Pieces

9. Perception

a/n: Dedicated to @comichael for the amazing cover! :)

After talking to Rita some more, Antonio had to go home as Mrs Lachowski wanted him to go to school. He'd been quite irregular for the past few days and though she understood how hard it must be for him to not have Marcus to hang around in the hallways, she couldn't bear the sight of her son being so silent and lost all the time. She tried to convince him that school would be a good distraction but it was in vain. 

I, however, decided to hang out with Rita some more. I was really enjoying her company. And besides, I had a list of questions that I thought she'd have the answers to. 

"I know what you're going to ask me." She said, as soon as Antonio left. "He gave me that "piece", for that crazy lad liked to call them "pieces", one night. And I tried to get him to tell me what exactly he was trying to convey to you through these because it all seemed ridiculous, really. I even told him to write you a letter and stop fooling around so much. For all we knew, you might not even have tried to..." She paused, hesitating, but I knew what she meant. And I didn't blame her for thinking he was wasting all the little time he had, on me. And now that I thought about it, I couldn't help but ask why. What had I done to deserve so much of his dedication of time? Then she grinned. "So basically, he asked me to give it to you without any further ado. So I'm just as clueless as you are." 

I was a little disappointed. I'd thought she'd have all the answers I needed. Classic Marcus move: To make things more complicated. Create life puzzles for people. 

G: I'll never understand your obsession with puzzles.

M: I like puzzles because they're complicated. Or you could say, designed in a way to produce complications. They're testing. They help you judge yourself. They potray, in a very simple and basic way, how you respond to problems in life. 

And I think the complications are what makes them interesting. If everything was simple, easy, then the world wouldn't be as fun and interesting as it is, today. In a way, complications are a necessity in human life.

I remember how I'd laughed at him for going into such depth about something as trivial as puzzles. I'd always seen puzzles as a must-have for parents with attention deficit kids, who always needed something to be kept busy with. 

But ever since that day, I saw them as so much more. Marcus could do that to you. Change the way you see things.

"You saw him today, didn't you?" Her soothing voice, pulled me back into reality.

"I did." I said, baffled. "You could tell?"

She leaned closer towards me, her voice almost a whisper, her eyes depicting urgency. "I see him, too. At first, I used to see him all the time. I saw him so much, it was impossible to tell whether he was really here or not."

"What about Anto-"

"He sees him too. I know he does. He just never tells." She whispered.

I gulped, a little hesitant to know the answer to my next question. "But it's okay, right? It's alright to see him?"

She threw me a sympathetic smile. "It's more than okay. Does it scare you? Were you scared when you saw him?"

"No." I said, remembering how the whole purpose of my trip here was to "meet" him. I was a little more than surprised when I saw him there. Just sitting on the bed across from us, very much  alive, one minute and then gone, the next. I wasn't scared. I'd known I was seeing things. If he'd been there longer, I might have even gone up to him and talked to him. "No, I wasn't. I just wish it were real."