Ink Flowers

For him

A/N: one sided one sided one sided
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Writing came naturally for Joe. It was the way the ink flooded through his fingers and into blank canvases that varied from notebooks to toilet paper and napkins. Or maybe it was Joe's unique inability to express his opinion and feelings in any situation ever that made his poems so heart wrenching, maybe it was all his pent up emotions that seemed to explode in waves of words and rhymes, or maybe it was nothing at all, maybe he wasn't even good, maybe he just wanted to succeed at something so bad he pretended he was good. Maybe he wanted people to recognize him from something that he forced himself to write until his fingers shook and the keyboard wouldn't work. Maybe.

Joe looked up.

Blue met fucking blue, and his heart jumped.

Caspar was looking at him, his eyes soft and his shirt lighter than last week's purple. They locked eyes, aware that no one would notice, realizing that in that moment, no one could see them. No one but each other.

Joe blinked once, twice, thrice, he blinked many times throughout the class, and still, Caspar wouldn't look away.

He looked fascinated, as if he had never truly seen Joe before, as if he was just now meeting him.

Joe waited silently as Caspar counted the colors in his eyes and the amount of piercings on his face. And Caspar continued, admiring the artwork that covered his skin, and the clothes that held chains and spikes that could very well hurt Caspar.

Someone gasped, and Joe broke the weird  eye contact to see who had gasped.

His heart slowed down when he realized it had been just Hannah, she had probably seen something behind Joe that had scared her.

She looked at him and smiled, and Joe smiled back, regretting his actions of the former week.

And then she side glanced at Caspar, and back at Joe, and then at her notebook, where she pretended to write.

Talking about writing, Joe hadn't finished his poem. It was dark and sad, but Joe read what he had so far:

It's the red
That flashes
Throughout the night
And the blue that
Never seems to walk
Away from my eyes.
It's also the grey
That covers your
Passionate soul
And turns it into
An endless void

He tapped his black pen against his pierced lip, trying to figure out what was missing in his poem. It needed more, more of him, of what he had done, to the world and himself, what they had done, to the world and him as well. It needed life, something that would make people remember it.

He ignored Caspar's curious stare as he wrote down the next  and final part of his half assed, pitiful and mediocre poem:

But maybe
It can't be constructed
Designed and deciphered
In matters of colors,
And what they make me feel.
So maybe I should just,
Give up on trying to
Make anyone understand
Why the world is sometimes
So bright it burns
So colorful I feel blind
So hot I cannot breathe,
Because it seems
No one will ever understand
The reasoning behind
My brush of steel
And the colors it
Leaves on my skin

Joe sighed, this was somehow better than the last one.

The bell rang, and Jim invited Joe to have dinner after school, after assuring him Tanya wouldn't be there.

It wasn't that Joe disliked Jim's girlfriend, it was that Joe was sick of being a third wheel. He had enough of that already, that with him being zalfies third well 24/7.