A/N: Hello! I'm here to try again. This is a story I wrote years ago but never really finished, or well, it never really got started. But I'm going to give it another shot. I'm sure Naomi and Emily can make it work, don't you think? Let me know if I should give it a try!
Have you ever had these thoughts, impulses you feel that you have to control? But, yet, at the same time cannot control at all. No matter how hard you try.
Have you ever, for example, been in a china shop wanting to sweep your hand through a whole shelf filled with different kinds of breakables just to see it all shatter to the ground? Just to hear the sound of a broken fullness.
Thoughts that confirm the boundaries and restrictions that lives inside ourselves. The thin line between what's natural and what's sick if you eventually go through with these sudden urges.
I have plenty of those.
That's why I usually sit on my hands when I'm in a car, afraid that I just might grab the wheels and steer it off the road.
Just because it feels so right. Because it's so tempting.
That's why I never bring a lighter to my smokes when I know I'm going to be close to a petrol station. Or go out on a balcony. That's why I rarely hold a knife in the kitchen when other people are around me.
Not that I would deliberately ever hurt someone that badly. Not because I've ever done it either. It's just these thoughts that keep screaming inside my head. And I have hardly ever answered them in the way they want me to.
I could ramble for ages about different these thoughts and actions that threatens to overtake me one day. It's been there ever since I was a child. I think it started sometime around the age of eleven. A Wednesday night with me lying against the cold white tile on the bathroom floor with a bleeding lip split in two after being beaten by Tom. Tom was an asshole, who I supposedly was to call my step dad. He married my mother when I was seven, much to my dismay. A few years after, it all started. It wasn't all that regularly. Every now and then. I was used to it.
I started to count the red drops that trickled down my chin.
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10..
It usually stopped at 54. I decided it would stop at 54. And when it didn't, I made sure it happened by myself.
It was all downhill from there. With the thoughts, I mean. It's just the red droplets that I actually still do something about, but right now I'm talking about everything. Every single one of them. I'm talking about wanting to throw a hairdryer in a water filled bathtub. About wanting to plunge a wet finger inside an electric socket.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal. I don't want to die. I just want to try out everything that our social standards say is wrong. I want to know why it's wrong.
But it doesn't just have to be these drives and urges that can be harmful. That you know are dangerous and unsafe. That you know can kill you.
It can be wanting to touch someone's hair just because it seems to be so unbelievably soft. Or wanting to put your hand over someone's pounding heart just to know that the person is actually alive. That it throbs just like your own does against your panting chest. It could be anything, really, and it could be just as lethal in the end.
"Naomi"
"Naoms!"
Oh, that would be me.
"Hmmm..?" A lazy smile covers my lips before I, yet again, take a deep drag of the flickering joint that's in my hand.
"Naoms, I don't know what they taught you at school today but in this house the rule is puff, puff, *pass*, sweetie. The good things in life never come for free, so don't waste it!"
The familiar and teasing voice outlines a just as well-known face when the thick smoke that passes through my lips slowly dissolves. And I give him the smile he deserves for always trying to keep me away from the dark places inside this weary head of mine.
"Oh, you mean like the way you're wasting it? I'm not the one in here with the lungs of a cow. You don't even make it 'til the second puff before it's out, F."
F as in Freddie.
Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.
The boy next door with the sparkling smile, the glowing chocolate eyes and the dark hair. The boy who thought that tugging at my ponytail in the playground would be proof enough for me to know that he liked me. The first boy to hold my hand.
Freddie, the boy who never managed to become more than my friend.
My best friend.
"Whatever, honey."
He teases back, just like he always does. Just like we've always done. Pushing the buttons because we know nothing will come of it. Pushing because we can. Because it's a harmless game. Our harmless game.
And it's in his basement we're sitting right now, the usual gang, smoking away his hidden stash.
It has become more like a ritual through the years. I don't really know when it began but we gather the group every Sunday after dinner, and smoke.
We get together, everyone with various raison d'êtres, to puff out everything that is weighing down on our shoulders. Leaving our old baggage and wounds at the doorstep for a few hours before returning to a reality we never really want to revisit.
"I mean like… I could be an artist. I should be an artist."
A female voice comes to life, letting me know that Freddie has brought some good shit home this weekend. Letting me know it's already having its tremendous effects. That the wounds we left by the doorway are way forgotten by now.
"Hey! I'm serious. Like, who knows? I could even be the next Pinocchio, or whatever his name was."
Katie. Katie mostly smokes just for the sake of it. For the feeling of it. I think she smokes more than anyone of us. I think she smokes every time an opportunity arrives.
And in a little town like this, in the land of Suburbia right outside one of the largest cities in the world, I'm guessing that Mr. Opportunity comes knocking on her doorstep everyday. It has become more than just a quick escape for her. It has become her daily routine. A weightless cross for her to carry.
"It's Picasso, Katie. Jenna would be dissapointed if she heard you!" Freddie tosses her a smug grin before passing the joint around the table.
They teased like siblings, and they kind of were. Freddie lost his family in a car accident when he was five. The Fitch family took him in. He's been with them ever since. So this was as much Katies basement, as it was his.
"That's what I said, stupid." She laughs.
She laughs with such a high pitched voice that it makes me laugh.
That makes everyone eventually laugh.
That only makes me laugh even harder.
Hard enough for my breath to get caught so deep within my lungs that I fear I'll never get it out again. And something inside that thought relieves me in a way I can never explain.
Something inside that thought makes me wonder that if I keep it inside long enough, will the laughter that I'm currently smothering within me last forever? Will that hysterical bit of fun provide me the joy I'm constantly in need of?
Can I keep it inside long enough to then exhale whenever I want to reveal this mind-blowing laughter just to remember that these ecstatic times actually have existed?
Just to know that these oh so happy moments are within me forever. Living inside me. Chuckling with the beat of my thumping heart at night.
These happy moments in our own little cushioned hideout with a heavy clouded and marijuana scented sky above us. Surrounding us. Keeping us safe from harm.
The safe haven where we keep shredding the weight of the world off our shoulders. Just to be able to experience the feeling of lightness, even if it's only for a split second. An instant. Letting us feel the heaviness that's ticking away. Breath after breath. Laughter after laughter.
"Who was that guy by the way? Uh.. the guy who cut off his own ear?" A shaky tone separates the solid air with its announcement.
And while I'm sitting on my red Persian cushion, picking at the seams and making exactly ten straight braids between my fingers with the threads, I remember the recent question Effy just asked.
Effy used to be the happiest kid on the block. That was until her father passed away three years ago. She's been on four pills a day for depression and anxiety problems ever since.
Four pills that are supposed to keep her mind off of thinking about the thoughts she actually wants to explore. To finally deal with. The thoughts that meets up with her every night inside her nightmares.
She says that she smokes because it's soothing. That it helps her cope with her panic attacks better than what hundreds of milligram happy pills each day does. But personally, I think it's mostly because she finally can get the release she's constantly on the lookout for. I think she comes here to get in touch with a lost father on a level we cannot reach in our everyday life.
"Um, I think it was Van Gogh. Austrian or something. Can't remember why he did it though. Seems pretty pointless." I answer.
"Maybe he did it for fame. Or recognition." Effy breathes out in her weary state.
"Man, the things you do for art and fame. Maybe you should reconsider your future profession, Katie."
That oh so familiar voice speaks again with its teasing manners. Shredding the heavy smoke into bits and pieces of amusement, coating us all with its joyful shade.
"Who said I would mind loosing a finger or two? I could become my thing, you know? Katie the fingerless graffiti artist or something." She bursts with such a renewed passion for this newly discovered career.
"Then what would you paint with? Your tits?" A light chuckle comes with the one-track answer from a one-track mind. Cook.
Cook has always been our little pretty boy. Our player. Known for his many tales about his constant trouble with the ladies.
He mostly uses this time of distraction to gather his thoughts, I think. He's always been a lover. A dreamer. Always been our Cook and to hear him share the same old anecdotes like how he had to hide underneath Emma Dillon's bed in middle school when her father walked in the room makes me laugh just as much today as it did the day it happened.
"Who knows? I might." Katie smirks back, making him choke on the smoke that's currently occupying his mouth.
"That I would like to see." A wink crosses the table from a pair of blue eyes, fixed on the very much amused Katie sitting next to me.
Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.
Freddie, on the other hand, is an entirely different question compared to the rest of these guys. Sometimes I wonder if he's here just to be close to me. Sometimes I almost believe that it's true. But I never ask anything and he never says anything.
That's the way it's always been. And that's probably why we call each other best friends. Because we don't talk about the things we don't want to mention. We know what we know, and that's enough.
Even through all these years that we've known one another there are always some things we never speak loud about.
Like the cuts and bruises. Like why he always turned away in bed when I put on my pyjamas during our famous sleepovers. The things we know but never talk about. Things concerning me. Things concerning him. Things concerning us.
I have never been able to give him what he wanted. And I know that he always wanted more from me. I know it because Effy told me in forth grade right before she passed a note from Freddie onto me. A note with the cutest marriage proposal I've ever seen. A note that I eventually turned him down with.
After that he never asked me again. And I never mentioned it again. And that's the way it's always been. That's the way it has continued.
And as he sits in his left corner with his slender legs sprawled out on broken concrete floor, leaning against the wall with smoke filling his lungs, he keeps swallowing those words. Those thoughts.
I can tell by the way he watches me with hazy eyes before completely shutting them and drowning his inner demons inside a tranquillizing sea. And I think he knows why I keep coming over every Sunday. Every week. Every day. I think he knows it all too well and that's why he keeps swallowing it.
And I have my reasons. My raison d'êtres. I could give you hundreds of different ones just as believable as the next one without ever telling you the truth.
I could say that it's because I refuse to witness how my mother refuses to see what's going on right in front of her, or because my grandmother who passed away a year ago is up until this day still the only one who really knew the real me.
I could say that it's because this house feels more like a home to me than what my own four walls inside my broken room ever have. I could say that it's because I have the thoughts. The thoughts that I always feel like I have to be in charge of, which depending on how you want to look at it, can be true in a way.
"Hey, Ems, could you bring back a couple of beers when you go up next time?" Freddie shouts through our sugar-coated reality wrapping.
But the truth is. The truth is that I come here every Sunday just to see her. The girl who just walked down the stairs to the basement and plopped herself down along the sofa in front of the tiny television that's placed in here. I come here every Sunday just to hear her heavenly laughter penetrate these thin and sensitive eardrums that I hold inside me with her joy.
I come here every Sunday just to look at her the way she's looking at me. I come here every Sunday to forget about everything I always have to control, and instead I focus on the things I actually want to keep in check. Like the urge to touch her silky skin in the nape of her neck or touch her wavy red hair that is now resting on her bare shoulders.
The girl who knows more about the bruises on my arms and the cuts on my lips than I want her to know. The girl who looks at me with such compassion in her eyes because she's seen it all.
The girl who thinks that she can save me from this place with the most intense stares I've ever experienced. Who thinks that a heart strong enough can save a way too weak body.
The girl I love for believing it.
And who doesn't have a single clue about it.
And we both pretend that nothing of this exists. We act like the wounds underneath my long sleeved shirt never happened in the first place and that her chocolate glowing eyes never noticed them.
We keep pretending that she's just the younger twin in the Fitch family and I'm just the girl next door who's always been the one coming over for dinner every Friday night after being out in the park with Freddie.
I'm the girl next door who, after 19 years, still wonder why we never share anything else then a simple "Hey" when she occasionally gets the door before anyone else makes it while I'm waiting for Freds. Still wonder why we keep pretending that we've never said so much more than that when we have so many times before. I'm the girl next door who has showed her more without a sound than what anyone who's ever spoken to me has managed to see.
And with a final glance she turns her head and starts to walk away when a distant voice next to me makes way through our talking silence.
"This time it's just puff pass for you, Naomikins. Now hurry, would ya? We're waiting over here." Cook says as he pulls me back into the feathery waters.
Into this cloudy world of mine that keeps pulling me in, pulling me down. Down, down, down and across a threshold between what's real and what's not. Between beatings and embraces. Between her disappointed eyes and loving eyes.
I come here every Sunday for her.
Emily Fitch.