traces of stardust

the olive green constellation [part I]

song that's stuck in my head
shadows // sabrina carpenter

I'm worried about the boy in the olive green sweater.

Over the past three months, everything once seeming to be going in his favor has fallen apart at the seams. For one, the confidence he held has been snatched away from underneath him and gradually replaced with jumpiness at the slightest of noises as if someone's car alarm was going off in an infinite loop intended to fill his ears forever. The once form fitting sweater he only wore every now and again during the bite of the mid December cold has become a staple that hangs loose on his now fragile appearing frame despite how spring has fully come to grace our small town in all its glory. His friends shunned him away from their shared eating spot the day school came back in session after the holidays; I couldn't hear the entire heated spill from the circle's leader but from what pieces I managed to pick up, she wasn't going to risk him tarnishing their image so he had to be cut out before any significant damage could be done to them all.

After multiple tries at searching for him since he was sent away from his former friend group in hopes I could keep him company (and failing due to a shortage of time), I finally reached the treasure chest of answers by accident funnily enough. Being the ever so forgetful person, I still had a novel from the school's library in my possession exactly two weeks past its due date (I guess the excitement from all that time ago over spring break soon approaching made the thought of a library book go on the back burner in terms of priorities) so in an effort to turn the overdue book in before the thought slipped my mind again, I took the opportunity to run through there while I was on my way to the cafeteria. As I entered the small space, the first sight my eyes focused on was the olive green tone that had yet to fade from my memory.

Despite the bubbling uncertainty over how he'd react to me suddenly reaching out, the way his fingers uncurled themselves from holding the edges of the staple piece's sleeves as if he found someone he could finally breathe around by the time lunch was nearly over made me forget all about the past nerves; if I handled this the right way, just maybe he'd be capable of fully healing from what has been done in his attempts to cope.

We grew to acknowledge each other outside of that safe space in the matter of a few days. The best step of initial progress had been around a week after I found him during lunch in the library. During one of Mr. Finch's history lectures that hardly anyone was listening to, I had snapped him out of the supposedly permanent tired daze (that somehow made his skin grow paler as the minutes ticked by all while the dark circles underneath his eyes slowly started to appear like smears of black chalk) momentarily by passing him a folded sheet of paper just before the bell rang that I had neatly written my phone number and a message stating that I would be there to listen if he ever wanted to talk outside of school on. While I couldn't see the proper reaction he had by the swirls of ink on the page, merely witnessing his worn down barrier fall for a moment at receiving something in kindness was enough to make my heart swell.

Something I never would've thought could come from him was waves of intense sadness. I don't mean that he wasn't allowed to feel that way; it's a part of the emotional spectrum and I'm aware that every person will go across that by its very corners in their lifetime, rather how he went about getting these flood worthy feelings out of the constant turning his brain was putting them through to gain a clean slate.

The outburst began with a text he sent in the early hours of the last Sunday of April. Luckily I'm a relatively light sleeper so when my phone went off the noise didn't last long enough to risk anyone else's rest getting disturbed, but the message I read nearly made that not matter because my initial reaction had been a noticeable gasp because this surely wasn't coming from the same boy I'd grown acquainted with recently. The boy in the olive green sweater wasn't the type of person to be somehow naturally poetic through their sorrow, right?