Burning Pheonix

BEGINNINGS

The wind was silent yet recognizable like a whistle as it plays its usual tune near the middle class neighborhood of Carson Drive. The wind was dry but cold in its temperature as it shudders Maui Igo out of another pleasant and back into the cold world. His fierce medium brown eyes open into the near darkness as he realized that he had embarked on another chapter, hopefully the concluding one, with regards to his education. It was his last year in CFHS as graduation loomed in the near future. The chance of him dunning an eye-catching graduation gown with a matching cap as he made his way down the steps after hearing his name being called, to which he robotically shakes the hand of his schoolmaster and take in the lack of cheers was highly probable. He was neither a great student nor a bad one. The problem with Maui Igo was that his seemingly ordinariness tends to make him stale, almost invisible when it came to his peers. Maui was not a scholar, yet he was no slacker. He also wasn't a top-tier all-American athlete, but he could hold his own against others despite his light frame. The harsh truth about the world was that the ordinary--the ones who did what they 'supposed to do- tend to be ignored, shunned, and dismissed from the world. Meanwhile, whether it's good or bad, the extremes­, criminals and authority figures alike, the well-gifted and the handicapped, tend to gain the awe, sympathy, and even envy from this contradicting society. I'm invisible...but not anymore goddamn it.

Just like the months before, he performed his usual morning routine which consists of a relaxing warm bath that allows him to appreciate the scent of his new soap, unorthodoxy brushing his tooth right after, and then doing something totally different, effectively breaking his morning tradition. In one hand was permanent hair dye while the other cautiously stroke his natural brown hair that he had grown out a little during the past few months. He stroke his hair delicately, almost somberly, as if he was having regrets, but he had already justified this many times in his head and he knew that he was going to go through with it.

When Maui emerged from his showers, he looked...different. His slightly long brown loom teasingly close to both shoulders as they normally do, but this time, on his right frontal side, the hair went from the natural stale brown to a bright, fierce red. Satisfied, the young man made his way down to the house kitchen for a rejuvenating breakfast where both his parents had already beaten him as anticipated.

But they weren't his real parents. He liked to called them 'substitutes' in his head. They weren't horrible people, but they weren't like the real thing. The one thing Maui enjoyed most about them was their absolute honesty to him as such telling him the origins of his biological parents. They, Cyril and Alysa Igo, happily married one another after meeting as both were firefighters for the city. They fell in the fountain of love and later gave life to Maui but tragically, and ironically, it was the fire, the same one they were trained to fight that had consumed them where baby Maui miraculously survived and was given to Jan and Abby Susman, an older couple who discovered that they couldn't procreate and were eager to accept. In both sympathy and respect, they allowed Maui to retain his parents' last name, which was a grave mistake on their part.

As Maui grew up, so did his wisdom and his perception. He realized that the majority of the children shared a surname with their parents, and seeing that, he began to wonder why he was one of the rare exceptions to that dogma. This led to Jan and Abby reveling to a young Maui the fate of his true parents, which temporarily devastated the young boy, pushing him into a brief hole of depression. They never explained to him the cause of their deaths, but Maui would soon find out while unintentionally overhearing a conversation about his origins from two adults at his new school. Once again, his foster parents weren't horrible individuals or bad parents, but the thought of the grass being greener on the other side always chip away at anything positive­ that the Susmans did. Nevertheless, in his opinion, they were the best foster parents that they could be.