Anthological

Smoke

Words: 567

6. If your life was a tapestry, it would be made of cigarette smoke and dead dreams.

        The gears of fate start moving at a friendly hello and your soul starts dying with a harsh goodbye. You were walking into school and this stranger says one timid but not unfriendly hello and under the harsh white light of the hallway and your tired mind their eyes look electric blue. They explained themselves with a i'm a new student and a can you tell me where the English classroom is and you thought nothing of it then but now you can just picture the three fates laughing over their loom while they add a new thread to the fabric of your life.

             You start hanging around this person, because you're not a social outcast and you have friends but you can always have more of them, right? And they're another person to sit next to at lunch and pass notes to and talk trash with, and it isn't immediately awful so you continue delving deeper. You get an easy sense of trust with this person and you try so hard not to overshare or divulge any secrets but it's hard and by month six they know almost everything about you.

              But at least it's mutual, and you learn small and not so small details about them that managed to culminate into a swirling portrait of colours and lightning. When I  look at you, you had confessed, I see electric blue. Really?  they had said back. When I see you, it's bright and shocking pink. And looking back on it now, if both of you were a tapestry they would be blue and rainstorms and a rising hope, and you would be cigarette smoke and dead dreams. And bright, shocking pink.

                A year goes by and it's like something's changed. Just little pinpricks of things in your ribcage that feels a lot like a crush and you look at them and you find you can't live without them anymore. But god, do you try. You try to spend less time with them, try to stay away from them, try to cut off all contact, but electric blue and shocking pink collide in your minds eye and it's beautiful and you can't help but think that maybe if the two of you collide, it'll be beautiful too. You can hope, at least.

               Hope turns you insane and it's the day before summer vacation starts and your eyes meet theirs under the harsh white light in the hallways, and you mumble something, confessing your crush and maybe love and your hopes of blue and pink forming purple, and their eyes meet yours. They look shocked and scared and sad and pitying and you can just feel your hope sinking in your stomach and you already know what the answer is.

            I don't swing that way, they said. I'm sorry. And you say it's okay with a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes and a clog in your veins and a tear in your heart. It's not your fault. And it isn't. You can feel your soul dissipate and the weight on your back has lessened, but the weight on your ribcages has not.

You stare at them and they stare at you, and when they say goodbye you just walk away, because that's all you've learned to do.