, it would change. The more she stared at the message, the heavier the magpie felt on her shoulders, the more tears welled up. She closed her computer so hard, some of her classmates had turned to look at her. She asked the teacher to leave, and as soon as she stepped out of the classroom she could barely muffle a sob. It felt like a knife had been stabbed straight through her chest, right through the hedgehog who had made themselves so comfortable.

Miyah got home that day and she was quieter than usual, none of her family knew about the love that she had planted in her chest, she sat on the floor of the bathroom, hands shaking, tears flowing uncontrollably. The magpie flapped its wings with a soft screech, as if trying to comfort her. But Miyah didn't want comfort, she curled around the hedgehog, whose light was still bright, despite the wound. She didn't want comfort, she didn't want to feel low, she didn't even want to acknowledge the magpie, she wanted to go back to the way that the hedgehog made her feel light in her chest. Not heavy.