Throwback

To the First Time

If you're here and you've taken the time to click on my story, consider yourself loved.

Chapter one:

Throwback. Back to the first day of summer.

I can remember everything about that day. The way the air felt sticky and how I’d been wearing an old tank top and gym shorts because I hadn’t wanted to sweat to bad. I also remember my mom saying, “Shane, you look pitiful. Really, you do. You look like you’ve just come from goodwill.” But I went out anyway, because it was to hot to care about anything, least of all fashion.

I especially remembered the way my milkshake tasted. Terrible. Terrible like everything in the god forbidden restaurant everyone in town adored.

I was there with a group of friends that were talking loudly about things that didn’t interest me. I could hear them, but they seemed to be off in the distance as I sat at that corner booth, sipping my shake wordlessly.

Through all the noise, a sharp sound of the bell on the door at the front of the restaurant caught me off guard. A girl holding a giant canvas and an odd tribal satchel slammed the door behind her, the bell ringing once more in loud spastic jingles from the violent movement.

She hurried to a two-person table beside a window and collapsed in the seat, throwing her canvas on the ground and propping her feet up on the chair across from her, as if making big entrances was a usual thing.

Everyone watched her too. Maybe because it looked like a rainbow had puked all over the shirt she was wearing, or maybe because she was a stranger and this was a small town.

I felt strange when I saw her.

I got that kind of feeling you get when you go somewhere you’ve never been before and you feel like it's significant for some reason. The kind of place that isn’t special or even important to anyone else, but you feel as if you were meant to be there or had been there before in a dream.

And if you’re driving by that place, you can feel it in you’re heart, a throbbing of nostalgia that makes you turn around in your seat and watch it disappear in your window, wanting desperately to go back and look at it again.

I’d never seen her before, but I knew I was meant to. I'd heard that  in romance movies, and I wasn't even sure if it was legit for me to think it since it was so overused. But that's what I felt. Cliché or not.

I knew it because when she sat slumped over a notebook, opened to a clean page, and began dragging a pencil across it with graceful flourishes, she was totally concentrated- lost in the movements.  And as I watched, I became lost too.

I don’t know how long her hand moved across those pages. And when it stopped; I waited for her to continue, or even to close the notebook and leave. But she did neither. I looked up and realized, with a lurch in my stomach, that she was staring directly at me.

She looked slightly confused, but more curious than anything. I smiled at her faintly and I wasn't sure if I should go say hello or run away and hide in the mens room. 

 She smiled back. She had the kind of smile that invites a person in. And that’s what she did. She invited me into her beautiful life with one expression.

It was the first time I saw her. But when I had, I wanted desperately for it not to be the last.

Please leave feedback. It was a spur of the moment idea and I didn't even give my self time to process it before it was being uploaded. I'm not even sure if it's good, I just know that I have this whole plan in my head and it's mine, so don't steal it.

Oh and if you read all the way to this sentence, God bless you. :)

- ACertainLady___