Bonded by the Blues | A Sander Sides Book

Chapter 29 - Blue Reflections

Happy New Year, peeps! Here, have a chapter. 

---Virgil---

I was at the clinic. My body might be, but my mind was elsewhere.

I watched a withered petal break free and fall to the dusty earth of the flower pot on the nurse's table. There's a certain kind of numbness in broken dreams that make you want to look. Just look. Look at a dying flower. Look at the cowlick standing at an odd angle off the back of the nurse's head, ruining here otherwise neatly combed hair tucked into her sterile white cap. Look at that star athlete with an open head wound waiting for an ambulance. Watch the face contort in pain, and feel ashamed that you find it fascinating. Look at the concern, fear and reluctant disgust in her boyfriend's nervous eyes, sitting by her, but one seat apart, and wonder how long the most adored couple on campus will last. Wonder what the cop who had brought her in was thinking right now, was this just another ordinary Friday for him? But most of all look at the dusty, messy, wounded, anxious boy wondering how he ended up at a clinic on the first day of what was supposed to be the first day of his new life: Me.

When dreams form, it's as electrifying as a rave reverberating with the beat from the bass amplifiers and you forget where you are and for one second, you're in your element. When dreams die, it's as if some idiot set off the sprinklers and you stand there drowned back into reality, your make-up dissolving and collecting in your mouth open in surprise. It sucks, all I'm saying. You're left with nothing.

There's nothing.

But no, there is something.

Thoughts.

Even if your body feels like an anchor stuck in a sandbank, and your eyes don't see through the murky waters, you can still think and think and think. Well, until your lungs run out of air.

Thanks to my over-thinking brain, such nice thoughts from swimming laps round my skull.

I could not stop the questions from pouring in like thick black tar. My mind was a forum of opposing voices. The topic: Roman.

Why did I let Roman in to my life?

I could never have known it would end like this, it could've been better, it could've been worse.

I could imagine it better. A perfect new life with a perfect... special someone.

No. that couldn't happen. My new reality sucked the same as before, just different. I shouldn't have bothered with change.

Yes. The same old hellish wheel of questions, indecision, vision and revision.

But what made me feel utterly immobilised to the core was a niggling thought that made me want to choke on my own vomit.

From the moment I realised that my parents made me deeply unhappy, I knew I needed out of that life. Walking away was one of the best decisions in my life, heck, the best. But it was a foregone conclusion, an inevitable certainty it was going to happen someday. But with Roman. I gave myself the tiniest bit of hope that I've finally met someone who'd tell me I was okay. It's worse when someone you put value in betray your expectations. I was wrong to expect anything more than a flash in the pan jolt of attraction from a guy who clearly wore his heart on his sleeve.

A dry sigh shuddered out of my parched throat.

The cowlick flashed as the nurse looked up. "Are you alright there, young man?"

My mind let go off my dimmed sense and I became aware of the external universe. "I'm fine," I muttered.

"You look like you've had to amputate a leg! Your ankle's all cleaned up. don't over stress it and you'll be up and running in no time. Cheer up, you got off easy. Not like that poor girl."