Loving him - Oscar Isaac

Chapter 1 - recounting (pre story)

Red
A blur of red...
The trees lined up in an almost perfect sequence across the street from the window I had been staring out of for God knows how many minutes. Moving ever so gently with the rhythm of the wind. I could feel a connection to the leaves; worn out, tired, whittled by the season... the grass which surrounded the roots, decorated by autumn foliage. The cold from winter had already started pouring in as fall was slowing to an end.

   Abingdon was a small but friendly town... friendly to tourists and visitors. I really had nothing to compare it to... It's not like I'd ever left there before except for the few school trips here and there to other neighboring towns. I had once believed in my earlier years that no one on earth had it harder than me. I thought I was cursed, I thought God didn't like me, in fact, I thought I was some sort of superhero who had to be living in the "success story" era. To an extent it would be plainly unfair if after what this town put me through I don't become some beloved pop star or a wizard. It took me a lot of littles to realize I'm just unlucky.

One would say middle school was the toughest for me... in just judgment.

Having to walk the school after my dad got brutally assassinated, being in the same class with the boy whose dad had had it arranged. A spoilt brat with no remorse or humanity.

It killed me more and more everyday how carefree he was. So carefree he'd make jokes about it here and there.

"Yeah I'm late but so is Astrid's dad..." ? Like acceptable, you're a kid and your sense of humor is still developing but how brain dead can you be to think that's funny?

As brain dead as the entire school.

Maybe it'd have been more bearable if he was the only one, but not anyone seemed to care... in their eyes it was all his fault.

Politics is a bloody game...

My dad would always say anytime I'd asked him why he'd occasionally had cuts and wounds, when I'd seen him stacking layers of clothes and a mask on himself just to be able to go to the corner store, and the few times he'd come home drunk. He'd always had a sullen expression and it got worse about a week before he was murdered.

Nobody knew what was really happening to him but what we saw was fear. He was afraid. I'd sometimes catch him staring blankly at the walls... eyelids quivering, fidgeting with little objects around the house in deep thought and sometimes even leaving for days on end without informing anybody.

Even in all this, he was an amazing human. He never hit us, never yelled, and he loved my mother to bits. He'd cry in her hands while she ran her hand through his hair. He'd help her get the groceries, buy her the sweetest things and never left her side.

I was his precious stone. He nicknamed me ruby for the deep red color in my hair and didn't fail to treat me like one. He'd plaît my hair and tell me stories. He'd taught me everything I'd known.

The time before he went into politics was the best time in my life. We were very poor but we were also very happy. We'd sit in the trees and he'd entertain me with the most wild and intriguing childhood stories. He gave me everything he could... I was his life. We were his life and he was ours.

Then he decided to run for mayor of our town. That's when the money started coming in but it was paying for the price of his soul. He was long dead before he was murdered.

He'd been threatened multiple times by the mayor in seat but the one thing my dad and I strongly share is our stubbornness and our willingness to die doing what we wanted to do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was during the summer of my junior year... on a Saturday. We'd gone camping just me and him. My mother never came with as it wasn't her thing.