MJerson_Q
Bridge Shienne was seventeen, though there were days he looked much older. He stood slightly taller than most boys his age, his lean frame carrying the quiet discipline of someone who had learned to keep moving no matter what. Music had shaped his posture-a certain calm in the way he stood, a quiet rhythm in the way he moved-while life had taught him the kind of resilience no song ever could.
His skin bore the warm brown complexion of a Filipino raised beneath relentless sunlight. Dark hair fell across his forehead in loose, stubborn waves, though one section never quite grew back the same. A pale scar ran diagonally across his left eye, beginning just beneath it and cutting upward toward his temple, crossing through his eyebrow and leaving a small gap where hair refused to return.
It wasn't the kind of scar people ignored. Some people noticed. Some asked. Most didn't.
His eyes-dark, steady, the color of freshly brewed coffee-held a quiet exhaustion that didn't belong to someone his age. Something older lingered there, unspoken, unhealed. And sometimes, if people paid close enough attention, they would catch him smiling at nothing... frowning at empty spaces... or pausing as though he had heard someone call his name.
Bridge never explained those moments.
Not because he couldn't.
But because some things were easier to live with than to put into words.
After all, loneliness never truly been a problem for him. Even in silence, he never felt alone.
He only wanted simple things-a quiet home, good music, enough peace to get through another day. Instead, life kept handing him strange coincidences, unexpected friendships, and mysteries that seemed to know his name before he ever learned theirs.
And when he smiled-which didn't happen often anymore-he briefly looked like the boy he was supposed to be. A boy who loved to sing. A boy who loved to live. A boy who should have been ordinary.
But ordinary had long since stopped belonging to Bridge Shienne.