The Premises of an Ideal Life and Additional Poetry

Chapter 9

The cramming people on the streets suddenly cease with their stride and get inside the houses, giving intense loneliness to Aria’s limbs when walking- as if she needs some outward noise to keep moving up the stairs of stone, to solve the problem, as the man said.
    Such a miserable rattlesnake, Quinn thinks with herself, as if everyone will take pity on her with this slow-motion that she’s putting up to get to the step I’m on. I can’t believe she came back, only to suck my blood out and show to the world that she’s better, victimizing herself. And then, after the crying-baby scene, she’ll take my place, my friends, my status-quo. She’s a venomous scrounger, a pain in the ass.
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Why is she looking at me as if I’m a vermin? Am I that bad at hiding my uneasiness and torture in doing what I’m about to do? Doesn’t she know that, for a time, I used to look at her pimples and think of the stars, the planets, and the Moon? How she brought me out of a hole that I had dug myself, for one day pushing my old self at the deepest parts of my conscience, where my dad stayed. Until, one day, she approached me with her confident-boosted friends, whose only purpose was to have fun and forget about life, real life. Where sorrow is indeed undeniable and is at all times urging us to dig our own holes deeper. The stars visible on her face made me pound about the possibility of a world where this throbbing of the head and torment over being abandoned is non-existent. A new earth for a new person, a changed personality. Whatsoever, what the ghosts and even the hurt, disdained rat showed me was that I will endlessly be alone. That, in the end, being solitary and visiting my darkest chasms will be all done with just… Me.
I am Aria Miller and I will not falter. I have discovered a new galaxy for myself, new moons and planets, with, yes, infinity; the infinite chances of being alone in this character-development  pilgrimage, but also knowing that I will find a companion one day. Maybe, I already have but haven’t yet opened my eyes in full to enable me to see him, or her.
I’m such a romantic, stop it Aria. Stop jabbering away.
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Aria gets to the top, near the purple lavenders that pour out from the lilac orchard. She scarcely has time to inflate her lungs with their aroma and the sheer feeling of natural freedom, making her almost groggy about the fact that being a flower would be so much easier. Aria would most definitely love to listen to the crickets at midnight, the sun infiltrating every pore from her leaves and being refreshed by the dew of the night.
However, doing the slightest gestures might imply a certain lack of awareness and control over the situation; she does not pretend to show her mellowness under the harsh lines of her face. Appreciating an orchard you do not possess, distracting yourself with the light of the rainbow on the horizon after the rain, and checking your back to make sure no one is in hearing distance are fatal gestures. As vague, trivial, and novelties as they seem, to a certain degree they strippe out your tenderest feelings. At the end, it all comes down to maintaining a posture of selfishness, deceit and business- which put on display how emotionally strong you are.
“Would you like to sit here, Aria? This place near the drain where you are will end up soaking your clothes in dirty water from the rain.”
    Quinn lets out a circle of smoke from the device that comes in and out of her mouth, the smell of pineapple enclosing them both nearer each other.
    Aria sits beside Quinn on the wooden, white bench and the question “what next?” is reciprocated in both rumbling minds. The two resemble lawyers from the SOG, the same spirit of wired brains and tactics present in these surrealistic hard conferences ablaze these young women. 
“I’m all ears, Aria. Maybe you could start by making clear the reason why I was blocked from your cell phone. Not only me but Christian, Jacob, Lucy, Esmeralda… Which was attested by me this afternoon after calling Lucy. She said you hadn’t said a word about why all of us were dusted off from your account. I hope you have a fair reason for being here, Aria. Otherwise, I won’t mind if you snap out of this trance you're in or not, I will not want to see you ever again walking on this street. Oh, stop with this despicable face of disbelief for goodness sake. I for one would advise you to think long and hard about what you’ll be saying today or you can see for yourself what I can do with your social-”
    Quinn goes on and on like a boat full of pirates, walloping at the bay of a composed beach, Aria. The eyes of disgust, impetuosity, and the decrepit speech her late, late best friend is putting up awake the nineteen-year-old coma patient from all the skepticism leaving the red-lipstick mouth in front of her.
    Amid the sonority that the lavenders, hyacinths, and tulips make, mingling with the curses and screams pronounced by Quinn, Aria brings her hand forward and Quinn retrieves. Just what she needed.
“Quinn, I wasn’t the one that blocked all of you from my cell phone. It was my mother.”
Complete silence and the rancid smell of fruit from the vape pod engulf the agitated bodies.
“What do you-”
“When I was in the coma, my mother got my phone and clicked the button, thinking she was helping me in some way. Before you ask, yes, I have talked to her and we are on good terms. Now, the reason for which I came here is: I have been pondering over my life, friendships, the mother-and-daughter relationship I have, or better yet, lack of it all, and my dad.”
Aria realises that the girl staring at her is the mirage of what she had been, a walloping three months earlier. At this point, Quinn resembles someone that has finally acknowledged her discretion. Although she gives glimpses of a woman under her sinewy posture, Aria cannot infer for sure whether she is still a redundant teenager wearing the skin of a grown-up.
“I got a job at the outskirts of the metropole as well. I’ll be the assistant of a kindergarten teacher, a job I had never wished for, but I came to realize that it would be a great opportunity to start taking care of myself too. The car crash was definitely a sign that my ferocity with drinks, the abolition of any kind of study, was not paying off.”
Quinn looks at the citizens on the left, the poor souls wandering on the road, to no future, only encased in servitude. The young woman takes up the characteristics of a volcanic explosion. Hushed for a moment, but getting closer and closer to the timeless eruption. Aria thinks with herself: will she say something? There must be controversy coming.
Nonetheless, to Aria’s utter astonishment, Quinn doesn’t locate herself in all this.  It is like she is beyond any dominion, any time and space, enraptured in her thoughts. The hatred evanesces from the corner of Quinn’s misty eyes and Aria can almost picture her past-best friend putting down her gavel as an order to listen. For now.
“I had to move out from this craze Quinn. If you want to try and thrive in what I call ‘a new adventure’ along with me, don't think twice. I will accept you! Frankly, I feel lost in this immensity of mistakes and unanswered questions about my past. Our friendship can still prevail, though. With changes, of course, but they are nothing more than evolutions.  We can usurp this old life and bring up a more ‘quiet’ and ‘normal’ one in exchange, if you know what I mean-”
Quinn looks terribly offended by the last sentence and strikes a pebble, which was lying on the bench, in the direction of the stairs below. Aria knows that, before her mouth was even opened, Quinn was compromised to ditch her out of her life. What-a-friend, Aria thinks.
Whispering in a taciturn way, the young woman ceases her silence:
“No, Aria. I don’t know what you mean by that. This Winston-Churchill speech you’re apparently consuming yourself with, is toxic! You are better than this. All these adults swim in unfairness and anxiety. Their free will is impoverished with lies and cruelty. Don’t you think their world is a thousand times more dangerous, as you say, than the one we lead?”
“Which life are you talking about? As soon as we wake up, we plan a party. As soon as we go to the party, we gulp down our beers in a matter of seconds, we talk our ears off with gossip about our own friends.”
Quinn takes on her machine in the means of avoiding responding to that. Coward, is the only word that comes to the coma patient.
“You got the idea. Quinn, I understand your fear and uncertainty when facing the unknown, but we have to restart our life. be our own conductors and not be conducted by resentment.”
They look like kids when listening for the first time to the wine bottle stopper being gushed out from the slimy glass entrance; annoyed with what will come next as well as being excited for it to be over.
“Oh, no, no, no. Adults will orchestrate your life. You don’t get it, do you? They are famished for scrupulous young people who will work night and day for their ‘hopes’ and ‘dreams’. Then, they will crack you up and when you least expect it, you are lost in their money-bound addiction. At least I am still the owner of my hands, mouth, legs, and head. Grown-ups are cruel, Aria. They are no less lost than us. You won’t survive a day in such a calloused society. It’s best to stay where you are rather than being a hypocrite and bow to their ways.”
“You are a hypocrite for not seeing it, Quinn. The difference between a good life and a bloodied one is that the first recognises their errors and tries to sew them out. Now, the second blames the first at all times and radicalizes human problems to their advantage. It’s a mechanism to make people lose faith in society. And I want to be part of the first one, do you get that? I’ve spent too much time self-centering myself. It’s time to boil down my emotions of angst and look around. You should do the same for once.”
Gazing down at the white tiny rocks at her feet, Quinn grins in disdain:
“You’re such a lunatic.”
Aria stands up, fed up with the proclaimed misconceptions about her newest decisions, and shakes off the grime powderish substance that comes out of the gravels, similar to the white chalks that make students sneeze.
“Goodbye Quinn.”
The young woman turns around, fists tight at her side with knuckles ardently hurting. Quinn makes the last claim on her friend’s future life, getting to the end of the “counter-arguments” paper on her imagined brown suitcase.
“You are completely alone in this one. You’ll come back like a crying baby next timewe meet, just wait for it.”
Such arrogance comes from the undergrounds of Quinn’s throat, a place that had never been discovered by Aria, until today.
“It might surprise you, but I’ve met quite a bunch of people during my stay at the hospital. They taught me many things you would, unfortunately, never get.”
Quinn’s rattlesnake mask drops to the floor and she looks genuinely taken aback. Nonetheless, she tries to maintain a respectful demeanor.
    “So you’ve formed a gang of ill weirdos? Wow, at least the feeling of pity toward you is reciprocal!”
    “You’re babbling the problem away. And they are neither ill nor weirdos for that matter. I’d say that you are the sick and mentally debilitated one, but I wouldn’t like to go this way with you. Just for the record, my friends are as normal as we are, if not better. The difference is that their hands aren’t clenched, they are concerned about what they will use their mouths for and their legs move more freely than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Oh, and to get things straight, my new friends aren’t rascals and don’t have insane mindsets like you!”
    Aria doesn’t look back when she finally gets to the road and Quinn leaves her head facing the gravel path, tears liberally falling to the reathing sound of condemnation.
It is done.