Losing Layla

Josh

"Yeah, there's so much history in these streets
And mama's good eats
And wonder on repeat
There's soo much history in my head
The people I've left
The ones that I've kept"

- Troye Sivan, Suburbia

************************************************

I am so stupid. I dropped her home and I had a chance to get know her. Her dancing eyes always gleamed with her beautiful smile. She turned around and I drove away. I banged my head against the steering wheel. 

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. 

I felt so incredibly dumb. It wasn't like she would remember me anyway. She was too drunk and didn't what she was saying. I circled around her block twenty-three times and here I stood parked across the street. Like some creepy stalker, my mind was screaming at me. 

GO HOME!

That was the last place I wanted to go, though. The air was much thicker there and the weight on my shoulders was ever so present. So there I was parked in front of her house. The windows were black and everyone in there was probably asleep, but it brought me comfort to see that she was somewhere safe. Where we live safety isn't really a problem though. Nothing ever happens in suburbia and if it does, everyone always finds out. 

That's what I was scared of and she knew that. I remember what she said to me before she got out of the car. She said "Thanks for the quiet." It was a simple sentence that rocked me to my core. She was so loud I never thought she would appreciate the quiet, but I guess everyone in suburbia appreciated the quiet. No one ever got any though because it was never quiet in suburbia. If one were to listen quietly they could hear the whispers that were always there. I heard all of the whispers because all I did was listen. I am paranoid and it's the guard to my silent prison.

Sometimes I go to the highest point in town and look down at the identical houses with different stories and I wish for something to happen. I want something to happen so badly because if something happened maybe my head and my thoughts would be moving so fast I wouldn't be paranoid for one second. The only thing that did that for me was football though and that would be over when everyone finds out. 

Sometimes I wished people would find out. So I could stop pretending. Maybe then it would be expected of me to be a monster who prays for crime to occur. Maybe then it would be expected of me to scream. It wasn't like that, no matter how hard I wished. People only saw the guy I showed them. I was the quiet and polite quarterback, who never reacted. I was approachable.

 I was the guy who got people out of trouble, not into it. I was the perfect counter piece to my "best friend" Jonah Andrews. Jonah was loud. Jonah was bad. He was the defense and I was the offense. He was the only one who knew my secret. I mean he thought it wasn't that big a deal so, he took me everywhere, he dragged me to parties, bars, and sometimes family vacations. It didn't matter though because I quiet and Jonah was funny and that was better then me being a tragedy and Jonah being a poster child. 

I put my car into drive and I began to drive through similar streets.

************************************************

Monday 

Monday's were the best day of the week. Monday meant Football practice would be an extra hour. Monday meant I got to be free of whispers for one more hour. Coach always made Monday practices longer to "punish" us for how bad we did on the Friday night football games. 

When I got to school it felt like the whispers were amplified. I quietly leaned against Jonah's locker where to football guys usually hung out before first period. I leaned my head against the locker and closed my eyes. All I could hear were the whispers. 

'I can't believe she did that' 

' That's so uncharacteristically morbid of her'

'It was only a matter of time. No one can be that happy'

'She finally snapped maybe the drugs stopped working'

'It's probably because of Kendall' 

I let out a sigh of relief when I figured out they weren't about me. But who the hell were they about?