Writing Commissions

Hope

The clock ticked overhead, as the velvety blankets cushioned beneath him. The rest of his house was eerily quiet, but Rui sighed to break it, shifting. How was anyone supposed to be okay with themselves, just laying here, and thinking about the way their lives were? Personally it sickened him.

All of his homework lied to the right of him on the counter that he couldn't be bothered to clean- despite the depressing boredom covering him like a blanket. How had he gotten here? Why was this happening- and where did the void come from?

It was from within himself, in the most painful way... which meant he couldn't seek it out and destroy it. It was an addiction, that destroyed him from the inside, threaded around his fingers, sipped from his integrity like a straw from a cup.

Again, he felt tears threatening his eyes, and he gripped at the covers beside him. There wasn't a single person he could come to about this, it was all so stupid. But the twisting in his gut was very real, a pain he wasn't sure how to escape.

Rui wasn't sure when exactly this had started. As older adults loved to preach, technology was a poison. For him, it felt more like a haven. It laughed when he laughed, comforted him when he cried, in a way no one who delivered that judgmental stare could understand.

His world was harsh and cold, like an unceasing blanket of snow. Silence caught in his throat. The arctic chill sewed his mouth shut, it brought numbness- and a foreboding, deceitful peace. He was in the present, among these people in the hallway, but he wasn't. Trapped in a brain behind a neutral expression, expecting.

Waiting.

For solace would come to him, in time, he knew- it was grounded in the soil, a sturdy flag pole never to shift in a windstorm, that lifted the ice off of his skin. A drug, but a prescription one, to light up his face and soul. Home.

When a house didn't feel warm and welcoming, he could pick up a fistful of home. When friends didn't seem to him like just that, all could be forgotten, relieved, if prolonged, preventing his hypothermia, the electric blanket on a warm winter's night- melting, melting the stress away and his thoughts to dust. All it ever took was a few clicks, and the door was opened for him, as he stood right there on the welcome mat.

The deficit was the benefit and the ventures to a fantasy land were the little sojourns from reality that he would have otherwise dismissed- too difficult, too cold, without a buffer, without a safety. But when smiles eluded him in the hallway he could always pick it up and have thousands of smiles at his fingertips, thousands of people willing to listen, and to melt, melt the stress away. Threads of countless people's hope could weave a tapestry across the world.

That connection- comfortable, fuzzy, needed so desperately. Accessible, only a touch away, and the portal to narnia that then would be a cushion for the daggers of corporations, conniptions, corruption, chaos and confusion and a clutter that could never be reordered, wrinkles that could never be ironed out, because people's minds were so different, and some perpetually refused to kneel down or stand on tip-toe to meet each other's eyes.

How was he supposed to explain it to them? How was he supposed to explain it to her-? What had she done wrong? Rui didn't know why he felt so lost simply stationed next to her. Was it because there was no way she could possibly understand-? His mother was a social woman, and it wasn't like she was a negligent parent- yet despite this, they seemed to be in two separate worlds- two separate planes of existence. And he didn't know how to reach her.

She didn't know how to reach him. So she took it away. She stole his hope, and now here he was- staring at the ceiling, unfulfilled, bored out of his mind and feeling the withdrawals. Sitting up, Rui stared down the door, before he hopped to his feet and tiredly made his way out into the hall. Photographs lined the wall that he didn't bother to look at, and he passed his sister and parents' rooms without a word. They were probably downstairs anyway.

His mother glanced up from the patterned kitchen table, acknowledging her son's existence. There was light passing through the opaque curtains. The kitchen had been recently cleaned, and his mom was sipping a cup of steaming coffee- things he would have bothered to notice if he hadn't tuned it all out so long ago. "Why don't you come do a sudoku?" She started with a cautiously optimistic smile. He nodded, defeated, and sat down next to her. "I haven't done one of these in forever."

"You've finally woken up and now it's time to smell the roses, then." She commented, pointing her finger to the middle of the chart. "You can't have the same number in the same row or column, and you have to figure out how to arrange them according to-"

"Oh, yeah-" He blinked. "I remember." Sloppily sketching a three, his eyes scored across the paper, but his mind couldn't be farther from the puzzle, as he tightened his grip on the pencil.

His mom placed a hand on his shoulder, after a minute of stifling silence. "I know things have been hard for you. I'm sorry for being hard on you, but just know I understand.."

Rui glanced up. No she didn't. Why, then, did she so consistently fail to detect his emotion? Why did she never notice when he descended into grief, disappeared under his blanket to cry alone for hours? As much as his mother would like to protest the opposite, he knew that she wasn't really there. Didn't really understand.

"Whatever." He muttered under his breath, having written four or five numbers when he sat up abruptly. "I'm going upstairs." It had been a bad decision to come down, anyway. It'd only reminded him more of what he was missing.

Days threaded by without his life, his hope. There was only one person he could talk to, someone who his brain chastised him for being simply a figment of his overactive imagination. From so young, he'd been alive with stories, tales and characters. It was a wonder how people seemed to value those types of things less and less as he got older. They got tired of him, or what he came up with, or maybe both. Where a new character would have been praised before, it was met with fake interest, and eyes that screamed again? You're forcing me to listen to this again?

Yui was one of his most recent characters.

[Stopped here]