the art of chasing the stars

(chapter 12)

willow

Willow woke up to the sound of knocking on her door. She groggily walked over to her bedroom door and opened it, yawning. Her squinted eyes opened slightly, and a hand grabbed her, pulling her outside. She yelped and saw that it was Jesse.

"Wait, Jesse? What are you doing at my house on a Saturday morning?"

"We're going for a walk," Jesse flashed one of his rare grins.

"Grab your paintings," he told Willow.

"Why?"

"Just do it."

Willow walked back into her room and grabbed all of them except one.

Who knows what he wants to do with them, she thought to herself. Might as well keep one.

Jesse grabbed her arm when she walked out of her room and galloped down the stairs. He ran out the door and hopped onto his bike. Literal bike.

"Hey, um, I thought you rode a motorcycle," Willow said.

He smirked, "I actually like my bike a lot more. The thing is, no one talks to the quiet guy with a motorcycle, but everyone beats up the quiet guy on his little bike."

She smiled, hopping onto his handle bars. "It's like a metaphor. You make people think you are the motorcycle, but you're actually just a red little bike."

"I would say I'm actually a little blue bike, thank you very much," Jesse grinned as he started peddling off.

"Where are we going?" Willow shouted against the wind. No response. He pulled up to a park. The park had two pairs of swings and a playground. No one was there. One could also spot the river peeking through the trees.

"Follow me," he said in a hush.

She followed him past the abandoned swings and into the woods. She stared at the river as they walked along it. She stopped in her tracks, intrigued by the movement of it. It was much like the water she would stare at on the bridge. It moved back and forth. Back and forth. Like a hypnotic pendulum.

"You okay?" Jesse's voice asked her, taking her out of her trance.

"Yeah..."

"You know that this river backs up to the cemetery?"

"Actually no, I didn't know that," She replied.

"I come here often to get a breath of fresh air after visiting the cemetery."

"So, you were that guy at the cemetery that one time, right?"

"Yeah," He replied, some sort of regret sinking into his voice, as if his favorite spot had just been figured out.

Willow laughed. "That one day I thought you were the most poetic person alive. Remember what you said to me that day?"

"I said that I thought it was disrespectful only to pay my respects to my loved ones and no one else's."

She looked up, and he was holding her paintings. He set them down on the ground in a pile.

He put his hand inside his pocket and took out a Zipo Lighter and handed it to her.

"You have to be the one to do this."

She fell silent, now knowing why he was doing this. She took the lighter into her palm.

Opening it up and rolling her thumb down the edged spine, she lit it up, bended down to her pieces of art-her work that she spent hours on-her every thought and feeling from the past year-her life....

She set it aflame and just stood there watching the flames engulf her past.

You are not your past. Her mind chanted. You are not your mistakes. Your failures. Your condition or illness.

"I had a sister," Jesse said flatly as he was watching the ashes glow.

Willow looked up at him, "Had?"

"Yeah, she died two days after she was born. I was five."

"Oh... that's awful..."

He just nodded silently, "And then, when I was fifteen, my mom died."

Willow shifted, still uncomfortable with speaking out loud about death, "If you don't mind me asking, how?"

"She went to work one day... and never made it back... not much else left to say," he spoke softly. His gaze was fixed on the crackling flames. "And after that, my dad became... distant, and my brother, Nick? Yeah, he didn't stay long after our house started falling apart. As soon as his 18th birthday came, he left without a word to anyone, leaving me to take care of my invalid father and the rest of the house."

Nick... why did that name sound so familiar?

Willow was shocked. This boy who was standing right beside her-he had been through a traumatic experience, and yet, he still went to school and still supported his family by working at that stupid coffee shop down the street.

Suddenly, Willow made a connection. The name: Nick. It was from that journal. The journal. The author. Was it...

"Wait... are you Hamlet?"

"Who?"

<><><>

Willow sat across from Jesse at the cemetery. She was holding a journal in her hands. The journal. His journal.

She explained to him that she found it on a picnic table one day after lunch. When she couldn't find the author around, she took it home and read it.

She named this unknown author Hamlet. She went on to explain that Hamlet, the Shakespearean character, had been through so much death, each of his loved ones stricken by the inevitable fate of mortality.

Hamlet was Jesse.

That was his journal.

She thought about it. This author was just limited to a piece of paper before this moment. He was now sitting a mere few inches away from her, and he was living and breathing. No longer just a page of paper. It was like having the perfect guy from your favorite book now standing in front of you in the flesh. It was just odd and eerie.

"And I know that this is a bit weird and all, but you see as I kept reading Haml- I mean your entries, I couldn't help but feel sympathy. I know what it's like to lose someone. I know it's completely different losing your mom than it is losing your dad, but I think that we can help each other out."