Riparian

Aven IV

She said no. Tallahassee said no; she wanted to see me again.

I didn't quite understand why I was so infatuated with her. It could've been her chestnut hair that fell from her ponytail holder down past her shoulder blades, like melted caramel. It could've been her oddly dark eyes, as sad as blue could be. Or it could be that she was like me. She felt my sadness, my pain, and she felt it hard. How I wanted to run away with her, to leave all the people that had never cared about us and slowly regain happiness. She wasn't anything beautiful, but I'd easily guessed that a wide, elated smile would've been quite becoming on her. As outrageous as all of it sounded, I wanted to hear her laugh. I wanted to laugh with her.

But more than anything, I wanted to free her. I wanted to find the key to her cage and set her free, watching her take flight into the refuge of the clouds where she belonged. Yes, happiness would've been beautiful on her, and I knew it.

But she'd cast me aside again. She'd begged me to go, and while I'd wanted to stay and tell her never to use those sickening blades again, I saw the bruised look in her eyes and knew it wasn't my place to ask that of her.

But leaving her there like that, alone with her blades, felt like she had plunged them into me. I just wanted her to love herself, to never feel the need to make herself bleed again.

But acts of depression are an addiction just like any drug. And I couldn't just tell her not to cut, simply cutting off her morphine use. All I could do was stay with her and wait, wait for her to loose that need, wait for her to pull her blades out one day and throw them deep into the river beside us. I couldn't ask that of her. But that didn't mean I couldn't wait for her to ask that of herself.

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"What's gotten into you, boy? You hiding something?"

I looked up from the breakfast I'd been devouring with a start. "No, sir." I refrained from saying anything else; he would've just used it against me.

My father's eyes caught mine and didn't let go. "You've been going out a lot lately. You'd better not be doing drugs." He took his dark eyes off me and I released a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. "Although I can't say I'd be surprised. Something's got to be wrong with you."

I looked over at my mother. She was like an apparition: she never spoke; it was as if she wanted to be invisible. She was a watcher of things, a passive nonparticipant. She had experienced everything there was to experience, the majority of it secondhand. I hadn't heard very much about my mother's childhood, but it seemed as if she'd always been passive. I mean, she must've. She'd married my dad, not exactly ignorant to his habits, his history. She had asked for children, but he'd said no. My existence was because she'd deliberately not taken her birth control pills.

However, I didn't think my dad hated me. He just didn't have enough love inside of him to allow it to escape or even radiate; it sat in the depths of a part of him he didn't want to possess, and so no one ever saw it.

I didn't realize I'd been staring at my mother until she gave me a small, wordless smile. My dad looked from my mother to me but surprisingly didn't address my gaze. "Not talking back anymore, eh?"

I stared at the bowl of cereal before me. I couldn't bear looking into his eyes and noting their deep, dark malice. "Why would I?"

"Because you enjoy rebellion, that's why," he responded with a sneer. I failed to understand how so much hate could've built up inside one human being. I'd never heard anything about his past as he would never open up so vulnerably, so I was left in the dark.