Cloud Chasers

two | the less I know the better [pt. two]

He exhaled a cloud and caught her looking at it.

"You want to try this?" he asked, shaking the vaping device in his hand.

"No, thanks. I don't smoke," she said.

He frowned. "This isn't smoking."

"I don't like it anyway."

"It's not harmful to you, if that's what you're worried about," he said.

"Yeah, but I don't want to, thanks." She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. "Tell me about that girl now."

"Alright," he said after a long puff, "well, her name was Daisy. When I first met her, we were in high school and she was madly in love with this friend of hers. I don't know if he played football, but I want to believe he did. He was tall and huge, a classic jock. I felt something for her from the moment I met her but didn't know what it was. You see, before that, I had never been in love with anyone. I didn't even think about girls. My friends at the time thought I was gay; some for real and some just to make fun of me. But the thing is, I didn't think about boys, either.

"Looking back now, I realize the major problem was that I didn't have a personality. I was raised by troubled parents, and I was so introverted that it made me submissive to other people. I followed others around, copied their clothes, did whatever they did. I was just one guy in a group of people, never the leader, never stood out. Until I met her.

"She made me want to change. She made me want to have a personality. I wanted her to see me, but how could she see me if I was transparent? How could she know I existed if I felt inexistent? I was a white canvas ready to be painted with whatever colors someone else thought looked cool.

"So I started to change. I let my hair grow, I developed something that resembled a personal style, I started listening to the music I liked and not the one my friends liked. And so, of course, my friends started to get away from me. One day it's, "Sorry, I'm busy this weekend," and the other it's ghosting you for the whole weekend. But I didn't care. I guess I never really cared about my friends. I felt like they were the friends of a me that didn't exist anymore, at that point.

"And, most importantly, Daisy did notice me. We became friends as soon as we started talking. We didn't necessarily have a lot of things in common, but we were able to have hours and hours of conversation without one single moment of silence in between. It was amazing. And I fell in love with her more and more with each conversation we had. Problem was, of course, that in the months it took me to finally become someone, she had already found somebody else. In other words, she was dating the jock.

"I never showed any of my feelings toward her. To her, I was just her best friend. I never even disapproved of her relationship. I was a shoulder to cry on when he acted like a jerk to her. And this went on for a year or more, until I reached the point where I couldn't hold it in anymore. I had to tell her. And I did, one night. She was so mad at his boyfriend and how he was acting and I just told her. Every single thing I thought about her came out, and she was stunned."

The wind had changed its direction, and now every cloud Chase puffed out was coming back in his face. Joyce spotted glistened eyes behind the sunglasses.

"She didn't know how to react," he continued, "she'd never expected all that. She never thought of me that way. She said a few things while she was trying to organize her thoughts, but when I put my hand on her shoulder, I saw she was more open to me, in a way she'd never been before. So I kissed her. And she kissed me back. That was my first kiss. Ever. And after that, we kissed many more times. As a matter of fact, we kissed more times that night than in our entire relationship.