Control Freak ✔️

10 the friendzone experience

Caleb let his eyes roam as he meandered down the rustic halls at the peeling brittle wallpaper and calloused wooden banisters. The dense wood was dry and dormant, coated with dust as if it had not been touched in ages.

He wandered up the stairs again. This time he went into the master bedroom. The room was symmetrically planned, measured and predictable. It reminded him of his own father's house. It was so like his father to demand such meticulous arrangement and order. He ran his finger across the oak drawer. It was whitened with dust.

Caleb opened the drawer. In it rested an old school gaming handheld, with its screen still cracked and now coated with a thin film of gray. He unconsciously fiddled with the halfway-stuck buttons that barely clicked anymore and flicked the switch a couple times to no avail. It was a paperweight and nothing more, just a remnant from childhood tucked away in its hiding place.

He last checked the kitchen. It was dark and quiet, and there was no lingering aroma of an early meal that had been cooked or any dishes in the sink. But, the sliding patio door was open. He cracked it slightly and called for Ivy again. No answer. So he slid the door a bit more and crept out.

The morning air was cold and thin. His eyes traced the old stone path to a barren garden, at the center of which was a large oak tree with twisting arms and a dense head of green leaves.

"Hey, Caleb."

"Huh?"

Ivy shoved the startled boy from behind into a patch of high grass, laughing as she dove down with him.

"Ivy, don't sneak up on me like that!" hollered Caleb.

"Did I scare you!"

They wrestled a bit before losing steam and resting in their bed of grass. There was no talking between the two of them anymore, though he watched her lay there, almost as if she was in some sort of a trance.

Relaxed beneath the shady tree, the two of them lay there: Ivy, with her golden hair spilled out over the green grass like sunflower petals dashed by a carefree wind, lost in her dream world, or perhaps the memories of a summer long past. Caleb folded his arms underneath his head in order to look casual, as he attempted to focus his mind on just about anything else to ignore his loudly beating heart. They lay there, for what felt like an eternity on opposite hemispheres and an untraversable body between them. He brought his hand down from his head. He closed his eyes and lunged across the divide as he held his breath. He touched her. As his fingertips met the soft skin of hers, the touch made his fingers tremble. And so her fingers enveloped his, and stopped them.

"Hey, Caleb. If you died and went to heaven, only to realize that heaven wasn't anything like you expected. None of your friends were there, it was no fun. If you died, but were given the choice to come back down and live again, would you? And what would you do?"

"I dunno."

"Wouldn't it change the way you lived the second time around, especially if you knew there's nothing better than this?"

"I think I'd be more afraid to die the second time around. I'd want to enjoy life as long as I could. I wouldn't waste a moment."

"Just so you know, that's the choice the devil made."

"Wait, what?"

Ivy laughed. "Don't worry, I'm not judging. That's what I'd pick, too. I'd want to live again. But what if, on the other hand, there was no actual heaven, and God was just a computer, endlessly generating simulation upon simulation for an eternity. Simulations based on someone else's memories that couldn't even be remembered all the way correctly. Like I remember how it felt to lay under this tree, and feel the leaves crunching under me, the smell of the air when it rained, the tingle I get from holding hands with a boy that looked just like you, what it feels like to swim in the ocean, what it feels like for the water to fill your lungs until it stings. It's like I'm watching a movie, sitting in the very back row. But the girl I'm watching is me. I think my whole life has been that way."

"A simulation..." Caleb repeated under his breath. He squeezed her hand. "It's real to me."

"What would you do if this wasn't real, and we're just here, existing in a half-forgotten dream of someone else's?"

"Then would I have a choice?"

"Yes," she softly affirmed with her lips barely opening. "There's always a choice if you're brave enough."

He sat up and positioned himself over Ivy, blocking out the narrow sunrays as he gazed into her eyes, so eager and yet yielding to his emboldened stare. He could feel the rise and fall of her chest beneath him as she waited in silence for him to speak.

In the golden light, she was illuminated in dazzling color. He met her flashing eyes, and her soft pink lips, parting into a tiny smile that concealed a world of secrets behind it. It depicted a mixture of any number of human emotions: wonder, misery, loneliness, enchantment, despair. In the darkness of the shadows, her eyes were moons in a sky without stars, brilliantly beaming, but also hollow, and when he looked deeply into them, he could see the wires behind them: the shorted and burnt out circuits that had blackened and lost their functionality. He had chased the wires to their ends and found there was nothing except maybe his own bemused reflection gazing back from the abyss. The more he pursued her, the more he realized he was losing his way inside of her darkness, suspended inside an illusion of a dream girl that gazed at him from the other side of time, from beyond a giant canyon between the past and present.

"Then... then I choose to do this..."

She cupped his face in her palms and combed his hair with her fingertips. She swept the curls from the side of his face and traced the beginning of a scar that ran from his temple to the side of his head. As she ran the surface of her fingertip over the narrow mound, it evoked a lamenting smile from her lips. He moved his face toward hers, but with her palm, she stopped him. All the while, those lips, and the golden oblivion of her eyes, encouraged him to come to her, until their noses gently touched.

"You know, if you kiss a girl, there are consequences to that," she whispered. "Especially if she's a monster."

For the first time ever, her pupils fled from his, and she could no longer look Caleb in the eyes. He took her by the chin and guided her face back to him. But the moment she did, her eyes began to glisten as if they were melting. As they lay there facing each other and he controlled her in his hands, it surprised him that she did not oppose him. Defiance had evaporated from her face. Her honesty breached his defenses, and before he knew it, he was on the defensive, wondering how to feel. She lay beneath him with her hurting eyes, which were softly beckoning. So, Caleb squeezed his eyelids shut and leapt across the chasm between them. She warmly received his lips, cradling his face in her hands.

"I don't care. As long as I'm with you," he said finally. "We'll be monsters together."