Almond Boy

Almond Boy - 18

Emma hasn't been at school for two weeks, and every day Elliot makes sure that his eyes are painstakingly open, just in case. He doesn't want to blink away time, not even when he's just spending it waiting.

Elliot isn't sure whether to give up on seeing her or to look for her. His mother is getting worried. She asks him a bunch of questions, and why his mind is always in the clouds and in the fog and why she can't quite reach him. 

Elliot knows the true question beyond her endless set of dramatic metaphors: Why aren't you talking to me? You used to tell me everything. 

Elliot's a seventeen year old boy. Albeit, a seventeen year old boy with a severe heart problem, but a seventeen year old boy, and damn it, sometimes he doesn't feel like talking. Especially when it's not about things he actually cares about. Especially when it comes to his problems. 

Damn it, he's a teenage boy, and sometimes he doesn't feel like talking. 

Though his lack of talking is starting to bleed into everything, things he knows he has to tell his mother. Kind of like how he's swelling up again. How when he looks in the mirror at night and in the morning he can see his skin turning purple and red, and the veins that crawl up his pale face are getting more prominent. His ribs are no longer showing, but he hasn't gained a pound. He's taking double doses of the pills to calm down his swelling, but he can feel it expanding in his cheeks like a latex balloon, and one day he might just go pop!

He gets very worried about it, his hands sweat and so he drinks more water, and the glass slips down his palm from the constant sweaty hands. He rubs his neck, he rubs his neck all the time as if that will relax him and his swelling. His eyes are bloodshot from nights spent up worrying, worrying about him, worrying about Emma, worrying about things he used to never worry about - worrying about things he knows won't matter in the end but while he's still around he just can't stop worrying about it. 

Elliot sighs. For once in his life, the heat of Florida is getting to him, and so he takes off his sweatshirt. It's overcast outside, the rainy season beginning, and now he can't take the heat. His hand shakes as he sketches and he clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth as if trying to get the gears going for ideas to draw.

He often thinks about drawing Emma, or aspects of her. He'll think of her, and he'll think of her strawberry blonde hair, and he'll draw something that resembles her hair color. Or he'll think of how she breathes, how it shakes as she exhales (and how admittedly that scares him a little) and he'll draw something based off of that. He often thinks of Emma, maybe too much, maybe not enough, and maybe for the wrong reasons. He thinks about her in aspects of drawing, he thinks about her in how she hasn't called or texted or communicated in any way possible that she is alive. Sometimes he likes to think of her as the reasons for all of his new problems.

She isn't, though. He likes to pin it all on Emma, but it's not true. It's not her fault, he's had friends ignore him, he's had friends die and never speak to him again, he's had friends who "just couldn't take it" and left him int he dirt. He's had shit friends and he's had dead friends and he has perfectly live friends. 

Then he has Emma, and he's not really sure which one she is.

Placing the blame on Emma is stupid, but he can't help but hope that her not talking to him is even worse. 

God he couldn't be angrier, and he shouldn't be, but he should be, and she has made him so lost that he can't even decide. She can't even contact him, it's been two weeks and she can't find the time to send him one text - two words would be all he needs "I'm alive".  

Of course not, though. So Elliot waits and sits on the park bench. Only Claire comes by nowadays and asks him of Emma every third day or so.

It's a bit funny, his life is a bit like a bench. People sit down, but benches are made for waiting for something, like a bus, so eventually they stand up and leave and "get on the bus". Is Emma done waiting with him? He supposes she is. In Elliot's entire life, which has gone longer than he thought he would, there has been no one to wait with him forever, not really. He gets new stragglers by the day, and eventually they leave and maybe they haven't yet, but he knows eventually they will leave. Maybe it's because Elliot is the only kid waiting for the final bus to come along.

He supposes that's how life is, when everyone you every associate yourself with is from a therapy group or a park bench, and when half a heart is beating for a whole one. He supposes that they either go on and live their life on that bus or they're sent to the next life. 

He's the only one who sits and waits for that final bus. Maybe he was hoping for Emma to wait with him, but at the same time, he knows what that means, and by God he's happy she left him alone. 

(But he isn't). 

(But he is). 

(And damn it all he's angry at her because he can't decide). 

He decides that may be the best way to think about Emma: a series of contradictions. Right now, as he sits on this park bench and eats his almonds she's not there and it's silent, yet at the same time he can hear her asking him a silly question and calling him "almond-boy". In some ways he's glad she's gone and other ways he's so angry at her for leaving. Sometimes he thinks of her as a friend and sometimes more than that and sometimes he doesn't think of her as much of anything at all. 

Emma is alive, but at the same time she might not be, and he doesn't know. 

Emma has dragged him into this state of limbo, where everything is a fog around you and nothing quite makes sense; and the worst part? She's left him alone in it.