Strawberries and Whipped Cream

Chapter 6 - Brins d'herbe (2)

You asked me if I could help you carry some bottles when you volunteered to go grab everybody something to drink at one of the small food trucks that were parked by the beach and made a huge profit selling cheap food for too much money. I agreed, even if I was feeling a little bit down, like it had been a rainy day and my mood had simply started to match the outside world. But the sun was shining and the laughing families around me judged me for not enjoying this wonderful day here in paradise like I should be. 

"Sorry if they are not your cup of tea, but I hope you are enjoying yourself nevertheless" you had smiled down at me, as we waited in line at the truck and my thoughts drifted off to the things these friends of yours could show you and make you feel. What they had done with you, the wild stories they hadn't even gotten to yet and now here you were, hoping that I was having fun. 

And my impulse was to simply reach for your hand and intertwine it with my own, smiling "I am", making you chuckle and shake your head at me. 

We were acting like a teenage couple, like those you would see in bad movies made for younger kids, those who were not yet at that high school or college age and they could still dream about what it would be like to change into that school and how you would finally meet your Edward Cullen or your very own so called Bad Boy, that would pick you over everybody else, even if you weren't special. 

That wasn't us, of course it wasn't, but it wasn't too far-fetched, that one could imagine us waiting for the other by the locker, if they truly did something like this in reality, make out on the parking lot and all these clichés that you would see presented by the media, that made young girls dream of feeling this type of special, so that everybody else would envy them. But that wasn't us, that would never be us and yet this felt special and private as well. I didn't even want you to tell your friends about what we had done in the privacy of my room, I didn't want them to know what we knew, no this was only between us and nobody else. We weren't young and in love, but we held something else in our hearts that apparently was neither too much nor too little so it grew into something new that I liked and wanted to keep. 

"Are you ok?" I asked you and you cocked a brow knowingly. I asked you that a lot. Are you ok. I cannot explain it, it wasn't like that was a trait of mine, that I always wanted to make sure that everybody around me was feeling alright, no, it was only with you that I needed to confirm that you weren't unhappy or thinking about something that upset you, but you just hid it very well. My missing ability to be able to read you like a book that spoke to me, like a poem my favorite author wrote, made me crave the confirmation that you were not feeling uneasy in my presence and with our silence.

Are you ok? Are you ok. Am I ok? Only questions and through the answers even more doubt that swirled through my mind. "Yes, very much ok" you smiled and telling me with your expression that I must have been the reason why you were contempt with life or feeling much more than just inner peace. But I never believed you. 

Because how could you be ok? After all, you were spending this time with me, so ok was probably not an appropriate comparison to what you were feeling. Adequate. Just barely fine. Not amazing, but also not like death seemed like a good option. There it was, the insecurity. But it simply never felt genuine when you answered my oh so often asked question. 

And that made me uneasy and unsure, so I had to ask again. "You ask that a lot, don't you?" you replied this time and I was caught off guard, since I was just thinking about that very fact and my first response was to apologize. I knew how annoyed I could get if people around me would repeat the same phrase or words over and over again, it drove me to insanity. But you shook your head and told me not to apologize, since it wasn't a bad thing. 

"Maybe you just ask, what you weren't asked enough as a child." And there it was, your understanding of me that not even I had of myself. I always believed that I was rather self-reflected and understood myself very well, but you seemed better at that than me. How was it, that you seemed to understand me and my needs without me speaking them out loud and I didn't even know how you were feeling in that moment even if you told me? Wasn't that simply unfair? But at the same time, it made me like you only more.