Reality And Us

Chapter Eighteen

Nicklas sat on his bed, his arms wrapped around a pillow.

His bed was comfy, but not too big, they had bought it before he had started to grow that much. His room wasn't very spacey, the bed filling up most of it, but he didn't mind. There had never been that much of a reason to spend a lot of time inside of his room, there was a lot of other space in the house as well, and some of it way more comfortable if you just wanted to enjoy yourself or spend some time alone.

He sat there, and he wore his pajamas already, even though he wouldn't go to bed within the next two or three hours. There was faint music coming from some other room, his parents were probably dancing, or at least that's what it sounded like to him.
He had just gotten home, storing the book he had bought in the drawer under his bed, and now he was staring at his wall, thinking.

His arms were putting pressure onto the blue pillow that he held firmly against his chest, Jamie had given it to him a while ago, because he had thought Nick's room not to be comfy enough.

As he sat there his mind kept replaying the situation earlier again and again, even though there was nothing really special about it. Just two people being in love.

Still, it had caught his attention, made his mind full of thoughts and hopes, in some weird kind of way.

It wasn't that he's never seen same-sex couples before. It wasn't that he hadn't known any queer people before. It wasn't that he hadn't known about being friends with someone who felt this way before.

It wasn't any of those.

But it was a moment of realization. That moment where knowledge in your mind starts to make sense, that moment you begin to understand what you had previously only known.

These situation could happen with the most daily topics. Sure, you know that the cute little mushroom is a living being, but sometimes that doesn't mean that you actually get that it lives, that it can die. You don't realize that you've just pretty much committed a murder when you've stepped on the tulip in your neighbor's garden.

Those realizations could come with absurd things as well, but then they usually didn't seem as ground-breaking to Nick, simply because weird things needed a lot of understanding.

This situation wasn't weird, it wasn't that unusual, but still, there hadn't actually been that connection. Not in the way it existed, now.

It was like a punch in the face. Life telling him to stop this bullshit of his.

This fear inside of him, that need to fit into what society wanted him to be - he felt as if he didn't know anymore what it wanted him to be, if things would really be that bad if he wasn't who everyone expected him to be. After all, Zane seemed to be just fine being out, and maybe, he could have that as well.

He wanted to find out what this meant to him. How he could change through this. He wanted to allow those thoughts inside of him, without being unhappy about them.

But he didn't know how to, because, somewhere inside of him, he still hated that part of his. That he couldn't be what everyone thought to be normal, maybe not everyone, but too many.

On the other hand he really wanted to discover a new kind of normal for himself. Meeting Zane, learning and understanding his sexuality had made Nick a little bit more comfortable with himself, he wasn't happy with this situation, wasn't exactly ready for anyone to know, but he wanted to face it, even if it was just through allowing the thought of it in his head.

Considering how little attraction he felt towards girls and how attractive guys could get, there was indeed a possibility of him being gay. Maybe.