Status: completed ◕‿◕
Every Man I Fall For
Black Coffee
Sometimes, in the mornings, you can see your breath curl before you like vaporous ferns on a high-speed camera, before it slowly vanishes like a vivid dream; intangible but unforgettable.
This morning, the school is a rainforest. Kids are huddled together, talking and laughing, and though it feels as if the cheer is too great for such an institutional setting, a sense of foreboding hangs about in the air, smothering, like a damp cloth. Their fern-breath curls like smoke in the air, carcinogenic gossip filling the atmosphere, and causing a black sickness in the hearts of the second-hand listeners; a blackness that no scalpel can remove.
I’m here, in the physical sense, but separate from the place by mental degrees, sitting under a tall tree on my own and looking up at the school in front of me. I’m not really a ‘people’ person. It’s not that I don’t try to make friends, it’s just that my mind is too soft, too wispy for anyone to be bothered with. If people even tried to look past what they see, what they know of me, they might find something worth the effort. But they don’t.
I wonder if I am as fleeting as the evaporated heat of my breath, or as steady as the sandstone of the building before me. Sometimes I think I could be both; infinite to fleeting in as many seconds.
Sometimes I feel nothing at all.
Either way, I’m not brash. I’m not the sort of person that people easily let in to their glass cages. I’m not loud, or funny, or gregarious. I suppose I flow quietly, like a river, and I move in a steady stream that plonks its way on to a predetermined future. My life doesn’t take hairpin bends, doesn’t well or build. It just moves in one, straight wash, right on out to the ocean.
This school doesn’t even really register in my river-life; I just see it as another passage to traverse, a sort of ritualistic coming-of-age that I have to endure before I can function on my own. A last ditch effort at gestation, as I attempt desperately to clamber out of the womb. I’m looking up at the tall sandstone building now with a sort of disdain evident in my expression. It’s not that I dislike school... entirely. I just sort of float through it, and all I can think of is everything that I’m missing by being there.
Then the bell is ringing, and the nervous chatter is expelled, and everyone is rushing. In a sheep-like state, preoccupied with my own head, I follow some others that I recognize from my year level to our locker room. As I reach my own locker and open it, I’m greeted by one of my closest friends.
“Oliver.” I am pulled in to a terse hug.
“Good morning, Harriet. How were your holidays?”
Harriet likes to think of herself as a bit of an intellectual. She spends a lot of her time reading, and drinking tea, and not eating. Her copy of The Bell Jar is utterly ragged, and you can always tell when she’s re-read it over the weekend, because she’ll come in to school with darkness across her brow and malicious glee in her eyes, ruminating on the beauty of the end.
She sighs exasperatedly.
“The worst yet. I had to listen to my Great Uncle Jasper crap on about politics for two weeks straight over Easter. What about yours?”
I consider my almost non-existent social life, the upwards turn my skin has made in its constant battle against oil and hormones, and the latest efforts of my token stalker.
“Could have been a lot worse. Sat at home. Ate. Poked at myself in various reflective surfaces. Pretended not to see Priya Kathal in the bushes outside my house once or twice.”
“The usual, then.” She said as we closed our lockers, arms straining under the weight of new books.
“The usual.”
This morning, the school is a rainforest. Kids are huddled together, talking and laughing, and though it feels as if the cheer is too great for such an institutional setting, a sense of foreboding hangs about in the air, smothering, like a damp cloth. Their fern-breath curls like smoke in the air, carcinogenic gossip filling the atmosphere, and causing a black sickness in the hearts of the second-hand listeners; a blackness that no scalpel can remove.
I’m here, in the physical sense, but separate from the place by mental degrees, sitting under a tall tree on my own and looking up at the school in front of me. I’m not really a ‘people’ person. It’s not that I don’t try to make friends, it’s just that my mind is too soft, too wispy for anyone to be bothered with. If people even tried to look past what they see, what they know of me, they might find something worth the effort. But they don’t.
I wonder if I am as fleeting as the evaporated heat of my breath, or as steady as the sandstone of the building before me. Sometimes I think I could be both; infinite to fleeting in as many seconds.
Sometimes I feel nothing at all.
Either way, I’m not brash. I’m not the sort of person that people easily let in to their glass cages. I’m not loud, or funny, or gregarious. I suppose I flow quietly, like a river, and I move in a steady stream that plonks its way on to a predetermined future. My life doesn’t take hairpin bends, doesn’t well or build. It just moves in one, straight wash, right on out to the ocean.
This school doesn’t even really register in my river-life; I just see it as another passage to traverse, a sort of ritualistic coming-of-age that I have to endure before I can function on my own. A last ditch effort at gestation, as I attempt desperately to clamber out of the womb. I’m looking up at the tall sandstone building now with a sort of disdain evident in my expression. It’s not that I dislike school... entirely. I just sort of float through it, and all I can think of is everything that I’m missing by being there.
Then the bell is ringing, and the nervous chatter is expelled, and everyone is rushing. In a sheep-like state, preoccupied with my own head, I follow some others that I recognize from my year level to our locker room. As I reach my own locker and open it, I’m greeted by one of my closest friends.
“Oliver.” I am pulled in to a terse hug.
“Good morning, Harriet. How were your holidays?”
Harriet likes to think of herself as a bit of an intellectual. She spends a lot of her time reading, and drinking tea, and not eating. Her copy of The Bell Jar is utterly ragged, and you can always tell when she’s re-read it over the weekend, because she’ll come in to school with darkness across her brow and malicious glee in her eyes, ruminating on the beauty of the end.
She sighs exasperatedly.
“The worst yet. I had to listen to my Great Uncle Jasper crap on about politics for two weeks straight over Easter. What about yours?”
I consider my almost non-existent social life, the upwards turn my skin has made in its constant battle against oil and hormones, and the latest efforts of my token stalker.
“Could have been a lot worse. Sat at home. Ate. Poked at myself in various reflective surfaces. Pretended not to see Priya Kathal in the bushes outside my house once or twice.”
“The usual, then.” She said as we closed our lockers, arms straining under the weight of new books.
“The usual.”