Happy new year and happy reading ! :)
A considerable time has passed since the famous Halloween of 1984.
The famous ? The memorable ? The surprising ? It was difficult, even impossible to put a word to that period so much she had marked Mike deeply of himself.
This some days full of tears and screams had left an indelible mark in his brain and in his heart. He might well say to himself , repeat to himself and harp on to himself again and again an again a little bit more that this scar will disappear or at least fade like all the after-effects, it was no use.
The week after the drama, the next summer, the start of the high school, the Christmas which come on after another, the years that was flashed by, the time which was trickled between his fingers like the water which flows trough the streams, the scar was still red, still swollen, still painful, she never was disappeared.
His wound seemed even to open again lately, like if she wanted remind him of this period which yet never left his head. Halloween was just around the corner, and soon the time that slid between his fingers would ring the third anniversary for… all that.
His scar which seemed to him become infected, spread in all his body, rise to his brain in the course of weeks remembered to him of a load of things. Like the possession of his best friend by a monster horribly powerful. Or else those man-eater Demodogs which caused the death of all these people, of Bob Newby — superhero. There was too the memory of the exact copy of his home town but gloomier, darker, with this atmosphere apocalyptic which floated in this toxic air. But what made him suffer the most, it was the memory of the loss of Eleven, of the worst year of his life.
These three hundred fifty three days which had elapsed at the pace of a millennium for Mike. These months which had passed to call her every evening, to try to find the sleepy for finally imagine the worse scenarios, to have to go to the middle school. Mike must listen to the lessons of Mr. Clarke and behave as if everything was fine even though nothing was. To go back home and to torment himself with the vision of that had was the home of the young girl for a few weeks, to simulate nonstop a artificial joy in his own home. To restart again, again and again every day to have no answers at every word pronounced to his talkie-walkie which he desired more and more to drop out the window. This scar which didn't cure, this hollow in his chest which was almost painful, and this lump in his throat every time he thought at her.
Today, she had came back but his memories still haunt him so much, paralysed him by the fear to lose again this girl, who had become the focus of his existence, the fear to see Will again like the prey of this frightening monster, the fear that all start again.
Mike was afraid, every time, for three years.
Obviously, he tried by any means to hide this fear. Most of the time, that worked rather well. School, Lucas, Dustin, Max, Will and Eleven filled much of his time to the extent that the only moments when this fear totally to took hold of him like the Mind Flayer could have been monopolize the mind and the body of Will, it was the night.
Only, more this wound cleared a way through his entrails, the less his attempts of dissimulation were successful.
It was an evening in fall. Outside, the breeze blew through the trees, the leaves spined, offering a whirl of oranges and red nuances. The sun tumbled down over the minutes, swaddling the town under a twilight coat.
It was a pretty end of the day.
Mike, sat at his desk, a pencil between his lips, had the head busy by his exercises of physical-chemistry and of mathematics. Beer-Lambert law, binomial coefficients, spectral curve, mathematical expectation, molar extinction coefficient, standard deviation, molar concentration…
The pencil put on his paper, the hand of Mike stopped clear. His ebullient brain suddenly changed of preoccupation.
In two shakes of a lamb's tail, the sciences seemed to be light years away from his thoughts, he had this strange feeling to have forgotten what he wanted do, what exactly he was doing in this room at this precise moment.
When his thoughts lightened again, Mike cast a glance at his watch and scrunched his eyebrows realizing that the minute hand had moved thirty minutes, even though he felt that the time of this confusion had been in the range of a few seconds.
Putting this blank down to his homeworks, the teenager took the initiative to stop to work on two subjects at the same time.
Initiative that, of course, he wasn't applied. The Year twelve was a difficult class and his workload has increased while his energy has tumbled down.
So, when this moment of inattention was be repeated the next week, Mike didn't worry.
« It's nothing. »
He didn't fret either when this blank of almost three-quarters of an hour happened again .
« It will pass. »
When his mind was seemed go off for the fourth time, he put this down to the tiredness, and found a pretext whenever this moments of wandering happened.
« It's nothing, it will pass. »