drowning in violet - skephalo

04:26 AM, Saturday

Darryl avoided all contact with the color blue until two days after Zak's mysterious disappearance. It was almost half four in the morning and Darryl's vision was blurring over in black dots, dancing over his sight and taunting him with the idea of oblivion, so he walked down to the supermarket, hoping the emptiness would help wake him up. He pushed his shopping cart to some corner of the shop and walked past the tills, noticing a single worker with his head lowered in a textbook with a too-far-away-to-read name tag. He was shaking his head, flipping pages robotically, scribbling answers and notes with bruised and arborescent fingertips. Darryl couldn't stop looking at his hands because they were pale and bruised like watercolor, and he wanted to know why and how it all happened because the stupid colours painted on his knuckles were the most exciting thing Darryl felt like he'd ever seen.

The worker's head popped out from beneath his textbook labeled 'The Principles of Art', and all of Darryl's blood rushed to his face.

Green irises smashed into brown and Darryl's fingers felt like they'd lost circulation in them. His entire body seemed to have forgotten how to work because he felt short circuited, a deer in headlights, and something jolted in his stomach.

"Are you drunk?" the man asked, his voice deep and raspy from misuse.

"No." Darryl stated quietly.

"Then why are you here this late at night?" he shut his textbook and placed it in his lap, "Oh, wait. Do I know you from somewhere?"

Darryl wasn't sure why he was sad but he knew he was, because the swirling mess of emotions were burning against his stomach and in the pit of his throat like acid, acrid and thick, and for a moment he didn't think he could breathe because it was all so dizzying. Everything around him was a light shade of blue, like he'd looked at the sun directly. He forced a tight smile and spoke: "Yeah, uh, we have class together. I'm Darryl."

Zak's eyes lit up. "Oh, yeah! Sorry I didn't recognise you at first, I'm too tired to remember faces right now." His voice felt like it was years away.

Something snapped in Darryl and he laughed, a stupid sort of laugh that doesn't make sense, and it was quarter to five and he was still up and Zak's eyes were illegally beautiful. "It's okay."

There was a slight silence during the conversation, hesitant and curious, but Darryl felt like he had swallowed his tongue because he couldn't form a single consonant without wanting to ask ridiculous and intrusive questions that flushed against the corners of his mind and seeped into his throat. Why are your hands so bruised? Why weren't you at class yesterday? Why take the night shift?

Zak snapped his fingers in front of Darryl's face and he hadn't even noticed how close he had gotten. Darryl blinked for a moment, his hair falling into his eyes, completely forgetting all of his previous thoughts in that instant. He was staring again, he knew he was, but he never knew that hands could be so mesmerising, and that eyes could be so gorgeous; Zak could tell that he was stumbling to form a sentence. Darryl was just so curious, so short-circuited, tarnished and fatigued and he had never met anyone that'd posed so many questions to him. "Will you be in class tomorrow?" Darryl asked shyly, "I've missed you - gah, I mean, we. We've missed you. Like, our classmates." Darryl bit his tongue at his own words.

Somehow, Zak giggled at that: "Oh, really? My family's dog passed away a few days ago, and they wanted the whole family to be there. Sorry I left you all hanging." His eyes looked small and sad. Darryl felt his stomach flip and churn in a million different directions.

"Oh... I'm sorry about that." Darryl uttered. He didn't know what else to say.

"Don't be sorry, it's not your fault. It was long-awaited, really. He's been pretty sick for a few months now." Zak sighed, sticking a highlighter cap between his teeth as he began to open his textbook once more. Darryl felt like his feet were cemented to the tile beneath his worn-down sneakers.

"I... I have to go." Darryl said, his legs tripping over themselves in a desperate attempt to not make a fool of himself any longer.

"I'll see you on Monday?" Zak yelled after him, but Darryl was already halfway down the street, even though he had no idea where he was going. The street lamps were still on and they were bright as hell - the light seeped into his skull and impaled his brain, and it was cold outside but he still felt like he was on fire, disintegrating and charred and black. He shook his head because everything seemed so surreal; he was half positive that he had just dreamt the whole interaction. There was nobody in the street, just tipped over trash cans and street lamps and roadkill that didn't ever seem to be scraped off the road, so Darryl stepped onto the asphalt that needed to be repaved and walked aimlessly in the middle of the street. There were no cars out, anyway.

He stared up harshly at the spaces in the sky where the stars should have been, because it was easier than the blue he was drowning in.

He jammed his key into the lock, throwing his weak body against the wall as the door shut behind him with a shallow click. He pounded his feet against the steps leading to his room, slowly undressing himself as he made his way there. He threw a loose t-shirt and sweatpants onto his weak body and plopped down onto his bed. His lamp burned a bright orange, turning everything in his room a gentle shade of merigold. He couldn't help but wonder - wonder about Zak whatever-his-last-name was and whether he liked video games and if he was younger than Darryl even if he didn't look like it; if he was cold at four in the morning and if he even liked working night shifts and it was horrible, because Darryl had no right to be attached to a person who hardly even knew his name. The last thing he saw before he drifted off to sleep was the bruise on his shoulder slowly fading into a mellow shade of purple underneath his pale skin.