Cinderella's Evil Sister

17 | I ruin everything all by myself

I WAS SCARED, SCARED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. I wouldn't consider myself too brave; in fact, I'm the complete opposite. I'm scared of lot of things.

I never swim further in the sea unless I reach the bottom with my feet, for I am afraid of sharks; I know very well that sharks have no problem getting to the shore, but for some reason I once thought in my head that sharks don't swim beyond buoys, and I've blindly believed it ever since. But in any case, if there's an inconvenience of sharks coming closer than they should, if I can still reach the bottom with my feet, I can run away.

         Or once I'm more than 5 meters in the air, my knees start to shake, and my head plays out the worst possible scenarios of my death if I stumble and fall to the ground.

For some reason I have a terrible fear of crocodiles, even though I have never seen one with my own eyes and they don't even live in our state (or at least I think they don't, I don't have that much information). But just the thought of meeting him one day makes me want to kïll myself. This brings me to my next fear; with everything I do, I'm afraid I'll hurt myself. I think that even if I wanted to, I could never hurt myself on purpose. If I wanted to kïll myself, I'd probably have to hire someone to kïll me, but I've read that it costs a lot of money, and since I've known Juniper, I don't have much money, so I have to wait until old age comes for me. Or a car accident, I don't really care at this point.

But I would say that my biggest fear was love. I was afraid to love; to love the wrong person, and most of all to love more than the other person. I was afraid of getting hurt. And now, I'm scared because I feel like I feel all four.

         And it doesn't help that the only thing that surrounds my mind is Juniper goddamn Pensbury. I've tried to get her out of my mind numerous times, but I just keep seeing her everywhere I go. 

        I see her at my window every night before I go to sleep and I wait for her to come into my room, although she never comes.

        I see her when I walk through the garden and see her blue bike with a basket on the front handlebars leaning against the wall of their house.  It almost seems like yesterday when she was teaching me how to ride a bike.

        I even see her every time I pass the goddamn trash bin, imagining her soft voice mockingly saying: "That's where you belong."

        I feel like I'm nowhere safe without my mind constantly thinking about her.  Thinking about how she's doing, what she's up to, if she's in a bad mood or a good mood.  If she's thinking about me too.

        I sat at my desk with my head in my hands and clicked my pen on the wooden board. Try as I might, I couldn't concentrate on my chemistry homework. Because there she was again.

        Juniper loved chemistry, probably even more than me and I was the part of a school chemistry team.  She loved anything that could explode and she loved anything that could corrode the eyes of her enemies.  She was just like a little kid at heart, and I think that was exactly what I loved about her.  I, sometimes, thought I was forced to grow up too early and never had a proper childhood, and Juniper made sure to give me my childhood back.  I didn't have to worry about anything with her. I felt so. . . free with her.

          I would hate to brag (I actually love to brag), but I would say that Chemistry was one of the subjects in which I excelled.  And so I didn't understand why I couldn't answer a single primitive question on the paper in front of me.