Okay. If you're here you probably know about this little iPhone game called Surviving High School. If you don't, spoilers.
So this is how this story happened. One day, the producers of SHS decided to permanently kill off a character. This character happened to be one I liked, and also one half of a couple I also really liked. This made me have many, many feelings, including the feeling that I should not be investing this much attachment to fictional characters on an app. Nevertheless, I continued to have feels long after the game gave its own form of closure, and revamped itself to a shinier version. I was then slightly bewildered to find that the living half of said couple had apparently moved on and gained a hipster companion (possibly due to an in-game timelapse in the process of revamp). Then, despite the large pile of work I had beckoning, I sat down for a couple of hours and wrote this lengthy, angst-filled piece in an attempt to assuage my grief.
If you have played the game from at least the whole of the last season, you will know who the protagonist is. If not, feel free to partake in the nameless protagonist's angst. That is all. Enjoy.
He hasn't cleaned his room in two months.
The walls, the floor, any horizontal surfaces, are all scattered with photographs. Mostly, they are glossy snapshots, covered in smiles and sunlit skin. A few are candids, blurred with movements suspended in light. He doesn't normally keep the imperfect photos. A perfectionist, he is, for photography is his only passion. Once, for a very short time, it was his second passion. But not in two months, not since his room was tidy; no, photography is all he has left now.
He keeps the imperfect ones because he needs to remember. The time for perfection is long past.
Some days he feels like gathering up every last one of them, bringing them out to the garden and burning them. They mock him, little pieces of broken amber holding what may as well be ancient history, relics of frozen time. A glimpse of events past. But he couldn't do that, not really. He needs the photographs. They are all he has left, and without them he would surely forget.
It is cruel, he thinks, how time is. Time goes forward, always: it doesn't hesitate, it doesn't stretch, it plows forward inexorably like a car through a guard-rail. Out into the waters of the future, unknown, grasping, dark.
He would rather hold on to the scattered amber portraits of light.
He slowly moves his stiff head off the desk and staggers out of his chair. As he does, the movement sends a swath of photographs fluttering to the floor. He bites back a swear and stoops to pick them up. One catches his eye: a reflection of himself, before. In the picture, he stands next to a girl with sun-browned hair (smooth as the water she swam through, yes, he remembers) and they are smiling. Behind them is a field of yellow flowers, brighter than Vincent van Gogh's dreams. He avoids looking at the girl's eyes, even though he knows she cannot stare back. He can't bring himself to.
My fault. My fault.
He picks the rest of the spilt photographs as if they were flowers, and strews them gently back onto the desk.
How ironic. The girl who broke the national record. The girl who was the best at swimming – drowned.
He leaves that swirling thought behind him as he lurches towards the bathroom. Soon it will be time to face the day again. Time to face the day, and life, and the living.
-~o~-
Between lessons, he knows what they are thinking, the ones he passes in the corridors. Even two months after, he knows what they whisper about him when he walks by, like a shadow, camera bag slung across his shoulders like a millstone.
("... still can't believe...")
("... feel kind of bad about...")
("... deserves that...")
Some of them pity him. He shrugs their pity off like water (no, not water, not that) – like a hand off his shoulder. It feels wrong to have their nameless pity.
A few probably think he should stop moping and move on. He doesn't care.
None of them talk to him.
Eyes to the ground, he doesn't notice who he's walked into until it's too late. "Sorry," he mumbles vaguely, and tries to help the person gather their books (stooping to pick flowers, such orange flowers). He looks up to give them back and nearly screams. It's her, it's her – but it isn't, and all the worse –
"My God, I- I'm so sorry, I-"
The words crumble in his mouth. Emily Kessler stares back at him, a mixture of surprise and anger and so much sadness, it shocks him. "You?" It rings in his ears like an accusation. Which, on many levels, it is.
He turns and runs.
Her eyes, he thinks wildly. Her eyes were just the same. He'd memorised her eyes – those eyes of her sister, the ones he never looked into again, even though a hundred pairs of those eyes watched him from every inch of his room – because he was, in addition to being a perfectionist, a great collector of beauty. Sea-blue, shining green in sunlight (broken amber on the ground).
Soon, he stops running. He realises that he has come to the area between the football field and the swimming complex, a dirt path the school has neglected to pave over, and passing by a tall oak. He wades through the grass (swishing like water, bottomless water) and collapses under the oak, not caring that he has a class in three minutes.
He rests his head on the trunk and begins to cry.
Everywhere reminds him of her and everywhere she isn't reminds him of her and as if that wasn't bad enough her sister is exactly the same the same eyes same sun-browned hair and the water follows him everywhere, trying to drown him just like it drowned her and it should have –
His hand falls from his face, and brushes against his camera bag. He stops, breathing hard, and takes it out of its case. The camera's lone eye matches his gaze mournfully. Slowly, he turns it on and aims it at the football field. Wide angle, twitch the zoom, adjust shutter speed. Steady hands, now –
Click.
- and there. The Polaroid emerges, blank, but gradually filling in with light and shadow, hues, shades and highlights. He examines it. Yes. Perfect. A portrait in light, of a field scattered with football players in jerseys of orange and blue.
Somehow, although he knows it shouldn't, it makes him feel the tiniest bit more whole. Maybe it's how the sun leaps off the blades of grass like van Gogh's immortal stars, or the way the orange and blue complement perfectly. And it comforts him, that no matter what, he will always have the gift of bottling happiness, and grief, in amber.
He stays there a while more, holding the picture, and begins to breathe normally again.
-~o~-
The hardest part is waiting for seven o'clock. The hour between six and seven had been theirs, once; an evening to spend and treasure. She had smelled of chlorine and soap then – but then, she always had. "Where to today?" she would say, eager for the adventure he had plannned for them that would fit their one precious hour.
It seems fitting that he spend that hour, now, entrenched in memories and the waning sun. The dying sun filters into his room and falls upon the mess of photographs. There, he remembers, was the day we went to the fairground, and there, the day she turned cartwheels for him on the beach. He hasn't gone to the beach since that day, and nowhere near the water.
He sifts through them, taking his time looking through each picture in turn. He holds them up to the light of the sunset as if they are stained glass that colour his room in radiance.
Only in this hour can he feel something resembling happiness again.
He always finishes this ritual by taking his camera and walking to the park. He doesn't drive anymore, either.
When he reaches it, he stops to touch the cool stone of it for a moment. If he imagines it as her cheek, he says nothing.
"Hello, Sara." He manages not to choke on the words (hasn't for nearly a month). "It's a beautiful sunset today, isn't it?"
Around him, the birds sing their lullabies to the last light. There are a few passersby, but not near enough to see him clearly. "I bumped into your sister today. Again. Literally this time." He has to stop before saying his next words. "She reminded me of you."
(Maybe, in another life, another world, she can hear him. Maybe, in another life, it was he who died and she who lived, and even now that Sara is leaning her hand on his grave and talking to him.)
"But then again, it's hard to walk through Twin Branches and not be reminded of you. Call me an old romantic, but it's true." He likes to think he manages a smile at this point. He can't really recall how that feels like. "I'm sure if I asked you about your day, you might say something about your dad being a slave-driver, and I've heard it all, so..."
(...never come near my family again...)
"I took a lovely photograph today, of the football field. Here, see?" He takes out the picture. It glows amber in the deepening twilight. "I think that little orange blotch is Zach. And that one, that's probably Spencer, or something. It reminds me of those flowers you got me. The orange ones, remember? You wanted to give me something..." He trails off, and gazes at the sunset in silence. After a moment that contains eternities, he says "Hold on" absently and takes out his camera.
Change to low-light settings, adjust ISO, tweak the exposure, shift to the right...
Click.
"Look at that, Sara! It's amazing! I got the elements just right, too – that tree's not blocking anything and you can barely see the building off to the left... it's almost as lovely as you..."
The lamp-posts buzz on, bathing the park in fluorescent yellow. He stands stricken in the sudden glare. Eventually he sighs and puts the photo away in his pocket, then tucks his camera back into its bag. "Anyway, I better be going now. Lights on. That means it's seven." He places his hand on the metal this time, tracing the letters of her name.
"I... I miss you so much, Sara. I'm... so sorry." It's all he can get out before he smells the chlorine tears threatening to come. Quietly, he walks back into the darkness, leaving the memorial behind him, a thick shadow of solidified grief.
The time for perfection is long past, but if he never emerges from the waters that threaten to drown him, well, he thinks, he'll always have photography.