Select Works

One Night

Reposting this. Took it down because I thought I might publish it. I didn't lol.

She flips the small pages with fingers stiffened by the cold. The orange paperback cover shows the crinkles of wear along its spine, the corners frayed, and pages creased from the many months it has been in her possession. The small book with the orange cover and yellow title has been well loved. She has lost count of the number of times she has read it, but each time she still feels the same sense of belonging.

The boy in the book is misunderstood. He is misunderstood and struggling. He is not like other people—he hates other people—so he acts out to purposely distance himself from those who have repeatedly failed him. She wishes she was brave enough to do the same, but expectations and her innate fear of disappointing those who set her expectations keep her hostage in a false persona of complacency. I am living a life I have no wish to live, Virginia Woolf had said. Virginia knew. And she knows, too. She knows how easily sadness is disguised.

She has a friend in the boy trapped between the pages, a companion unlike the earthly acquaintances who claim to know her best. Her, the boy, and Virginia against the world. Them and all the other melancholy people. It is strange. She has a family waiting for her at home, parents who love her and a little sister who thinks the world of her, and yet she dreams of what it would be like to run away. Her eyes wander over the crowded scene of the public bus, at all the different people living all their different lives. She watches a woman resting her head against the glass in the row in front of her, fascinated by her complexion as the city lights shine through the windows and highlight her dark skin with a clementine glow.

She takes out the little orange book and begins to read again, though it is not long before she vaguely registers someone sitting across the aisle from her. Her eyes glance up, catching those of a boy around her own age. Blond hair, brown eyes, tall and narrow in stature, he is pretty. Delilah blushes after she looks away. He wears black jeans and a grey beanie, clunky shoes similar to her own and a shirt that says 'Til Death We Do Art in gothic font. He carries himself in an observatory manner, not looking at a cell phone, a magazine or a pretty girl, but at the passing streetlights and waving at the child seated a few rows down. She cannot place exactly why she sees it, or how, but she does. He looks like he knows, just like she knows.

"I, uh," she stumbles, her eyes flicking away in uncertainty. "I like your shirt."

"I like your book," he replies with a smile broader than the sea. Her eyes dart to where his gaze falls, the book she has been so often criticized for enjoying. "A pity no one understands him."

"Exactly!" She finds herself saying a little too loudly. She blushes. "He is protecting himself; I think."

"Just like the rest of us who understand him," he says with a knowing look.

The two teenagers spend the following minutes discussing the little orange book with the yellow title, growing increasingly excited the more their philosophies aligned as they moved on to different topics. "Have you read Chekov?" one would say, or "Have you seen The Hours?" Each question was met with a surprised yes, which would always set off a new tangent of discourse. She found a companion, a real one that she had never expected to find. She found someone else who understood, who was melancholy like herself. It was not only that he found joy in all the same things she did, but that he felt the same hidden meanings. He understood the existentialism of Russian literature and the heartbreak in John Green's works.

"Hey," he begins, leaning forward to balance his skinny arms on his elbows. "This is totally crazy and not something I've ever suggested before to anyone else, but there is a little shop at the next stop with the coolest stuff inside. It's where I was headed. Wanna go with me?"