4
"My mother always told me I'd become a time bomb; that if people continued to push me in ways I didn't know existed, I'd explode. But rather than blowing up, I'd turn into a collision of cinnamon pine cones and an owls feather. It was never ordinary or prepossessing, just a layout of her imagination. She was the only person who had hope for me, but I was beginning to question that hope, my existence, in the same way I questioned everything else. . ."
Calum
It didn't register in my mind that I was sitting on top of the horizontal, timber parapet, insufflating rings of smog until I felt a broiling omnipresence beside me. I envisioned being alone, but there ensconced sixteen year old Winnie, who happened to be a bit of a guardian for me.
"The horizon fell approximately four hours ago, you know," Winnie tittered, ensnaring the cigar folding my fingers into triangle wedges. She was insinuating that midnight significantly elapsed, but I didn't mind. The moonlight acquitted to be the only admonition that my existence isn't an animation, but a vitality.
I really don't want to be alive.
I never did.
"It's nice, isn't it?" I catechized, watching the way loops of fog fell from her dismantled, mango lips. She was the only one that'd share a cigarette with me.
"Yeah," Winnie floodgates, her limbs beetling at her sides, "I haven't seen anything this captivating in a while." Her parents abnegated her when she was eleven for being sapphic. Winnie didn't like living, either. But we still tried to pretend that we did.
"I have," I vocalized, thinking about the turquoise lilies and Monday morning lichen stains on my favorite sweatshirt. Escape.
"That's great, really," Winnie sighed, plunking down the flame with the bottom of her shoe, "I'm glad you're learning how to be happy."
"That's something I'm not," I replied, clenching onto the ligament of my pepper jacket, "I was wondering if I could sit with you and your friends at lunch tomorrow."
"Of course you can, Calum."
-
Nightfall was my soft-pedal, but then I reappeared in a building that made me feel inconspicuous, wistful, like ice. Except my skin was burgundy, sweltering in a pungent bowl of soup, and I wanted to die.
I always wanted to die.
"Calum, did you take your antidepressants this morning? You seem off," Winnie confronted, hands dividing like zebra stripes, "I'm only asking you this because you've hardly touched your lunch and you skipped your first two periods to smoke."
I smoke three or more cigarettes a day.
Was I normal?
I didn't care.
"Yeah, I took them," I lied, unwinding myself from her grip, "I'm alright, I swear."
"Hey Calum?" Winnie stated out of the blue, eyes locking on something behind me, "someone is staring at you."
"The blueberry blinds coated with his jeans, and I didn't want to blink. He was a marble, a firework, a dragonfly, and I was asphyxiating myself with polka-dotted knuckles and strawberry margins. He was what I wanted in myself, what I couldn't have, what I couldn't be, and that's what made him my imagination, even if he existed. I knew the color of his hair better than I knew my hands, my clothes, myself. . ."
Please don't remember me.
Please don't look at me.
Please stop existing.
"Why won't he ever give me a fucking break?" I groaned, constricting my fists together as my body became a sunflower, but a rubicund one. It wasn't miraculous, only an imitation.
"My body didn't exist, in the same way that I didn't exist. It was just there, even when I didn't want it to be. . ."
"Calum, stop. You're scaring him away," Winnie yelled, making a rather large attempt to calm me down, but it wasn't working. Him existing was making me numb, a skeleton, a grey sun that disappears with the rest of the world. Him living means me dying.
"That's the point!"
I staggered over to him, firewater filling my bones as a twinkling star of velvet flushed in front of me. He was lemon, pineapple and pomegranate. I was garlic and sesame, or sad. I preferred the second one.
"P-Please don't hurt me," Michael stuttered, hands quavering like a broken window, "I was just admiring you."
"Well I think it's time you stop," I whispered, letting go of his ironed collar, "I don't like being watched."
"Beautiful things deserve to be looked at," Michael mumbled back, fixing the wrinkles in his shirt that were created by me, art, and he gave me a small smile, but I only turned him away with a scowl.
I didn't need this.
I didn't need him.
Because he didn't exist.
"Please just leave me alone," I stated weakly, body turning into tangerine ethanol, and hands growing orthogonal, "and please stop looking at me like I deserve the world, because I don't want to be apart of it."
"Michael became cinereal, his navy skin growing pale, bloodless, and I wanted to fix him, but I couldn't. It was impossible to repair the damage from things that were apart of your imagination, from things that didn't exist. And that was the worst part about it all. . ."
"Calum Cabera to the attendance office."
I groused, knowing that it'd be unattainable to hide away from the people that were in charge. And I needed to deal with the consequences.
"Look, I need to go find my sister," I deadpanned, feeling all color drain out of me as I remembered her. My real sister, who was buried six feet under the galaxy.
"Bye Cameron," Michael deflated, fuchsia cheeks turning gold, "I hope I'll see you around."
Maybe somebody as pretty as him was the reason I did drugs.
Or maybe it was myself.
But I didn't care. Because I wanted to die.
In the same way that I didn't want him to exist.
He just did.
-
A/N;
Overall thoughts?
This chapter is kind of short, I'm sorry.
It's not confusing anybody, right?
I'm trying to make it as understandable as possible, so if it's confusing, don't be afraid to let me know.
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