Roots ; s.mendes

F A S C I N A T E

'You fascinate me.' I glanced momentarily at the mystery who lay beside me, her wild brown curls surrounding her fragile head which lay against the overgrown grass. She pushed her middle and index fingers, which contained the small remains of a cigarette, to her chapped lips and inhaled the poison which she willingly allowed to seep into her lungs.

Instead of replying to her random statement, I stayed silent. I found by staying silent piper would always continue what she was saying, like her mind wouldn't correctly express her thoughts if you interrupted her. I waited for her to follow up the statement with something, anything. She didn't.

Instead she pushed the same cigarette to her same chapped lips and blew the air into my face, striking my nostrils with the repulsive stench.

Her intriguing green eyes stared up at the empty sky with nothing but an empty look as she rested her fingers against her empty chest near her empty stomach which growled quietly.

"You should eat." The statement was abrupt and pointless, similar to the one she made previously. I earned no reply, it was no surprise, Piper only spoke when she wanted to. She only did anything when she wanted to.

I gazed at my crossed legs which sat beneath me, Lodging a finger into the folded edge of my sock and pulling at it, my fingernail catching a loose thread and pulling it out. My pants were loose at the ends, a black pair of jeans which once were my brothers. I caressed them gently as though they were a prized possession when really they were simply a hand me down that had been tossed at me by a drunken mother last Thursday evening.

Piper must have observed me fiddling with the leg of my pants because she complimented them.

"Nice pants." I wasn't sure if it was sincere or sarcastic, she was hard to interpret. In my confusion I simply nodded my head and sighed. I wasn't sure of the time but had assumed it was around eleven thirty due to the black sky and lack of screaming from the nearby houses. Due to the poor area me and piper lived in, screaming and arguments usually would be heard until around eleven and I was sure it had been silent for at least half an hour.

"Why do you do that?" I asked, a little angered as I ripped the cigarette from her small chewed up fingers and tossed it to the ground beside her. Her jaw clenched and she jerked up, sitting up right and squashing her eyebrows together in anger.

"What's your problem, kiddo?" The old nickname rang thousands of nostalgic bells, each connected to a memory between us, the most prominent one was where the nickname had originated: A a dried up garden and tufts of grass wedged into my hands, I shared with her the embarrassment I'd experienced from the large cut on my face which had now become a scar. 

"Why do you do that?" Her frown surprisingly subsided into a crooked smile, the crooked smile that was so familiar to me yet so rare. I hadn't seen that crooked smile for what seemed like forever.

"I smoke to speed up the whole dying process." She tilted her head and looked me straight in the eyes as though she was watching through my eyes and at my thoughts.

"That's not what I meant." I mumbled, observing the small lump in the ground we were sat on, my legs had now moved from beneath me  to in front of me, curled into my chest, my chin resting against my knees.

I looked at the rows of houses that were falling apart, each of them full of fucked up families and fucked up people. I looked at one where the door was bashed in, another with the windows boarded up. It wasn't perfect, it was far from it, but I labelled it home and moved on. 

Piper sat down again, poking my knees with her thin fingers. She wanted me to put them down. So I did, I lay my legs down straight against the grass and she placed her small head against my knees. She faced upwards to the sky, arching her back as she reached into her pocket before pulling out a small square Polaroid.

She tossed her hand up and passed it to me in silence. I took it in my index finger and middle, glancing at the photograph.

It was photo of me and her, my arms around her waist as she looked at me, squinting and laughing with her tongue falling out of her mouth, I pulled a stupid face for the photograph and laughed about it later, I looked at her old blonde hair and how happy she looked. I'd completely forgotten it existed before she randomly handed it to me on that strange night.

"You carry this around with you?" The question stupid and pointless. She didn't reply, of course she didn't. Instead she lit another cigarette and blew its remnants into the sky as it dispersed amongst the stars.

She squinted her eyes a little, words playing on her tongue that weren't prepared enough to speak.

"Sometimes I don't even want to open my eyes. I wake up and I'm so afraid that I physically can't move. You know that feeling that you get when something is so intense and so stressful and happens so fast that you don't properly understand what's happening. It's like you just need one second, one minuscule fraction of a moment to just breathe, to just understand what's happening- in fact you don't even have to understand it, you just need a moment to inhale everything and then you can carry on and you can breathe and even though it's stressful and it's intense you've had your second and now you can make some sort of an attempt to carry on."

She didn't open her eyes, just left the cigarette hanging out of her chapped lips, her curls spread out on my black pants- two things I so strongly loved, the hand-me-down pants that were once worn by my brother and my best friend.

"I just need a moment, some kind of moment, some minuscule fraction of a second so i can breathe. Even just a little breath." She took the worn out cigarette from her worn out lips and tossed it onto the worn out grass, its burnt out corpses laying beside the one i had previously tossed. She took her bony, nail-bitten fingers, and clasped my hand with her own, bringing it on top of her chest. A chest I was so sure was empty, i was so sure her heart was malfunctioned and that it did not beat.

Yet in that moment my fingers lay atop of such an empty chest, I felt the strongest pulse in the world.

"You feel that?" She didn't open her eyes, just breathed in the darkness she once was afraid of as a child. She held a hand which she had never dare touch before.

She so obliviously cradled a heart which was held together by flimsy string and dried up glue and as though her bony fingers were needle and thread, she brought my heart together again.

"I feel it." My voice fell to a whisper, my hands resting against her chest as I looked out at the rows of houses and spotted my own, all the lights out except for the top bedroom, my mothers. My eyes trailed from the lit up window and to the roof where i found the silhouette of my younger sister, sat on top of it, her knees crushed into her chest as she took a swig from the bottle that lay by her side. She didn't see me and I acted as though I didn't see her.

"Isn't it wonderfully strange?" I didn't answer out of pure confusion. "That my heart can be so alive while I feel so worn out. That it's pounding and my mind is almost sleeping."

I looked back at my sister who sat atop of my empty house looking at my hand that sat atop of an empty chest, which i had discovered was not so empty in fact. I smiled at her and she smiled at me and I breathed in the darkness and closed my eyes.

"Yes, that is wonderfully strange."