1.1 | Lost & Found

xiii. presley

I N D I G O

When the Boy with Sad Eyes and Fiery Red Hair first slammed the rusty doors of our shared locker today, all I wanted to do was tell him to stop banging doors. But after our English lesson, I don't think I will ever be able to string my words into proper sentences in front of him. No matter how much I try, I will never be able to shout at Presley Cooper.

Because today, when he stood up on the first lesson of the semester and read out his summer poetry homework after Mrs. Hurst, the school librarian come english teacher asked him to, he broke apart, free like the bald eagles who live near Harlan Cove. His arms spread into wings, the vibration in his chest daring our school to judge him. Presley Cooper almost sang his words, like it was the only way to let them out— a soft rhythm followed by a crescendo. I felt them in my soul.

Because Presley is not just the silent boy who sits two rows behind me in AP english. He's someone I've grown to one-sidedly admire in the few hours that I've met him. Someone I respect, because even though we've never spoken, the pain in his eyes hold mine. He's the boy who staples pages of his poetry notebook shut like even he's afraid to see what's between them. Whose brown eyes dart away if I let myself look too long. The boy who sings his poetry the way my heart can only dream to do. My heart wants to write poems, getting lost in thoughts, and imagining people it'll never know and places it'll never go the way he does.

Today when I had looked up in alarm when he shut close our locker with too much force, "Sorry," was all he offered, and now, I take it. I now know he meant it. Presley and I move in different social circles. Or rather, he is a solitary dot and I'm another, stranded in a sea of students, on completely different planes. 

Perhaps the only reason I'm actually showing up to Harlan High School, 'Home to the Viking!', is to listen to Presley sing out his heart through auric words. That, and to prove to my new family that I'm not a lost cause. I do just enough to get the highest grade, but not enough to top the grade. My teachers though, are fairly surprised and pleased with my overall performance, or little of what they've judged in the little work they've assigned. 

When we discussed Romeo and Juliet's profound love during second lesson, and Mrs. Hurst said that love was tragic, love was a deathly kind of feverish beauty, I refused to believe her. In my mind I heard the crack of Mom's beer bottles hitting the wall. I saw that same wall the next morning, perfect, as though the plaster never broke. I remember how my eyes slipped past it as I hung up frames, like they were unwilling to accept the way our strange house used to erase Mom's drunk violence for her. I've never understood anything in my life.

When I feel like this, I reach for someone else's words to pull me back. To remind me that the world is bigger than my Old Home, before I met the Clarksons. Bigger than the lowest part of my life with Mom. It's probably the best thing I inherited from Mom—her love of words. She loved classic literature and poetry, and every memory of my childhood smells like the stacks of paperbacks she'd stash all over the house. 

Apart from the ones that smell like old beer. 

She made books our home in a way our house never was.

But now I can't stand the classics. She always said they were romantic, but someone always ends up brokenhearted or dead. Or brokenhearted and then dead. As though tragedy is the only ending that has meaning. People lie all the time. Like mom, when she used to say things would get better. They lie about things that bring them fear and threaten to take away what is comfortable. And now she's dead. 

These days, I'll take journalism over literature. I'll take the truth over grief. Leave romance at the door. 

I've never understood a lot of things, in fact, like why I've always felt lonely around friends, like it's me against the world. Like maybe this wasn't ever supposed to be my life. I know they feel it too. I know the way Olivia and Ezra share looks behind my back at each other when I say something that is too much, too deep for a casual conversation. Or feel things harder than they do. Maybe it's that they don't understand me, but it might also be because they know. 

Maybe it's a curse to be a dreamer in a world full of doubters.

I think Isaac feels the same, but perhaps to a less depressive extent. I channel my thoughts to a world far from our own, but his fuel his newfound energy to wake up every morning and do something extraordinary. Sometimes I wonder what mistakes he sees in himself that he's afraid to see in me. Because we are both dreamers, and perhaps it is a truly a bane. I can't stop staring outside to a light wind blowing up beside the windowsill of the Math room, creating a soundless division between me and the world.

On the bus ride home, I can't tell if I need to wipe frost from the breezy wind or tears from my eyes. There's no way to tell except blinking and wiping. It's not going away. That thing that makes it so I can't see straight.

The wind.

The tears.

The pain.

Perhaps that is all that there is left to see. 

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