ALL THAT WAS LEFT BEHIND

A Strange Continuation Of Continual Strangeness

            The petite doll of a girl stepped out from around the corner, her eyes illuminating when they met mine. Before I could break the gaze, a smile spread across her face, as natural as if it were a permanent fixture.

            “Hi,” she said as she came up to me. “Are you new here?”

             “Uh, yeah.”

            The girl nodded, her chocolate coloured curls bobbing with her. “Cool. I was sent to come find you.” she said, “We’re in the same homeroom, I suppose.”

            “Oh,” I acknowledged, not knowing how else to respond to her. “That’s nice.”

            She turned, leading me along the corridor of identical, blue lockers. Some were dirty and grimy, some were quite clean. Some had graffiti, spelling out thick letters of undecipherable words, and a few were home to black and white posters for different events. But yet, they were still, ultimately, exactly the same.

             “My name is Willa. What’s yours?” she asked politely, as a line of latecomers steamed in the building from another blue door.

            I watched my sneakers skip across the floor in front of me as I answered. “That’s a really nice name. Mine’s Sea.”

            She looked at me, her brown eyes widened. “Really? Where did you get that name from?” she asked with surprise, as if I had picked it up off the street.

            I shrugged. “I don’t really know. I mean, I’ve never even been near an ocean before. My guess is that it’s from a poem, my mom liked poetry, but I never could find one that would suggest the background of my name. It could have come from something else though,” I rambled.

            She nodded, smiling, and thankfully didn’t question anything else from my odd story. My very odd, pointless story.

            “Sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble.”

            She laughed, waving it off. “No need to be sorry. You didn’t ramble. Gosh, you should hear how much I ramble!” Willa exclaimed.

            “Oh, okay,” I said, and then fell into a short, awkward silence as we came up to the room. She motioned me to the open door. “Well, this English. Miss Daniel teaches, and is pretty nice. I hope you enjoy yourself here.”

            I nodded and thanked her before following her into the room. Slipping into the crowd, into the soft currents of the water, and into a cookie cutter that didn’t really represent me.

            I was supposed to be invisible.

All the way home, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking just how easy it would be to simply completely pave over everything that mattered to me, and fall back into something new.

            I wasn’t quite sure how my own character would click into the rest of the school, Claire’s house, and the neighbouring communities. A small shred of me wanted it to all fall into place with easy perfection, while the more logical side knew that too many complications about myself left me with too hard edges.

            Somewhere in the wind and the whirling leaves, flying in jubilant, wide cyclones around me, I heard my name being murmured in my ears.

            I turned around in surprise, only to hear it again.

            “Sea…”