vehemence ☾ camren

one.

Among Camila's cluttered head, somewhere, were thoughts of her mother. Her mother had always been good, at least she thought so, but she didn't have a lot to compare it to, for she had only been with one mother her entire life. She imagined there were a few things she could've dealt with differently, but, putting everything into perspective, for being a single mom of three, she did a pretty good job. She always had milk in her fridge and a coat to wear in the winter, and those were the basics of being a parent, right?

    The bitter taste of coffee lingered on her tongue and thoughts of home plagued her brain as everything around her passed by. The trees outside the window raced with the fast moving train, and lost. She felt sort of sorry for the trees, who were clearly moving as fast as they could, but just weren't fast enough to keep up. They kept trying though, all of them. She thought maybe that was what it felt like to be dumb, trying to keep up with a smart person. This was not something she had ever had to do. Camila was blessed with the ability to easily understand complex ideas since she was small. She clearly remembered being six (maybe seven, but the exact age wasn't the important part here) and trying to discuss why people had to take baths with a few of her friends.

"I don't know, because my mom makes me." Her friend, which she had now forgotten the name of, muttered. She thought that was the first time which she really became aware of her consciousness, compared to other people her age.

As the conversation, if you can even call it one at that age, continued, Camila kept trying to question why people needed to be clean.

"Why does it matter? Is it because we need to LOOK clean or because we need to BE clean?" The more she talked, the less interested her friends became. She eventually stopped and moved on, but later that night she thought for a really long time about it. Not about the topic of the conversation, but the conversation itself. She questioned her friend's disinterest, and eventually concluded they just didn't care. She decided that night that this was not the way she wanted to live her life, leaving everything to chance, she wanted to question everything.

Thinking about it now, she wasn't sure how far that had gotten her. But sitting around waiting to be told what to do didn't seem very productive, she was always the one to get up and figure out what to do. However, tonight was different.

The train jolted her body around more than she thought to be normal as she waited to see her station appear on the overhead screen. People around her spoke in hushed tones of how crowded Macy's was this time of year and how to better discipline their disobedient children. Camila became more and more aware of one specific conversation next to her. Two women, mid-forties, wearing pea coats and scarves whispered about a local tragedy while two children slept on their laps.

"They said it was a suicide. Awful, just awful."

"He was so young, and what for?"

"I heard from Nancy that his father was abusive, you know, hitting the mother and that sort of thing. I always thought something was wrong with those people, you know. I always said it, ask anyone."

Camila shook her head and tuned out the conversation. If anyone ever spoke of her like that after she had died, she thought, she would come back from the dead and show them a thing or two. Suicide wasn't a guessing game. She could tell the women got some type of sick joy out of trying to figure out why someone would kill themselves. The one women, in particular, felt pride in being able to spot something wrong with a family, however, Camila gathered, she never did anything to stop it.

Her station appeared on the screen and the conductor's voice rung out through the train, "Last stop," pulling her out of her thoughts. She got up and shoved her hands in her pockets, exiting the train, trying to get as far away from those women as possible.