The Scent of Books

V - Stagnant Reality, The Boy of White & Lunacy

Walking through the halls of my own school had never felt so foreign.

L.H High, amidst my life of negativity and self-deprecation, defined what a place of comfort is for me. It was a constant in a sea of variables, something that I could comprehend when everything else was a total mess.

Sure it wasn't exactly a safe haven, with all the stressful aspects most human beings have to go through when they face the monsters of grades, expectations, social status and etcetera. But even so these faded white walls, blue creaking lockers an unevenly placed maroon tiles were some things I could expect to still be here no matter how much my life changed.

Even if you include factors like, let's say an earthquake occuring or a property problem in which the school has to be demolished no one can deny that this school has stood tall and existed before all my friends were born and will most probably still remain standing long after they die.

That's more than my home can ever hope to be.

Anyways, I considered it to be my beloved stage. Here I am but a side character amongst the countless protagonists. Plain, boring except a few quirks here and there that might provide a moment of entertainment to the audience. Normal.

"You're still going on about that after all this time? Isn't it just easier to accept that we were never so generic? That we were so much more?"

I scoffed at the voice in my head, "Do you mean more insane? I'm damn well sure that if all this fantastical nonsense happening to me ends up not being real then 'generic' sounds heavenly compared to being mad."

You can't expect me to easily come to terms with the fact that death himself showed me how to manipulate the fabric of time and space itself, how easy it was. That and the fact that yesterday he freaking sat across me in Starbucks of all places.

Death and Dark Mocha sounds like a cultish band name if I've ever heard one.

"But to be mad in a deranged world is sanity, Thana." The voice giggled, it made the hairs on the back of my head stand. "With what you're currently able to do, if you'd just do it more, and how detached you're becoming to everything you used to hold unto so dearly well I'm convinced that the Librarian is more than real."

It made no sense, for something to be more than real.

But it was so stupidly spot-on that I couldn't stop my nose from scrunching up in disdain.

"That and he's hot as-"

I rapidly shook my head, as if it would aid in getting a disembodied voice to stop talking and not just mess up my hair. You'd think it wouldn't work but thank Megan Whalen Turner and the holy Queen's Thief series that it actually did.

Admittedly though, the voice was right about one thing (Well, more than one thing but that isn't the point) and that was the detachment.

I was walking to my next class, Mathematics. Every step I took felt too slow no matter how much I picked up my pace, minutes felt like hours and the school felt a hundred times bigger than it normally was. The faces of my schoolmates were blurred to the point where they all looked the same, not to mention whatever they were chatting about all sounded like white noise.

My senses felt dulled in this nest of crows.

I vaguely remember feeling this way when I swore to my mother that I could watch Harry Potter a million times and never get sick of it, but after watching the first movie for the tenth time I couldn't even look at the screen anymore without feeling uncomfortable.