3
"My mind is a hurricane, my lips are a piano. You expect to hear pretty sounds coming from them, but you get the complete opposite. You get destruction; fear; a complication of pieces without a puzzle to put them on; a mutual feeling of pretending that you're not burnt by the fumes already; you're just the void inside of your mind that doesn't exist. Or maybe it does exist, and you're oblivious to it. . ."
Calum
"During your freshman year, you'll experience a lot of chaos, since you're not used to this environment yet. But since I'm only a link leader and not a teacher, the only advice I can give you is to cherish your four years here, because they'll fly by faster than you can imagine."
Cheyenne forced me into Freshman Academy, a two week long program where ninth graders follow older teenagers around and ask questions about the school. While every other freshman was interested, I was not. It didn't concern me that there were six more janitor closets than classrooms, or that students fought a lot. I was fourteen, and the least of my worries was getting into a physical fight. Fists don't exist, they're only metaphoric tools used as a self defense mechanism. They don't exist in the same way that I don't, even when I have a pair of sienna eyes to see the universe. Being blind would be easier, because then I wouldn't be able to see the destruction that's bound to happen to my mind at some point.
"Would you recommend taking gym for two semesters or four?"
"That voice. It was the indigo sky embellishing the olive coated rolling hill across from the neglected playground. Or maybe it was the charcoal conflagration that I heard, because colors didn't entirely exist. They were marinated desires crammed into a bottle. An empty, transparent bottle that doesn't exist, only keeps your brain working and your mouth shut. . ."
"It's required to take two semesters in order to get full credit, but I'd suggest you take four. You'll fit in more with a good body."
"What the fuck do you know about having a good body?" I snapped, my neck cracking in the process. The link leader was practically full of herself, but who was I to process what she was saying without demolishing what was already destroyed?
"And you are?"
"Cameron."
She looked skeptical, but gesticulated me away with a glower. Vermillion, poison, just what I needed to escape, to delete the reality of existing.
He was standing beside me.
Why was he standing beside me?
He shouldn't exist.
"Hey, Cameron, is it? I'm Michael."
His lips were red-yellow, dipped with ribbons of amaranthine. He was the typhoon that could cleft terrain, as though it were my surreptitious leather hands instead.
"Don't talk to me."
"I was just trying to make a friend around here." He frowned, red-yellow lips pirouetting blue-gray, crossing in cowardice.
"Find somebody else to annoy."
He exclusively dressed like vinegar, entrancing people for palatableness, but was only retrieving a diamond shoulder in return.
Close your eyes, he doesn't exist.
Stop existing.
I want to die.
"Cameron, where do you think you're going?"
"Home," I lied, a baby smile impending near my cheeks. I needed a cigarette. I carried them with me, everywhere.
And as smoke suffused the anhydrous air, I constrained myself to exist for a second, to remember them as though they were a monograph made up in my head, even if it was more than my imagination.
"Hurry up, David. We're going to be late."
"Yeah, I'm coming."
I was already in the car, crying, crumbling my youth away with abashment.
"We're going to my award ceremony, Cal," Mali smiled, "I won the poetry slam. Can you believe it?"
I didn't understand.
I never understood.
But there was jeering, blear metropolitan lights, fragmented trees, and rubicund spots burnishing the windshield and bronze car seats.
"It's not good to smoke, you know."
Laughter. Buoyancy. Intrepidity. He was happy, and I was expectorating, hoping this was the end of my existence.
But it wasn't.
"Are you alright?"
"Please don't talk to me," I muddled with a desiccated laugh following after, "I don't need this, and I don't need you."
"Look Cameron-"
"I said don't talk to me," I shrieked, catapulting the nearest object, a pen, at his ghastly cheek, "I, don't, fucking, need, this."
"Or me," Michael convulsed bitterly, "yeah, I get it."
"He twirled on his heel in the most riveting way, just like a cyclone made of tined knives. It'd feel less painful than this. . ."
"Thanks for nothing, Cameron."
It's Calum.
But don't remember me.
I don't want to exist.
And I don't want you to exist, either.
I didn't speak up, only observed him as he descended inside of the brick building. He was brighter than the flame inside of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do about it, except for wish that I was blind. Or dead.
"Michael was blue, but if you mixed sapphire and grey, you'd get a fucking hurricane. And that's exactly what I was; exactly all I'd ever be. . ."
I was dangerous, but the world saw me as a divine messenger, looking for the answers, but never getting them. Because nothing made sense, in the same way that nothing existed. It just did, and I was stuck, wishing that this was more than numbness, and was my imagination, even though it never will be.
And I'm just Calum Thomas Hood, waiting to be the flame.
-
A/N;
Thoughts?
I feel like this book is confusing for you all. Is it?
Anyways, don't forget to leave a comment and a vote and just know ily all so much.