Sincerely

Leeon

"Do you really have to smoke that right now?"

Cin looks at me sheepishly and takes his blunt out of his mouth, "Sorry, I haven't smoked all day."

"What does smoking even do for you?" I ask, trying lower the harshness of my tone.

Cin sits back in his seat, "It calms me. Makes my mind go at ease."

"What is your mind usually like?"

Cin thinks for a moment, then his eyes flicker. I get nervous as he pulls out his phone and starts typing, and watch as he turns up the stereo to 100 percent.

"Wait, what are you-" I start.

Before I can even get my thought out, my ears get filled with the most horrific sound I have ever heard in my life. The sound waves pulse throughout my entire body, making me freeze up and clench onto the car seat.

I look over at Cin, and instead of him flinching or cringing to the sound, I see him laughing. I can't hear his laugh over the sound, but his wide smile and his shoulders bouncing up and down makes me a bit less tense.

I reach over and turn the stereo down and hear the horrific sound go to a whisper, and Cin's laugh filling up my ears instead.

I punch his shoulder and he winces and holds onto it, but laughs even harder.

"Your fucking face, oh my God!" Cin says in between laughs.

"You asshole! Why the fuck did you do that?" I yell at him, even though my cheeks sting from smiling.

"You asked what my mind was usually like. Well, there you go." Cin says, rubbing the spot where I punched him.

I almost ask him if I punched him too hard, but I bite my tongue, "You didn't have to almost burst my eardrums."

"You weren't gonna understand unless you got a taste of it yourself."

"What is with you always saying that? I don't have to experience something in order to understand it." I say.

"Dude, life is all about experience. You experience, you learn, you move on." His eyes shine a bit as he speaks.

"I learned to never ask you what's going on in your head."

"Good enough for me." Cin says as he opens his driver seat door.

I watch him step out of the car,"Where are you going?"

"Smoke break." He smiles at me, then shuts the door.

I watch him as he leans against the car door and lights his blunt aflame.

I look away from him in case he turns around and sees me staring at him like a weirdo.

As much as me and Cin hang out outside of school and now during lunch with his friends, I still can't get myself to be seen with him by anyone. He says he understands, but I can see the hint of sadness behind his smile every time I reject his offer to walk me anywhere. And even outside of school, I'm too afraid to go anywhere that anyone from our school might be. I feel like a coward when my head gets light to the thought of anyone catching us together. And the question I can never answer is what I'm so afraid of. Every time Cin asks me, and I stay silent, I can feel our unstable friendship crack even more than it already has. I say I couldn't care less how people view me, but then I do shit like force Cin to be isolated with me just to protect whatever pathetic image I have.

Maybe he smokes to deal with my stressful ass. I don't blame him, cause I would to.

I look out my window at the empty parking lot and it's worn out paint and overgrown grass. I've always liked when things look overgrown. Like an old abandoned house with vines overrunning it. Or an abandoned playground that looks watered down and covered with plants. It looks peaceful to me, that the plants are untouched and thriving on their own. Like in drawings of the world ending or a zombie apocalypse. The world seems so dead but also so much more alive at the same time. There's no people, but at the same time there's no people to keep killing the world we live in. Sometimes I wonder how fresh the air would smell if there was no people around. How quiet the world would be. How nothing and no one could-