Luxterra

Chapter 2

I couldn’t feel anymore.  

My hands drove through my backpack for the familiar sparkle of keys as my salt-stained face was just a blank sheet of paper with a bit of red ink accidentally smeared upon the edges.

Expelled. I was expelled.

But what did I expect when I came back to New York City? Understanding foster parents and peers? For the strange colors and sounds to stop cartwheeling across my mind? For my nightmares to cease? For me to find my real parents? Laughable.

After rifling for a few moments, I realized I didn’t have my house-key and would consequently have to search for the spare under the flowerpots again. I sighed at my own paradoxical self. Despite remembering the most random, nonessential details, I continually forgot how to just function through the necessities of life like a normal human being. There was a fog constantly swimming about my head, and I had to squint just to see through it. And I was sick of it.

Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t even human.

My feet tested the snow speckled side lawn for ice, but instantly fumbled over something and caused my books to run from my arms.

“Ah! Seriously?” I was frustrated, but then again I had been for as long as I could remember. Random klutziness was just another medium for the universe to tell me how much I was hated. 

An orange figure quickly glided out of the corner of my eye, with a flickering tail and an annoyed look that watched me scramble to gather my books from the slush painted ground. Instantly, I knew it tripped me. It was that little look in the cat’s eye which feigned ignorance and meowed mischief. It yawned before delicately licking its paws. Maybe I just wanted to blame something other than myself for once.

“Ugh,” I moved to grab a book near the tabby, but as I did, it jumped; its feet ricocheted off the metal cans and garbage joined the still grounded books.

“Are you kidding me?”  I punted my physics book across the yard, aware of the shifting curtains of neighbors who questioned my mental health. It wasn’t like I was going to be needing school books now anyways.

-

Soon, three flowerpots were toppled over, and a girl named Lucy was collapsed on the couch, a black-and-white movie playing on the screen and her mind forcing itself to remain blank. I wasn’t really sad; I was angry at myself, and instead of letting out my anger on unsuspecting flowerpots and overpriced school books, I decided just to feel the emotions of people that never ever existed.

Black-and-white movies were always my favorite. There were no flashing colors and no advertisements whining for attention in my head. It was just me and the characters on the screen. That way I could focus on the crinkle of laughter in their eyes, or the color of emotion in their voice instead of the pain of living with the constant, chaotic cymbal crashes of modern life.

I had to develop ways of coping with the sounds that arose with every color and the shapes that twirled across my eyes every time a bird sang or a footstep echoed across an empty hallway. Sometimes, I felt crazy because of it, but doctors clearly told me Synesthesia did not mean I was insane. However, it did mean I had to numb myself from the regular stimulation the world forced down my throat. Sleep was my only true escape, and few things could compare to the bliss.

But stories hidden in different arts and black-and-white movies came as a close second.

A very close second.

Soon, cradled under my wool blanket, my emotionally drained body was serenaded by the sound of Swedish poetry and the tolls of bells in a world created purely by imagination. I could barely make out the soldier’s comment of death and life as my eyes became leadened.