Rakastan

I wave my fingers in front of my eyes. Euri stands by me.
"who handed me the towel?" I ask her.
She stares in my direction like I'm insane.
"You grabbed the towel," she says and looks at me again.
Was the burly man a figment of my imagination too?

"someone said for me to go see Phil," I clarify, knowing my luck maybe I was hearing voices.
"Yeah, he did," she says and I look as the burly man heads in my direction.
I hold my breath as my eyes strain to see him and then I exhale when he's right by me. This is not Mige, in my confusion I had thought them one in the same.
But how eerily similar that laugh had been, and those green specs, how enchanting there was no way my imagination had pictured them.
I begrudingly enter the house to find Phil waiting for me. I'm so disappointed in my lack of sense that I feel like I might cry.
For the three short days iv been here, his presence has been at the center of my thoughts, yet ironically I percieved that coming here I could lay it all to rest.
"We should keep an eye on you," Phil comments as he takes out a thermometer.
"I'm fine, disappointed" I reply and watch as he takes my temperature reading.
"You have a slight fever, nothing rest can't fix," Phil says and advises me to stay the night with everyone before heading back.

"I really can't," I tell him and go to find Sen. I just want to get lost in my thoughts, alone.

Sen refuses to take me to the station until I make a go of actually walking there myself.
The car ride is in silence and Sen waits with me for the train to come in.
"if you need anything, call us," he says and hugs me goodbye.

I watch as the doors close on his face and I wave so he knows I'm okay.
I have three hours until I get to Turku. Three hours to think, and what I'm most afraid of is thinking about him.

I wouldn't call it an obsession, I did not hang his posters on my wall or dress with the logo plastered all over my body. I didn't wear black clothes and chains and band tees like everyone else I saw. If I mentioned I was a HIM fan people usually looked at me in disbelief, which I thought was unfair since not all fans were "goths" or some other stupid stereotyping that people used. I don't mean to sound judgemental myself but I never really gave off the demeanor od a HIM fan so I always felt like an outsider at the two concerts I went to and to those who didn't know who HIM was I was un apart from their musical tastes. I had alway loved music. I was more of a pop genre, I credit that to the era of boy bands and girl singers in the late 90s. The backstreet Boys were my favorite group, but as I grew into a teenager my mom showed me the culture of the 80s and I was soon avid fan of Bon Jovi, Journey, ACDC, Metallica, Aerosmith, etc. The one band I couldn't grasp although I did like them was KISS. My mother worshipped the ground Paul Stanley walked on, she went to any and every concert, she boasted later it was great my band appreciated hers.
When I was 14 in the fall I went to my friend's house and we tried to entertain ourselves as the thunderstom raged outside. She was a huge influence on my taste of modern rock. That night she had FUSE channel on and some videos were playing. She grew tires of it and left the room. The lightning bolted outside and the tv reception started going. The first chords of The Wings Of a Butterfly crackled into the room and I found te melody captivating. I watched the screen and my first impression of the leas singer was that he looked pale and not completely with it. I figured thi would be just another band that within two months would fade out of mainstream interest after they have maybe two hits. But when he opened his mouth an I heard Ville sing for the first time, I was hooked. His voice was not enhanced by computers an beneath the guitar riffs and keyboard bars, the lyrics spoke to me.
That Christmas, my mother bought the cd and all the ones prior and I started to educate myself on everything I could about the band and the country that came from that I had heard little of bfore. Valo and his lyrics influenced my writing, not in a copy way but that I felt as he did that how he wrote I could understand and that when I listened to the music my words just flowed. I fell in love with the beauty of Finland and it's culture.

The train rattles and I jerk forward from my daydreaming.
I wish it had just been the writing, that I had never accepted I had fallen for the author, the romantic. My whole life would never be the same.