Continued Silence

Three : a secret garden

30th December, 2009

I slept in until late-morning sunlight slivered through the blinds and found it's way to my face. The smell of breakfast was rising up in the air. A glorious Saturday. I hurriedly dressed up and raced towards the pleasant smell of hot chocolate, my favourite. Dad and my older brother Chris had already eaten much of the scrambled eggs.
"Bon appetit", my mum said as she saw me.

I ate as much as I could until someone knocked on the door. I opened it and found William on his bike. I could see the corner of his eyes crinkling with excitement. The kind of excitement a child gets while seeing the rain.
With his one hand in the pocket, he  spoke ," Road trip?"

I glanced at my watch; 10:00 p.m.
Hmm....I thought for a while and said, " Isn't it too early?"
"Oh God! You are never ready for anything. Alright we will go after an hour."
He came inside and met everyone. He was the kind of kid everyone adored. Well, me? I was just an ordinary lame boy who was always invisible. I thought that maybe if I disappeared tomorrow, no one would really notice.

And that scared me, alot.

Me and William went upstairs in my room and he sat on that blue couch. While his posture was aggressively poor, he said,
"Dude, as today is Saturday and we luckily have nothing much to do, I
planned a road trip for us."
"Well, okay." I said.
Even though I wasn't willing to go, but his excitement would all be drowned if I showed such a boring behaviour, so I asked,
"What are we gonna do?"
He looked out the window, smiled wickedly and replied,
"Precisely check some chicks out there "
I shrugged and threw my hands in the air in disagreement.
"What? No way. I'm not going then" I replied.
He started laughing, stood up, wrapped me in his arms saying,
"Just kidding dude. Did I ever, in the history of our friendship, put you in any trouble? Relax. We will just ride our bikes around this little town of ours and see what's going on".

I had always loved roads and long rides. They gave me a feeling nothing else could give.
Those empty roads and neon signs felt more like home. As if, the lonely dusty roads were my only refuge, under the open sky.

So we both rode across our neighbourhood. The clouds were spreading across the edge of the world.
William's hair moving through the soft wind, my own eyes looking at the evergreen trees, while the small neighbourhood itself quiet yet busy, like the others.

We didn't speak much. Not because we had nothing to say, but because we didn't need to say anything. That was the thing between best friends.
I could see his hazel eyes were full of innocence, the boy whom I met on the very first frightening day of school. I still remembered how I walked in the class crying, and sat alone at the empty desk behind like a pussy cat. When I was seated, and for a moment everything seemed fine, something inside of me broke again as I started to cry while missing my home.
That was when William, who was seated behind me, said,
"Dude, what's wrong?"
I cried on, until he sat with me and started singing an old nursery rhyme,

"That yellow bus, it'll drive us there
So wipe your eyes, as I really care
There won't be any sky of blue
But It'll be all fine, as I have you"

I smiled a little and then he took out his comics from the bag and placed in front of me.
"Superman: the brave and bold", he read, surprising me because I could hardly read at that time. Then he explained to me that what it was about and I kept listening with glow in my eyes. Then he asked,
"Do you know the part where he flew away from his own town?"
I nodded, as I had seen that part with my brother on t.v.
That was when I started talking to, as if I had known him all my life.
After few days, as I was able to read a little, he gave me that comic as a small gift.