ataraxia, lorenzo berkshire

"forty three"

"did you hear about what happened in the library the other day?" xander slowly queried as he settled down beside me in the courtyard.

i hummed, much more interested in compressing the dried autumn leaves littered across the floor with my shoe, product of the elder trees weeping away the amber essence of this season, shedding the dead weight and preparing to regenerate for the next, that was about to be much harsher, utterly ruthless.

maybe i need to do the same.

the defined crunch of the crisp leaves shattering under the pressure of my foot was my awful attempt to cancel out the words which she was constantly asked by others; some she'd never spoken to nor seen her entire life.

it was the talk of the school.

god, are people really this bored?

"val," xander gently placed a hand on my upper arm, causing me to twitch unexpectedly - he removed it as if it had never been there in the first place, as if i had hallucinated the weight his hand would've left.

"mmm," i hazily replied, still peering intensely at the ground, adorned in rich shades of orange - fragile, curl-tipped sheets of gold annually shedded that represent re growth - acceptance and passing of a period of time. the process of developing and outgrowing your environment.

how easily these beautiful fragments of the past could be crushed, forgotten.

holy shit.
this is deep.
plato has nothing on me.

"i don't care, frankly." i lowly replied, almost afraid to look up, as if once i did, i'd be surrounded by whispering figures, brewing words as they gurgled venom within their throats and weaved it within their words, in a way that once valentina had heard of these words, she felt as though her heart had been pierced with a dozen syringes filled with searing heat.

her chest burned, an inferno of intense emotion, too much for her to even fathom on how to process, streaking throughout her legs, her arms, all the way to her throat and head.

hearing these words, what had happened in the library, put her in a harsh, but realistic mindset.

she and lorenzo were simply not to be.
merely pathetic high school sweethearts, who loved too intensely and too recklessly that in the end, sealed their fates by passionately gouging holes of childish obsession and adoration, a debilitating reliance on each-other that they knew neither could support.

everything happened so fast, but in too little time. it became suffocating. she wanted to forget - forget what it was like to fall into a sudden, rapid sinkhole of intense emotion towards your best friend.

and although both of them could use forgetting one another, taping up the past as a form of medicating stitch to tend to these gouges, the scars, however, the memories of exposed tissue and muscle consisting of the utter adoration that channeled their veins, weakening them - a bitter taste within the depths of their mouths - would always be prominent, as they knew the barriers they'd risked their dignity to overcome would still always be passively maintained through word of mouth - omnipresent harassment.

mocked by their verbal exchanges, confectionary through words - like a melted toffee, substance stuck and messily webbed within the walls of their skulls.

a rich coating of the experiences marinated their brains - the emotions they'd shared between one another that is so sticky - so complicated, that it's stuck a little fragment of their souls together. regardless.

but that fragment was not enough.

sweet reminiscence i suppose, but it becomes sickening. stomach churning. when you realise you've engulfed all of the sweet things, and you notice there's none left for you to indulge.