Staccato

Seven Years

~*~

New York

October 25, 2012.

Seven years.

It's been seven years since me and Efrim talked after that.

Seven years' cycle of weathers - rushing winds and crashing rains and baking heat and biting frost - have weathered our mansion of a house like a castle that has grown more beautiful with age, the changes imperceptible, yet existent. The oak trees growing clustered and sprawled in the rambling grounds behind our estate have grown a little more entangled and deep, the woods have gained more girth, seven more concentric xylem rings might have been added inside them...

And as for us, we have grown. A little older, a little wiser. Leon and Louie have passed out of their high schools, and Lilly too. My twin brothers have grown into fine-boned, lanky guys, and are pursuing professional dance in the Juilliard. My eldest sister Lilly has grown into an elegant young woman, cleared her LSAT exam, and is doing law in Cornell.

While us remaining three kids are still in Trinity; Les is her vivacious, haughty self, with her bouncy curls and flouncy walk, is in eighth grade.

As for me and Laurie, we are in the first year of our middle school. In sixth grade.

Seven years have made me and Efrim drift away into divergent paths, despite being in the same school, and despite seeing each other every day.

Efrim's father, and more recently, a key share holder in my dad's business, Brian Tyler, had made sure of that.

That me and Efrim stayed away from each other.

Because seven years ago, after the snotty tears I shed into my mom's shoulder, my little body shaking in her arms, I slept fitfully, welcomed the next day with a crushed heart and sore, gritty eyes, and went to school to see Efrim's father himself, in flesh and blood, standing just outside the door, dressed sharply in a suit, talking grimly to our teacher, and from where I sat, I couldn't hear him, I could only see his thin lips move.

It isn't allowed, a parent talking to a teacher during school hours, but Brian Tyler has his ways. He is the single biggest fund provider to Trinity, there is a math lab named after him on the third floor, and there he stood that day, engaged in seriously delivering a set of instructions to our meekly nodding teacher - and a few moments later I saw Efrim ushered in by his nanny. He had his eyes lowered, his face set cold and dead, like stone...

And I sat watching, tiny nails digging red moons into the soft flesh of my palms, heart thumping frightfully and fitfully.

I was frightened, for I didn't know what was going on. Why was Efrim's father here? And why is he talking to our teacher so seriously? Is it something that I did? Shouldn't I have invited Efrim over to my house? Shouldn't I have cried so hard and made my mother cry as well? Shouldn't she have called Efrim's mom on the phone? Was what we did somehow a huge mistake?

I didn't know the answers to these questions back then; I could only sit with a heavy, shivering heart.

And even I wasn't as naive, even back then - when the teacher always made us sit far away from each other, when she made sure we never met, like the poles of the Earth, or the day and the night - to figure out that what Efrim's dad must have told our teacher that day was to never let us talk to each other.

And every teacher who followed her, every teacher of every grade, made sure of the same thing.

But I myself wouldn't have anyway been able to bring myself to make an effort to forge a connection with him, because like a creature frightened by the fire, I was left shaken. A twinge, an ache, that was all too bitter and unpleasant to bear at such a young age, a feeling that my young age achingly rejected.

So we never talked, just as his father wished, and I made other friends - Alex Beckham, Quinn Forstner, and Jake Hummel, whose fathers are all board members of our company. And Joshua Kwon, who isn't a family friend, but a nerdy, goofy best friend me and Laurie made at school nonetheless.

While he...

He remained solitary, like a lone wolf.

I think that's what he likes.

To be alone.

Because when I look at him in our classes - steal glances, as I sit a few benches behind him, because that glacial, stone cold profile is fascinating to look at, I see him writing, or sit listlessly staring at the teacher. Those dreamy eyes are deceptive, because they are razor sharp, and perceptive -

For they have caught me looking at him, often.

It always makes my insides jolt. It's when he turns his neck just a little - he has a thing of touching his neck with a hand, and he cranes his head slightly to the left - he does it when he is bored of a lecture, or when he gets annoyed.

You can barely see any emotion on his face, though; it's a perfect blank mask.

But those dreamy ambers, when they catch mine, are roused just a little.

That's when my heart skips in sheer fright, and I think he can sense the erratic knocks in me, as effortlessly as he senses the sights and sounds around him.

He turns away though without any acknowledgement or hint that he registered it. And I am always left thinking whether these thoughts in me regarding him are only phantoms of my imagination.

I retreat to the back of our estate sometimes, to the woods, to think and just be alone and away from everyone.

Or maybe, I want to know what solitariness feels like.

I feel it sometimes. It's different from loneliness.

While loneliness is weak and sickly, solitariness is powerful and poised. Cold and calculating.

And when I just lie there on the grass, staring up at the sky, still aching for a companion to share my ideas, my soul with - all my mirror world stories, my wonders and my fantasies - from the depths of my heart, from the depths of the long buried neural connections in my brain, like a spirit resurrecting, my child-voice still echoes within me, and I still ache for Efrim with that same heartbreaking force with which I wept for him seven years ago, despite these years' worth of total, solid silence between us.

When the skies darken, and rumbling plumes of pewter grey clouds gather, there's a scent in the air, raw and feral. It's stirring and powerful, the abrupt change in the air before a storm. You know it's going to be brutal, just by the menacing darkness around you, by the sharpness of the Earth's scent around you.

When I look at Efrim, and when his dreamy ambers catch mine before they turn away unfeelingly, that's what I feel.

His silence, though it pulls and tugs at my heart achingly, though the mystery of which is something pure and glacial, is somehow shot with forewarning.

I think just at the edges of it sits a certain insanity.

And though it has always scared me, warned me to stay away as far as possible, all these years, I have silently nurtured a longing, counterintuitive love for it.

~*~