A Prose With No Direction

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We sit on opposite sides of my room, my body leaning towards the wall with scratched-out pictures while Hugh sits across from me, underneath the window of sunshine that is dimmed by the grey and dull curtains I own.

I offer him coffee or tea.

He took coffee while I took tea. 

We sit in a considerable amount of silence before I begin to speak. 

"I still don't get why you're doing this," I begin, rubbing my cup of tea. I don't look at him. "Why you're being this nice."

"Shouldn't everyone be this nice?" He says, kindly. 

I give a small smirk. "No," I reply. "Everyone should be. But they're not."

I finally look at him, his blue eyes glowing in my dimmed room. "Give me answer," I say. "Answer the why."

We sit in silence, our eyes immersed in a long, quiet, and endless staring game. Not a word comes from his lips and not a word comes from mine until he gives an answer. But even with the suffocating silence, I find a certain kind of peace I haven't seen in a while. Maybe it's his eyes I find peace in. 

I wonder if he'll lend me his eyes. 

"You're skin glows in the dark, doesn't it," he points out, a small grin on his face. "And your eyes easily reflect what you see."

I stare at him. "How would you know?"

His grin spreads wider, his hand retreating to the nape of his neck again. "I had a sister," he begins. "She had the same skin as yours, a flawless white. She hated the sun, too; that's why she was so pale. But it was a kind of paleness that wasn't sickly, it was a kind that glowed underneath the moon."

"You said had," I reply. "Is she dead?"

He nods sadly, rubbing the nape of his neck more. "Cancer," he answers. "Pancreatic."

So even a boy with that kind of eyes knows how the death of someone feels like.

He interests me.

"Anyways, she was really beautiful," he continues, his ocean eyes staring into me in a way where he doesn't see me but sees someone else. "That's why she's named Belle. But it wasn't her face that made her beautiful. It was her eyes."

He smiles his pretty boy smile, eyes shifting to lock themselves with mine to look at me. "She had a dark color like yours," he says. "A color close to black but it still had a brown tint to it when you look at it in a certain angle under the sun. Unlike mine, you couldn't see her pupils because it blended with the iris. This allowed for whatever Belle saw to be clearly reflected onto her eyes, like the black window of a limo. She would always stare at the moon when it was at its fullest, and the moon would reflect so beautifully in her eyes." He tilts his head a bit. "Just like yours."

"How would you know my eyes reflected the moon when I look at it?" I ask. 

He chuckles. "I don't mean to sound creepy," he starts. "But I sometimes catch you gazing out the window, mostly at night, always looking up to the sky. Once, when the moon was full, I caught you gazing at it, and the vastness of space and its moons and stars were reflected in your eyes. It reminded me of Belle." He pauses. "I guess that's why I took an interest in you after the baseball incident. Because you reminded me of Belle."

"So is that your answer?" I inquire. 

"Well, you also remind me of myself," he adds, sheepishly. "I was once as lost as you after Belle died. I became a person I wasn't, a person I never wanted to be. It was like running in someone else's clothes without knowing where my destination was or where I was going. It was only when I tripped and someone slapped me in the face did I realize how deep I've fallen into a place I know I would never get out from." 

He sighs. "I don't want to assume, but I think you know what I mean," he says. "About running without a purpose or a guide. I can tell from your eyes. I guess that's another reason why I feel obligated to help you in any way I can."

Running without a destination. 

He sees it as running without a destination. 

He's not wrong. 

His analogy is right.

It's like running and running and running and running to a place you don't even know where or if it even exists. It's like running and running and running and running to a destination you think you're supposed to be at but actually you weren't. 

It's like running.

And running.

And running.

And running. 

But unlike him, he runs towards a place.

While I—

I run from something else. 

"Do you like writing?" I ask him.

He laughs. "I don't usually like reading," he answers. "Much less to write."

I stare at him before looking out at the window behind him.

"I like writing," I say. "Because the paper listens to me more than anyone else has." I purse my lips. "You compare it to running. But to me, it's like writing a story without knowing it's ending. It's not poetry. No, I can never write poetry. But rather, it's like an actual story like the Hunger Games or Harry Potter. It's like writing one of those, writing a prose. But the narrator and her story are just so lost that it's not even considered a prose anymore. But neither is it eloquent enough to be called poetry. It's just a story trying to find its topic, its subject, its theme, its purpose. To me, it's like that." I look at him. "It's like a prose with no direction. That's how it feels. Like I have no direction."

He smiles. "I assume you didn't think we'd actually have much in common, did you?" He chuckles.

We do enjoy the touch of pen and paper.

But yet again, he's an artist.

His mistakes can be erased or blended with his art.

And I'm a writer.

My mistakes can never be perfect imperfections. 

"An artist and a writer never have much in common," I tell. "You describe with sketches while I paint with words."

You call mistakes genius while I call them failure. 

"Well, we could be the first," he says, sipping his coffee. His light expression then darkens. "What happened today, Clara? If you don't mind me asking."

I sip my tea.

Inhale

Exhale. 

Inhale.

Exhale.

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