Midnight Kisses| ✓

Chapter 3

So how many of you are caffeine addicts? 😋 Dont forget to vote and comment✌

When I come back from school, mom gives me an extra big cup of soy latte. Yup caffeine addict, guilty as charged. That is my reward for making it through a weekday without having a breakdown.

I watch reruns of Glee and Pretty Little Liars till mom comes back from her shower. There's a loud honk and I run to the window overlooking the street. It's just who I am expecting. Novahk McAllister pulls himself up on the iron wrought gate of his house and makes his way to a shiny bling bling. He always does it. He never opens the door, simply climbs over it. And I say this not as a regular stalker but as a depressed girl who is bored while the whole scene of teenage and unfounded adventures lives right next door.

Caleb Walden is driving it and music blasts through the Porsche pretty loud.

A lady opens the McAllister's gate. She's really short with dark hair that comes up to her waist. She shouts, "Drive safe kids." When she turns around I get a look at her. She's really pale and looks as frail as a porcelain doll, as if she may break any minute.

"Don't worry Mrs. McAllister he's safe with me. I am not going to let him die that easily," Caleb replies waving his hands like crazy. "At least not yet." Novahk punches him slightly on the shoulder and the two of them vroom away at a blink-and-miss speed.

Normal. I take a mental note of it. Hanging out with your friends. Normal. Having no friends. Abnormal. Now my days are spent trying to grasp the concept of normal and its obscurity without actually understanding it, just simply filing away categories. Normal and abnormal. Dos and donts.

When mom comes back, she switches it back to an Indian serial. We have pretty limited access and she takes in whatever she gets. And while she watches a story of what I can tell is of two sisters fighting over a boy(I can't figure it out really since I don't understand the language).

Mom tried, she really did but Bengali is just not for me. I know a few things of course, the basics, Bhalo acho? Are you well?

Amar naam Krishna. My name is Krishna. Even how I pronounce my name is supposed to be different in Bengali

Mom doesn't even bother to bring me up-to-date to what's happening. A girl cries, face down on her bed while the other girl cries in another room in her bed. Moral of the story: Love sucks.

I stuff down into my popcorn and hold a tissue to mom when she starts sniffling. She always starts sniffling when she watches this serial (which is why I have like ten packets of Kleenex in my room). This makes no sense to me. We all have so many problems in our own life, why do we need some piece of fiction to make us even more sad?

It's pretty pointless for us to invest our real feelings for characters that aren't even real, who only exist in the scripts of the writers who are probably having a good laugh right now at our expense.

Life is really hard to make sense of.

Novahk doesn't come around at night. Not like I am expecting him to come back of course. I have no delusions of romantic notions.

But the thing is yesterday when he was at my window, I came closer to the feeling normal than I had in ages. Normal and unexpected, which is what I realize is what I need in my life right now. Not Netflix. Okay maybe Netflix since this is what keeps me alive and sane when the demons start showing up. Which they already are, the long shadows forming in the corners of the room.

I see in movies people always crying in some dark corner of the room. This I can relate to. The demons pull you in, attracted by the sadness emanating from your body like magnet. Ferromagnet actually, since the feeling doesn't go away even when you are numb inside. It's not an external field, it's internal. It never goes away. Your dipoles are already aligned to tip off the deep end any second.