Soul Harbour

0.17|when hearing some philosophical shit|

Song: Irresistible by Fall Out Boy up there.

0.17|from Sabah's tape-recorder: when hearing some philosophical shit|

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of Auburn and Anthony. They were young, happy and busy and I wondered if I had scared them with the waves of long-forgotten yesterdays that had slipped into today. Would they come back? Could we be the same again? Would they just leave like so many people had left me after David and I had got separated?

Suddenly, because I never realized when I had started, I found myself humming to an old, old tune. It brought a smile to my face and behind my closed eyes I could feel myself being transported to a memory, a happy memory. After the music, the first thing I remembered was the breeze on my face and the scent of ripe tomatoes. Somebody was dancing. I was dancing with David, our laughs ringing-

I opened my eyes and breathed deeply trying to clear my head, stop the music, forget the tune. Happy memories can get corrupted too, you know. People can kill your happy memories and with them, kill you. This is the violence that hurts the most and yet there is no justice system for it.

I shifted in bed and thought, "I wouldn't care if they left forever." Just like I had tried to convince myself that I never cared. It was better like this. Like this you could teach yourself to smile and lock away the tears somewhere deep inside your mind, a place which you wouldn't even know existed.

Anyway, I wouldn't know until a week later so what was to come of thinking it? Fridays and absences or presences could wait.

I was proven wrong the next day itself.

Around forty minutes past three, when the side-street becomes quieter, the air lazier and myself drowsier, the wind chimes tinkled. I looked up, a groan on my lips at being dragged from the state of near-sleep I had been in.

"Anthony?"

He smiled at me cheerfully, "Guten Nachmittag."

I began to laugh. What was Anthony doing here, in the afternoon, hair wet, wearing ridiculous red pants and was that German he was speaking?

"What?" he looked self-conscious now.

"You're speaking German to a Spanish woman?" I replied. "No wonder you don't have a girlfriend yet!"

"Oh," he realized. "Did I? I didn't even think it was German when I spoke." He set his sports bag (which I noticed had the Real Madrid emblem) in a corner. "I think when I think and talk freely without thinking beforehand, I talk in German without even noticing. Its...natural?"

"Hmm," I waited for him to continue, even more amused by his philosophical mood.

"And when I notice that I'm talking, when I think that I have to speak this-and-that to so-and-so, I speak in English because that's the other language in which I can still express myself. Now, Espanyol...its very tough for me because I have never been the studious type. The manager has appointed an Espanyol teacher but I hardly ever go to the classes so I know very little of the language and the boys teach me stuff like names of food, football stuff and abuses so..."

"So, you think that to speak freely you will have to speak in German, I in Spanish and Auburn in English?" I asked, trying to draw him into an argument.

He grinned, "No, I mean that in our native languages we may find it easier to express ourselves. Sometimes, I feel that to speak freely you might have to abandon language totally because it so complex and complicated and however much you try there will be a gap between language and meaning. Maybe actions would speak clearer than words. But to draw out something that's close to making sense from all the actual anarchy of words is the beauty of language."

I stared at him for a full minute and he was oblivious to my stare. You would like him, Sabah. He's the kind of person people should write stories about but they end up never writing about. That day he made absolutely no sense to me but what I understood was that beneath his shyness and sweetness lay a wonderful mind. One should never underestimate genuinely nice people (we wrongly call them simple and innocent to the point of immaturity) because more often than not, they are the ones with the most complex minds and that is the beauty of human minds.

He finally realized that I had been staring at him, open-mouthed. "So what I meant to say was Buena tarde! Is that right now?" he asked expectantly.

I looked at him, his damp hair and his eyes, understanding that he must have come here straight from practice and I smiled, "Auburn was right about you, you know."

Immediately he blushed to the colour of a tomato. "She talks about me?" he blurted, shocked.

"Of course, idiot," I laughed. I waited for him to ask me to tell him. I wasn't going to go easy on him just because he was a sweet albeit slightly eccentric genius kid.

He looked away, out of the glass windows, waiting. Finally he asked, a daring happiness in his voice, "What about me?"

"Your eyes," I replied. "They're neither the colour of copper sulphate nor Prussian blue but somewhere in between."

"Oh," he said simply and then quickly took out his phone to peer at his eyes. He frowned, "They're like a dirty sort of blue, right?"

[hey, baes, how are you all doing?

i love writing this story seriously its my little baby. i wrote this chapter right now and i feel so happy with it. anthony is such a cutie-pie and he can even philosophize. what more can one want? ahhhh auburn should have been there to see this side of him :')

vote+comment and munch these *hands virtual lays chips* :P

ilyall so much]