When you're really quiet sometimes you can hear a heart breaking. The whisper of fingers against skin, and the quiet breaths that the wind draws into the earth.
It's moments like these that get me thinking. Do you ever think of me the way I think of you?
Outside the sun shines and it filters into the dimly lit room, obscured by the caramel-colored curtains that touch the floor. (I think of changing it, the curtains, but you say it looks good with the interior so we leave it that way.)
Outside, the trees shiver and the earth pulls the rocks into its arms tighter for fear of losing the little endowed pleasantries of its infinite life.
Outside, a dog barks and a bicycle skids to a stop on a grassy walkway.
I wrap the emotion round me like a blanket to protect myself as I lift the veil from my window: boys playing football, and I think, maybe you're one of them too.
I always watch along the sidelines, but mostly I watch from my window when I don't play. I watch for you. This is the one place where you cannot see me seeing you.
It's funny because you always do, and at times when the breeze tickles her delicate flaxen hair and she moves her head gracefully so that it cascades down her narrow shoulders, you look at her with such intense elation that makes me look at you with the exact same expression.
So I'm left watching you watch her. Hurt. Like jagged shards of glass slicing into skin, twisting, pushing to the insides.
It happens most of the time, and I just grit my teeth and force myself to smile because you smile—if even only at her—too. But it's good. Pain is good; painting the canvass of our lives in realistic hues that makes the picture less irrational, and somehow all the more believable.
I like believable.
I like the pain because it's all you can ever give to me right now and I drink more of it every day.
I came here to this place—Rawley Academy—with boyish fantasies to escape the violence I have known. I sought for a refuge. I sought for a seat to belong. I sought for everything, almost anything I can get my calloused weather worn hands on to.
And I found you.
I found you, and yet even if I have brought with me splinters of hope, and maybe a tinge of desperation, you showed me how it feels to be left in the middle.
You loved me or so you liked to say to the point of cloyingness, but then you loved her too. And you had to choose because really, life constitutes a whole body of choices.
It's all about the decisions. There may be even a time when you have to choose for others.
But you didn't, and I smiled at you and you held the fingers of my hand like you were touching delicate porcelain ware. I felt like the teacup the rich boy treasured so much. That was okay for me.
They say that love's the noblest frailty of the mind, and Finn says that I'm one of the greatest minds this institution—built by farce— has ever known. But they say a lot of overrated crap nowadays so I'm not so sure what to believe anymore when you told me you came from a family that slung a myriad of expectations on your back since the day you were born.
You had to choose her.
Life is well, all about choices you see and it's the things we do that spins the intricate pattern of our lives. And maybe it's enough that I love you and you love me and you're with her. It's enough that we know that life's supposed to work that day.
You held my hand that last time and then I looked into the blueness of your eyes telling me to let go. So I did, but my heart—and what's left of it—didn't.
The softness of your eyes burned a memory into my mind.
When I watch you on those days when I don't have my shift or when I'm stuck inside the dorms doing Lit homework, I watch you through the tender fall of the caramel colored curtains adorning the window, and sometimes I wonder if this place really is where I belong.
If maybe I'm just made to watch you all the time.
And maybe it is.
Maybe I am.