d r i f t w o o d

Driftwood ☽ Chapter Five

❛❛please do not feed the fears.❜❜

-UNKNOWN

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driftwood ☽ chapter five

          Every town had it's own secrets. 

          And so did this one, just as the previous town did, and the one before and the one before that. It never had to be something as sinister as the murder of a friendly couple, or a secret, mysterious group of crazed teenagers causing trouble. 

          Sometimes, it was as simple as it's own heritage. I absolutely adored little towns with little histories: the tale of a distressed princess who had waited years for her lovers return, only to kill herself upon discovering his army had lost a fatal battle. Or the mystery of a mistress gone mad in her bed chambers, located somewhere deep within a sacred monumental palace. Sometimes even the reason why a certain building was burned down. It always intrigued me. Such a town was one meant to be explored, because how could you discover anything in a place that had nothing to hide? Every town had had it's own secrets...

          But some towns didn't have secrets.

          Some towns were the secrets. They harbored them:

          In tiny homes, occupied by tiny people. Sometimes it would be a certain item that was treasured by a royal King or Queen. Other times it was something extravagant that lived deep within the earth: oil, bones, diamonds. It was mesmerizing to realize how much of peoples lives were a mystery.

          And in understanding that, I found that the biggest secrets—the biggest mysteries—were the ones just in front of me. The ones I had met. It's something you get accustomed to: meeting people but being cautious of them because you know that they are an overflowing vessel of unknown things. And sometimes mysteries weren't good for you.

          I remember when I had first seen Quinn, not that moment immediately after he had opened the door, but when he had started talking.  When I had actually taken a look at him, standing there in my doorway with his pale blue hair and hands in his washed out jean pockets. He had looked so strange to me. And I realized that no matter how many different people I met, they would never cease to surprise me. I had never been so anxious to figure out the secret behind a person.

           "So, you travel a lot, huh. Who is the strangest person you've ever met?" Quinn asked me as we sat in purple fields and looked up into the sky, "besides me of course." He turned and smirked at me. I had fulfilled my promise to teach him the art of 'sky-watching', which wasn't entirely hard, considering all we had done was identify the way the clouds looked like candy floss today.

          I shifted slightly in the low field and studied the contour of clouds in the air. It's beautiful how when you look up, the clouds look as though they are painted against a blue canvas. When the reality is that they are large substances hanging in mid air.

          "My ex-boyfriend, Devin." I said blankly. And Quinn scoffed mockingly, "I know, it sounds painfully cliche." I smiled.