Burning Moon (Wattpad Version)

Chapter 15

Remember all those years ago when Tom Hanks won the Oscar for Forrest Gump and for the next while every Tom, Dick, Harry, Sally, Bob’s cousin’s uncle’s tree squirrel’s monkey walked around saying…

 “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.”

Well, that’s ridiculous! Of course you know what you're gonna get, just read the bloody box. Turn it over and look at the little pictures of the chocolates and read the descriptions below them. I’m not sure where Forrest was buying his boxes, but really, it’s not that hard.  

But tonight, I finally got it. Because the chocolate I was currently unwrapping, and was about to take a bite out of, wasn’t on the box. It wasn’t on any box, anywhere. In fact, it’s a totally new flavour that hasn’t even been invented yet and will only exist in the future when we taste with our fingertips. 

Because I would never -- in a million years -- have guessed that my life was ‘gonna get’ this. 

The party preparations were in full swing. More and more people were arriving and the music was getting louder and louder. The water thrashed with partygoers; swimming, floating, splashing and jumping. Dusk was creeping up and the fairy lights in the trees had been turned on. They scattered rainbow beads of colour across the white sands and cliff faces. The tiny dots of colour bounced across the surface of the reflective water and it looked like everything had been coated in millions of brightly coloured M&Ms. 

But I still hadn’t had my alone time with Damien because he seemed to know everyone here. We spent the whole afternoon moving from person to person; "Hello, How are you, great, awesome, long time, glad to see you, this is Lilly" etc. etc. A couple of people recognised me thanks to my new-found internet fame, and they’d all thought it as just about the coolest thing they’d ever seen. Suddenly, I was the ‘cool chick’, the celebrity. Some guy even asked me to ‘autograph’ his chest and a couple of people wanted to take photos with me. These people were so accepting; I thought about what Michael would say if he saw the picture, it would not be complimentary, and I'm sure he would have been mortified to be associated with me. Was my relationship really as good as I thought it was? In the light of all this acceptance, from Damien as well, my relationship started to look pretty conditional. 

We went around like this for hours, and I was thrilled to see my strip-club-buddies Mark and Bruno there. We got so wrapped up in 'girl-talk' that when I looked up again, Damien was gone. He was nowhere to be found. Nowhere. So I wondered around aimlessly, drank two tall purple drinks and then went to the toilet. The bathroom was a rather jungle-ish affair; it was a temporary structure comprising of reed walls built around a large palm tree. I wondered how all this stuff had arrived here. There were only two possibilities; either the guy who ran this was very rich and everything had been airlifted in, or this party was that mysterious and strange that everything had been beamed here through a trans-dimensional portal. Either way, it was pretty spectacular and I was in absolute awe of it all. One couldn’t help but get caught up in the energy and exhilaration of the night.

You really felt like you were a part of something. Something unique. A secret underworld that was completely separate from everything else. Here people were happy, they were free, made their own rules and marched to the beat of their own drums -- literally -- a drumming circle had been formed out on the beach. What is it with hippies and drums? I looked around at the people and was struck by how diverse they were; from your arty, poetry-reading, shell-earing-wearing types to your hipster Ken and Barbies, chuck in a few Rastafarians, some really cute Asian schoolgirls with pink hair, add a few Emos for good measure and then the most bizarre of all, a few people who looked like Moms and Dads.