Unto The Darkness

Us

The window was open, and thanks to our bratty cat, the screen was torn off. I was small, only four, and I saw the window as a portal. Lost in my daydream, I dawned my shoes and waited for it. I waited patiently for my parents to be distracted, they'd never let me go. And the second that both had left me to my own devices, I made a break for it.
The drop from the window  was my first obstacle. To my four year old eyes, the ground looked to be about a mile away. Most kids would be scared, but not me! I was brave! I was an explorer, and adventurer! Like the ones I saw on TV. The drop was twice my size, but I didn't care. I jumped. I landed painfully on my side in the rocks, sending a few to tumble away from me when I plummeted awkwardly into them. I waited for a second and listened for my parents. Nothing.
With a great sense of freedom, relieve, and excitement, I crept over to the tall wooden gate that had been left open. I snuck around it and found myself standing alone outside my house, facing a river death that the adults called a street. But I wasn't scared of no river of death, or its death machines they call cars! But, I was scared of my parents seeing me. So I stuck to the shadows and walked up against houses and fences until I turned the corner, finding a part of my neighborhood I've never seen!
I saw opportunity and many marvelous adventures ahead of me and I gladly took after them. My feet hit the ground roughly as I ran, hoping to run far away from home so that the neighbors wouldn't tell on me. Houses began to blend in with each other and roads seemed endless. Every scene I passed molded together into the same image, a collage of images that all looked the same. I couldn't have been out for more than half an hour when I got tired of this "exploring thing" and decided to go home. But when I tried, I only got more lost. Nothing looked the same, or maybe it did and I just didn't remember it. My feet were tired, and they no longer wanted to carry me. The sun, which had once been high in the sky, was falling slowly off into the distance, hiding behind the tops of trees and the rooftops of the tall houses. Hunger kicked in. I've missed lunch! And the gentle breeze from earlier had died completely. It was hot now. I was tired, hot, lost, and hungry. And it struck me that this idea of exploration and running away was a very bad idea. An idea I didn't want to ever repeat.
Dogs started barking at me. They were so loud and they were so big. I thought that they'd hop the fence and eat me alive. So I instinctively ran to a street without dogs. A much quieter and nicer street. A tall tree in the middle beaconed me over, offering me its shade and a place for me to rest. And I made a beeline right for it. I sat down with a plop and a sigh.
The slow realization that I had run away and become lost hit me harder than expected. And I was tired of being scared, so I got angry. And I did the only thing I could think of. Cry. I sobbed loudly, choking on my tears and soaking my shirt. Snot ran down my face and I wanted a tissue. Not any tissue. I'm very picky about my tissues. I only use the Vic's tissues. They make my nose feel better. And at that moment, I could have really used one of those amazing tissues.
I'm not too sure how long I just sat there and cried, but at some point, the boy who lived in the house behind me had come out to see what was wrong. He was around my age, defiantly not older, but not too much younger either. He had these huge brown eyes that took up most of his face. And when he sat towards the sun, his dark brown eyes would turn a lovely gold. He had a messy mop of wavy brown hair to match his eyes, and a funny way of talking that I couldn't quiet understand. He tried to calm me down. He talked to me gently and tried to act silly to cheer me up. But my stubbornness refused to let him help, and I ignored his kindness. But he didn't go away. Instead, he sat down besides me and started picking the dandelions that filled the yard. At first I paid no attention to what he was doing. I was too angry. But when I glanced over, I saw a chain of dandelions, and it was the coolest thing my four year old eyes have ever seen. It was witch craft! It was magic! How did he get the weeds to stay together like that. I stopped crying and watched him carefully. And once I controlled my breathing, stopped the excessive sniffling and what not, I could hear him humming ever so softly. The tune was regulated, it wasn't one of those "songs" four-year-olds normally sang, the ones where there wasn't much to them, a never ending shriek of words...sometimes words...not always words. But his sounded like it was an actual song, like the ones on the radio.
He then lifted a ring of woven dandelions and placed it gently on top of my head. He saw how amazed I was and smiled.
I'm not too sure how it happened, but the next thing I know, I've got a pile of plucked dandelions in my lap and I'm focusing super hard on what the boy's doing. I watch his hands carefully and cautiously repeat everything I see. Magic is hard to learn.
But the entire time I was learning, he never got upset with me. That alone surprises me because nobody ever got along with me. I upset everybody. He didn't seem to care. When I made a mistake, he didn't laugh or get mad like the other kids. Nope. Instead, he'd carefully show me where I went wrong, and then he'd sweetly show me how to fix it. He even let me have the satisfaction of doing it all by myself. And when I was slow to understand, he slowed down to let me catch up. He was patient with me. He was calm. My teachers at preschool didn't act like this. They'd get impatient with me and move on to another kid who actually kinda had a grasp on what was being given to them. I'd be left alone thinking that I was dumb and that I'd never get it right. I started to hate school. I still couldn't read, write, or count. And my parents didn't have the patience or time to help me. I was very happy that he was different, and treated me different. It made me feel like somehow I belonged. And with his guidance, I made my very own flower crown. The stupid things amazed me so much that we both started to make many more.
Hours must have passed, the sun was hiding completely behind houses, staining the sky in mixtures of blue, purple, orange, pink, and red. I had a small pile of flower crowns at me feet, he wore all of his on his head. That's when mom and dad came. They were very angry with me for running away. I got scolded and they grounded me. I was given a guilt trip home, which much to my surprise was only a street and a few houses away. I probably would have gotten home if I didn't stop to rest. But I'm glad I did stop to rest, otherwise I'd never have made the flower crowns, or most importantly, never had met James.
James's mother had seen how much fun we had making the flower crowns that she stopped by one day. She and my mom started to talk. They talked for a really long time, laughing and whispering. Mom talked about some silly things dad did and the other woman talked about silly things her husband did. They got along very well. However I didn't really care about them, I was more interested in playing with James. I showed James to my room. I showed him everything. I felt that I had to. No one else had seen my room before, and I always had it so clean, that's a lie, my room was never clean, it was clean enough, but still. I felt awfully proud of myself. He seemed interested in my books and the drawings I had pinned up on my walls. We didn't really play. We asked each other a lot of questions instead. I learned that he lived with his grandparents and uncles. His mom works over seas with his eldest uncle and they sometimes come back to visit. But when he said it, he said that they went home. That confused the shit out of me. This was home. Does he have two homes?
He then told me that he didn't live here, that he lived in a place called Britain. He told me that that's why he talked funny, he called it an accent. His R's seemed in and out of words they should and shouldn't be. And a few other letters, but the R's bothered me the most. His T's would appear and disappear too. I found it astounding, while I know many kids who would have deemed it annoying.
He then tried to read me a book, pronouncing the words how he was convinced was the right way. Then he asked me to read. My pride told me to try and if I can't then to make it up! But he saw right through my lies. Most kids would have laughed at me if they found out that I couldn't read, but he didn't.
He sat down and sounded out letters, told me what they were called, and after an hour, I finally got through the book. My mom walked in to tell us that he had to go home, but she stopped when she heard me reading. I think it was the first time she had ever cried with joy. I couldn't read very well, only a few  pages, but considering that it had only been an hour and I knew next to nothing before hand, I was doing pretty damn good. But that didn't stop mom. She took James back to his mom and the two left.
But James came back! He came back a lot after that. And at first he just continued to teach me. I was going back to preschool with a better grasp on how to read and I was getting better at writing. My teacher thought that my parents were helping, and it surprised her when she found out that they weren't. I'm sure it crushed her when she learned that a three year old could teach better than her, for James was only three. He's just a few months younger than I am.
James didn't just teach me though. He'd stop by and we'd play games. Normally we'd play the floor is made of lava and my cat would be the lava monster. But around his birthday, we'd watched a pirate movie, and since I was obsessed with the whole idea of flying and what not, we combined the two. This was the birth of sky pirates! I was a captain of a flying ship, he was the guns-man. And together we'd fight off other pirates, my cat, and often my parents who we called the land pirates.
Sometime around sky pirates, a spark of creativity struck. We decided that we needed a ship, and a hide out! So we started building forts out of my blankets and what ever I had in my room at the time. We built the coolest forts and only the fastest of flying ships. They never did actually fly, but our imaginations saw past that.
Eventually we both started going to school. We'd get put in each others classes every other year. And when we were in each others class, we'd have to be separated because we'd start mouthing off back and forth. So we passed notes, by paper airplanes! The notes never had anything serious on them, in case they landed in the wrong hands. It was normally small stupid messages like,"your mom!", "eat soup", "guns-man Skyler," or "captain Cloudchaser." This would greatly annoy the teachers and they'd give James a hard time because when I'm not around he's normally the goody two shoes of the class. He was also the smartest, until it came to math, then I was the smartest! But I was only good with math. I sucked at everything else.
So we used this. I tutored him in math, and he tutored me in everything else. We got homework done pretty quickly together, normally right after getting the home work which would often upset the teachers. But there wasn't a better feeling than being the first ones done with the homework.
My parents were so pleased with my grades that they let James stay over a lot more often. In the third grade he stayed over every weekend, slept over really. He and I would build a fort, put on a Disney movie, normally Lilo and Stitch or the incredibles, eat some butterfingers and some milk chocolate.
We were super happy. My parents seemed to enjoy our friendship. He kept me in control and in line, and I was able to get him to break out of his comfort zone and enjoy life a bit more.
Then it happened. I've never seen James cry before. I never wanted to see him cry. But that day, I held him close and let him sob helplessly and hopelessly on my shoulder. It broke my heart seeing how he tried so hard to be strong, and when he broke he tried to piece himself back together, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't stop sobbing, so he just cried more. We went to the funeral, we couldn't have an opener casket, there wasn't enough of her to be buried and shown. She was missing half her face, an arm, a chunk of her brain had been found feet from her corpse. A rotten smell hung around the casket, indicating that she had been dead a while. We don't know what happened to her, who did it, or if they'll ever be found. But some one had brutally murdered his mother. The news shocked his grand parents so badly that his grandfather's heart failed and he died to a heart attack. His grandmother went insane. She was so torn that she started saying that she was going to kill her children and her grandson to protect them.  She had to be locked away after she hospitalized the younger uncle. His uncles took him in, even though they had no way to support themselves and him. So my parents offered as much support as we could, paying half of their rent and supplying them with food so that they could afford to go to college.
Immediately after her death, he started suffering from night terrors. He slept restlessly, tangling himself in blankets and smothering himself with his pillow. He'd wake up screaming and crying. Often he'd be so terrified that he'd refuse to talk to me or let me near him. It was almost as if he'd forgotten me completely. And when I asked what terrified him so he'd only stare off into the distance and shrug. "I can't remember," he'd say wiping away tears. It took a while, but eventually he grew to trust me again after waking up. He was normally my emotionally crutch, but at night, I became his life line.
Time passed and his night terrors became a normality. I found myself staying awake at night waiting for them, knowing that I'd have to be awake to comfort him, thus damaging my sleep pattern. Insomnia soon became well acquainted with me. We were both tired when we went to school.
My dad felt absolutely awful, so he built us a bunk bed and allowed James to stay over for how ever long he wanted or needed. Mom took him to therapy. It took all summer, but he got better.
He was able to laugh and smile again at least. The night terrors never did stop. We don't expect them to.
But he did get better, and soon we were back to our usual happy antics. Fifth grade rolled around and I started to develop my breasts. The other mothers scolded mine for letting us practically live together at our ages, telling her that so we'd become experimental. My parents would roll their eyes and walk away. My father built us a tree house as his way of saying,"fuck you," to the other parents. And James and I would just laugh. He saw me as a sister, and for a short period of time was convinced that I was his sister. And I saw him as a brother. We had agreed over a summer some time ago that we were never to date one another, because it would be gross. Really gross. Besides, he liked another girl and I liked this boy named Max.
But this didn't stop the rumors. Middle school rolled around and every one was convinced that we were dating. Even Max. This made me sad, because when ever I tried to flirt with him, he'd ask me in an annoyed tone if I was dating James, and I'd tell him again and again that I wasn't. But just like every one else, he wouldn't believe me. No one ever did. No one but James.
When I told James, he would instantly threaten to kick Max's ass for making me sad. But we both knew that that would be a bad idea, because James can't fight for shit, and would get his ass handed to him before he could speak. So he thought that we should try and separate a bit, detach. And as soon as the words left his mouth we both started laughing. That was a terrible idea, one that we soundly even be able to fake or try faking. So disappointedly, I gave up on Max. If he couldn't see past James, the he wasn't right for me. Besides, I was too young to date anyway. At least that's what I thought. I still felt my heart melt when ever I caught him smile, and I'd fall apart when he'd turn away.
High school rolled up faster than we wanted. And since neither of us really knew what to expect, we decided to make the best of it. On the first day, he dressed up in one of my fancy dresses and I wore some of his fancy clothes. We wore flower crowns as well, our own little way of celebrating how far we've made it together. We were too busy having fun and enjoying our costumes that we didn't notice the states and the mumbling. And what little we did notice, we'd just laugh at them.
I think that's what I'm trying to get at. We were so close that nothing bothered us. We always had each other to back us up when we needed it. And there seemed to be no way that we'd split apart. And if we did, we'd always make up for it immediately. That's the way it went. That's the way it'll stay.