One hundred and fifty days earlier.
I fell in love at first sight – sort of.
Fifty five days earlier.
I lost my will to love.
Ten days earlier.
I was irrevocably, irresponsibly dropping into the chaos again.
One day before.
Gone. I had to dig out of the grave I dug for myself. It was hard. It was suffocating.
The day.
I miss it all. Every single bit. But nothing will ever be the same, not really. No matter how much I try.
×
One hundred and fifty days earlier
It all started with my transferring to a new school. Honestly, I hated it. It was a foul experience I didn’t really want to go through again, but it had to be done. As a teenager with doting parents who wouldn’t let me live by myself in Chicago, I had to leave my little bedroom plastered with too many RIOTZ! posters to a place where I wasn’t familiar with. A place where I couldn’t figure out how to work the shower and dirty, mustard coloured walls where all my RIOTZ! posters wouldn’t fit too well with – it wasn’t very nice. As I have mentioned, I reviled it. Loathed the bedroom with dusty windows and the lingering smell of cigarettes; loathed the quiet buzz of mosquitoes and the absence of city lights and speeding cars. Everything was so wrong.
School was wrong too. Ironically, the lockers were a weird mustard yellow too, reminding me all too well of the room I didn’t like living in. I slammed it real hard after I first opened it and filled it with all the usual order of things. Everyone stared. Except this one person. She would always be the exception.
She laughed, using her hand to cover up her mouth. I saw nothing but blue eyes crinkled in a smile and about half of her nose bridge. It was a nice nose bridge – nothing too sharp or deformed about it. It was just nice. She looked at me with amusement and winked. I did nothing but drop my notebooks and stared after her as she turned and pushed against the flow of the crowd. I blinked once and she was gone. I felt something odd, something really tingly and warm grow from the back of my spine and from my chest. It was weird, and fleeting. I shook my head and looked in the other direction. I remembered to pick up my books.
That was the first time anything like that happened to me.
I saw her again in lunch – complete with no one for company but a few birds chewing on some crumbles nearby accompanying her at the bench under the large oak tree. I knew it was an oak tree because I had the same old thing outside my bedroom window (I wiped it clean and squeaky this morning) and my mother had commented on the tree, saying that it was a fine tree or something like what an adult would usually say about a tree. I just nodded and stared absently at the window that morning as she rambled on about other types of trees and eventually moved on to flowers. I drowned her voice out and thought of the stupid yellow wall, thinking how I needed to do a paint job and stick up all my RIOTZ! posters.
I sat beside her on the bench, accidentally knocking our knees against each other. She turned to me and smiled – her lips were too thin and too small for her chin, but it looked good anyways. I have never thought anything like that about a girl. Another first, I guess.
She chewed on her bread as I looked up to the sky and tried to think of something to say.
What are you doing outside alone? Isn’t the weather nice? Hey, your sneakers are really cool, just saying. I like your hair. I sort of like your mouth too.
