A miserable girl who doesn't believe her college campus can change her hollow life in any way, wants to escape the place as soon as possible.
That is until she meets a musician, Indie, who shakes up everything she'd established & makes her feel som...
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Found your old music online.
Your style reminds me of the artist who wrote '305'.
This is exactly why I stopped posting my old music.
Also, what the fuck.
Laughing, I fall back on my bed. Holding the phone up above my face, I watch it buzz with her next message.
Now it's only fair that you send me your writing.
･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.
I go through the edits that my group-members have suggested on the document. We found an empty classroom two hours ago & have been working here on our project since then.
I shift around in my chair, feeling strange. It is not disruptive—just strange, in an otherworldly way.
The people I have been meeting regularly since the beginning of the semester but always felt a little distant from, suddenly create an air of comfort in the room, some unfamiliar ease. The same old document is more absorbing. The letters burn more starkly against the screen.
I try not to dwell on it, but I'm failing.
The door swings open.
This feeling...what does it mean?
Someone shuffles into the chair beside me. I assume it's one of my group-members, shifting places. Not wanting to look up & lose my train of thought about a particular paragraph on the document, I pull my laptop closer.
It's only when someone calls her name out that I look up sharply.
Realize she's sitting right next to me.
"Y-You."
Indie stops unfurling her charger & straightens her back, emerging from where she was bent down below the table. Probably searching for a charging-point.
One of my group-members explains that she was here to give us some information that might be useful for our project, and also to hang around simply because—as it turns out—they're all friends, but it's a monumental task to focus on what's being said when Indie just stares at me in greeting, a wide, knowing grin on her face.
A grin full of whispered secrets.
I avert my eyes & shut my gaping mouth.
That strange feeling returns with renewed force, shooting up my spine in a warm flush. Even then, I don't understand what it means.
Feeling a mild stab of frustration, I return to working on the document. It's with conscious effort that I muffle the awareness of her, sitting there, right next to me, and all my toil is about to go in vain when Indie pull her chair closer to mine.
Before I can move away, however, she's saying something in a low voice—and to anyone listening in from the outside, without context, the question would have made absolutely no sense.
"Do you have any idea how naked I feel now?"
And right then, everything falls in place.
Because I've seen her music & she's seen my writing.
The strange feeling I couldn't describe earlier takes form—the sawtooth edges of raw intimacy. Of sharing with someone a part of yourself you could never show to most people. Of feeling so safe with this someone, so understood, that nothing stops you from placing your most devastating failings & fire-breathing dreams in the center of their palm and closing their fingers around it. Of losing yourself in that wilderness of possibility, of sweet fear, of courage bigger than that, of trust that makes you tremble.
That's what it was. The strange feeling I experienced when I bared my writing to her.
I end up blurting it out with a second thought. "Yeah, it felt like I lost my virginity." To you.
Indie looks at me like she hadn't heard that right.
Fuck.
"You guys," one of my group-members asks from the other end of the classroom, "what are you talking about so secretively?"
I shut my laptop & glance at my watch, letting out a forced chuckle. "I was just going to get dinner."
Packing my things & discussing the closing details of what needs to be done next for the project, I take every precaution to not end up, even accidentally, letting my gaze meet Indie's.
Outside the classroom, the night is humid. Hot summer air collecting in drops of perspiration on people's skin. I take a few steps in the main corridor till it branches into a one that's narrower. Quiet, hidden away.
There, leaning against a wall, I wait for my knees to stop shaking.
