You never liked car rides because first you’d get sleepy, and when you couldn’t sleep, you’d get dizzy. Sometimes those rides would be bearable, if you remembered to tilt your head so far back you could see the streetlights upside down. They’d flash on your subtle, smiling face like a flickering bulb. Even freaky things became beautiful with you.

The light and shadow in your vision and nothing else made you feel like you were in a movie, but I could never see you as a character on the screen. Although, sometimes I thought of you as the song that plays when everything that went wrong is about to be made right. When the hero decides to fight the bad men, when the wispy-haired girl stands up against her father. Just before the world is rescued. The song that kept playing in my mind and dulled every other bass riff and bridge for me.

If I tried I could be the second song in the end credits that plays for empty seats, and I would need your glorious perception for that. But I never noticed the streetlights on a car ride, only the cars on either side of me. You had no place in a world that did not need rescuing.
Did nobody tell you, my little darling? You mad, sweet rush of a song, there was danger ahead.

Satvika Jain is a 17-year-old from New Delhi, India. She likes cats, blue-colored things, old books, and new friends. In all of her works, I include the ocean and stars in some form.