Hey Guys,
The following is a little thing I've Been writing. Please comment and say if you think you don't understand it, or you think something needs changing.
I hope you like/love/hate/admire/feel-any-emotion-what-so-ever-about-this.
-Annabek.
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In Between the Lines.
My eyes stare vacantly out of the car’s window, streetlights and traffic lights, headlights and office lights rushed past, as if they were hungry for something behind our car as we speed past them in the carpool lane. My mother insisted that I attend a useless dinner with her boss, a man that I promptly began to hate as his need for this dinner dragged me further and further away from the comfort of my bed and the slumber it hoped to bring, if insomnia didn’t awake first. Insomnia was one of the reasons Mother thought I was depressed. I’m not depressed, I’m just tired of being clinically stable.
We pulled up in one of the five parking spaces of the stereotypically named ‘Golden Dragon’, a reasonably sized Chinese restaurant that ‘Specialised in Yum Cha’. I didn’t make a move to get out of the car.
“Nora” Mother warned, “Get out, I don’t want Gary thinking I’m unpunctual.”
You’re doing this to help her, not stress her out, my conscience groaned.
Jeez, I replied. Lay on the guilt why don’t you. I got out of the car.
“Remember, sweetie, be polite to Gary and his family, and consider what you say before you say it.”
“Yes, Mother” I’d heard this before, next was Call me Mum, Nora.
“Call me Mum, Nora”. Mother and I had never been terribly close, its not like we were related or anything.
The interior of the restaurant was strictly oriental, with circular tables with that temporary shiny paper tablecloth you can draw on. Mother – sorry, Mum – moved towards the back of the restaurant to a table occupied by a middle-aged, beer-bellied man, a posh-looking woman (who promptly turned her nose up at my jeans and baggy T-shirt) and a teenage boy who avoided my gaze when we were introduced. His name was Alec and he didn’t look anything like his parents. Mum sat down next to the woman, leaving the only available seat for me in between her and Alec. Adults seem to think that all kids have something in common, and that they will jump in to conversation as soon as the adults point their attention in another direction. They were so wrong. Alec and I sat in awkward silence, until I felt the need to strike up conversation. “Hi” I said.
“Hi” He replied and looked back down at his lap.
Wow, Nora, he is bursting at the seams to talk to you isn’t he?, she invaded again. I fought the urge to start whistling. Grabbing some wax crayons from the centre of the table, I started to draw an eye, the only thing that I could draw that would actually look like what it was meant to. The iris was a vibrant blue, and everything else was a deep dark black, the kind that hides in your closet.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alec look at my drawing, I looked up just as he looked down, evading my eyes again, I hid a smile under the security blanket of a cough. Food came and went as I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He was colouring a sheet on the back of the children’s menu, a dragon. I watched as he coloured the dragon in deep reds and golds, silvers and blacks. I watched the flick of his wrist and the delicate curl of his fingers, his cuticles looked picked at. I watched as he coloured the dragon’s eyes the same as the eye I had drawn, now hidden under a plate dedicated to sweet chili sauce. I hid another smile under another cough.
Alec excused himself quietly to go to the restroom, which was located on the second level of the restaurant. Ten minutes later when he hadn’t returned (the adults were still engrossed in a conversation either about stocks or chocolate cake recipes), I stood up and followed his path to the second level into a sitting room like setup, threadbare couches around low coffee tables. Four of the seven tables were taken, so I moved over to the fifth which overlooked the lower level. I was almost to the table when I saw Alec’s scruffy brown head peeking over the top of one of the couches. I sat down beside him, elbows on my knees, head in my hands and I started crying the happy tears of reunion.
“Shh, Nora. Its okay, its okay” he whispered, he had misunderstood my emotions, and then he sung our lullaby and I cried even harder. I looked up at his vibrant blue eyes, the same colour as the one I drew on the tablecloth and the ones he drew on the dragon, the same as my own eyes. The same colour as the ones that crinkled in happiness when they first sung us that lullaby, the same colour as our dead mother’s eyes.
I remember the last words I said to him before we were separated, brothers don’t get lost.
