Social Casualty

Chapter 6

I rub my eyes trying to get the heaviness out of them, taking a deep breath and wag violently my head afterwards.
I haven't slept anything for the past two days, and it's getting harder and harder to stay awake. I try to play the sequence in the guitar again.

I bought the guitar exactly a week ago, and I haven't been able to let go of it for the last two days. When I first triedto play a song in it, it went horribly bad. I didn't remember a thing about how to play it and it felt foreign to do something for my own fun. Besides, I felt ridiculous. So I did what most people would do in my position, I hid it under the bed and didn't touch for a few days, thinking of how absurd my idea of buying a guitar and all of a sudden everything would be ok. Then I had this realization: so what I looked ridiculous? That's alright. There's no problem about that, no one would judge for that, no one even cared enough to judge me. And even if someone would, what would be such a big deal, I don't particularly care what anyone thinks about me (that's what I'm trying to convince myself of). One of the perks of being invisible is doing what you want without anyone giving a shit about it.

Those were my motivations to finally snatch the guitar from under my bed and finally do what I've been yearning to do in the last 5 years in my life. The moment I finally put all my foccus in it, I realize how stupid I had been for stopping to play the guitar in the first place. After a few hours I felt as if I had never stopped, everything started coming back to me. Suddenley, I was almost sure I could play certain songs with my eyes closed. Needless to say that, with the memories of me playing guitar, memories of my mother and my old life also appeared, sometimes leaving me a little dizzy and nostalgic. But what matters is that for the most part, I felt good with playing the guitar, I felt more like myself, I felt as if I was in control of my life again.

I try to play the song from the beginning, not allowing myself to stop until it's perfect. After what feels like a few minutes, but is actually another hour, I'm finally satisfied with the resuslts.
I set the guitar beside me, deciding it is time for me to get some rest. I consider sleeping with the guitar beside me and snuggling with it, like I did the day I received my first guitar. It's not that I feel in anyway lonely, and, although the fact that sleeping embraced with my guitar seems extremely sad, I'm scared that if I let go of the guitar I'll feel empty, hopeless and without a purpose for living.

I'm about to pull the covers over my head when my phone starts ringing. I pick it up before the my ring tone wakes up Effie.

"Uh?" I answer the phone, not even checking to see who was calling. I'm surprised by who it is when she talks.

"Peeta? Hei, it's Katniss." she says clearly.

"Katniss?" I ask. Lately I've been trying my best to get my mind as far away from Katniss as possible. I haven't seen her since that morning when we had that fight for almost no reason. I'm not mad at her, like I was back then. The truth is, I've never been really mad at her, I just needed to realize my anger and frustration in someone, and so did Katniss. I guess that if we think that way, Katniss and I have a pretty great arrangement.

"Yeah. You weren't sleeping, were you?" Katniss asks calmly. I look at the clock on my bedside table. It's past 3 a.m. I wonder why did she choose this hour to call me and not sometime else.

"No, but I was justb about to. I bet you weren't sleeping either, were you?"

I hear something near a chuckle on the other side of the line. "No. I was just thinking and I thought I'd call you. I really wanted to apolagize about what happened the other day and stuff." Katniss says trailing off in the last part.

"You really don't need to, it's not your fault, entirely. It's both's fault. Really, it's fine. I'm sorry too." I say. I can imagine Katniss silently nodding, like she usually does when she has nothing else to say about the subject.