city lights

♛ Germany

CHAPTER SIX

 ✈ ✈ ✈ GERMANY

It takes effort for me to forget, rather than to remember. So even if I don't want to, the glare of fluorescent lights and smell of fresh vegetables transports me back to the past like a time machine.

I am six and I let go of my dad's hand to run wild in the grocery store. My shoes make these slapping sounds on the floor's tiles and I play a game with myself: Stomp on all the white ones, avoid the black ones. When I run out of breath, I look up and the shelves are all too big for me. Unknown faces look down at me and my dad is nowhere to be seen. I am convinced I will die here, and I start to cry. I don't know what makes me do it, but I bawl for my mother.

She wasn't even there. She was in court.

A shoulder bumps mine and it pulls me back to the present. The gruff man begins to murmur an apology, but he's cut off by my freak arm. His eyes bug out, and the hilarity of it is enough of an apology for me. I wink at him in reply. His look of incredulity makes my day.

Wear your confidence like a cape and mask, and then everything will fall into place.

I wander around aimlessly, scanning the shelves. When I was younger, My dad and I used to treat grocery shopping as a treasure hunt; he'd hand me the list and I'd run around looking for the stuff we needed. I'm not sure if it stopped because I grew too old for it or if he grew too tired of it. Either way the view up here is definitely different from when I was short and had to tiptoe to reach things. My hand itches to reach for something, but I don't really know what I'm supposed to be looking for. There's no list.

I turn around to look for her, and after dodging some bodies I find her standing near the fruit section. Bracing myself to dive into the ocean of people, I take a deep breath and start wading through them, murmuring my excuses and apologies. I didn't used to hate places with a lot of people, but now I find myself getting extremely irritated by the buzzing of voices and warmth of bodies. I'm pretty sure the lack of an arm took my love of people away with it.

"I realised I have no idea what I'm looking for," I say when I'm finally standing next to her. She blinks up at me, as if she was just on a time machine of her own. I feel myself quirk a smile at her. "Do you have a list or something?"

She smiles back, and it's this tiny upturn of her lips that reaches her eyes. "I thought you were all for spontaneity?"

I huff out a chuckle. Both to show how amusing she is and to cover how nervous I am. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, don't know where I am or who I'm with. But instead of crying for my mother there's this adrenalin running in my veins and it makes me so nervous I can probably run around the entire store and wear myself out that way.

My hand crawls its way to the pocket of my jeans, taking refuge there to keep it from shaking. Then the nerves travel to my feet and they shuffle around instead. Great. "My spontaneous juice has run out. All that's left is conformity, now," I tell her.

"That's a shame."

Everything in me tenses. It feels stupid that I'm breaking down her every word like it's a textbook, but I do it anyway. It helps me predict other people's actions so that I can prevent anything untoward from happening. It's what helped me keep at least some friends who aren't that freaked out about me. Yet. But there's just something about her, something that I can't pin down and understand. She constantly changes and shifts and just basically catches me off-guard. It's the words she says and looks she gives that just don't add up to whatever formulas I've already had from before, and it unnerves me because I need to understand.