Emily #freementalillness #literasia

n i n e t e e n

Life wasn't the same without Emily around. In class there was nobody to tell his jokes to. Each time Walter turned around, smirk on face and a line balancing on the tip of his tongue, his joyful composure was swept off his face, leaving a blank mask behind.

Days were longer and lonelier though Walter had other friends, it wasn't the same. Emily was different. Walter liked everything about her, which was hard on him, since he missed everything about her. It hurts him to know that if he ever told Emily what he sees in her, past all exterior traits, she would hate him. Emily was strong willed and intelligent. She worked hard and cared deeply about things. She never liked doing things half way, and only invested her time into things she could pour herself fully into completing. Of course, she had flaws, and all her good qualities didn't cancel them out. But none of them defined Emily Kim. What really could? Emily was a perfectionist. She got frustrated easily. She knew exactly what she wanted, or not at all, and stubbornly fixated on attaining it, once the goal was determined. Emily hurt people without realizing it, and her chain of logic was skewed by her fears.

Walter could try and put together an accurate description of Emily Kim all day and night for a thousand lifetimes and never pin her down precisely.

People were just not to be categorized or condensed into a few lines of summary. Especially not Emily.

His hands idly stirred some bubbling liquid on the stove as his eyes wandered aimlessly through the classroom. It's like nobody else existed before her. There were all these people...and he'd never really noticed them. After Emily, he started to see his classmates in a new light. They had individual faces instead of blurs. They had individual voices and laughs instead of a cacophony of clamors.

Chef's glare, however, was becoming far too familiar. Each disaster that Walter turned in gave way to a distressed shriek and shaken head of incredulity.

"Even my very worst pupils have, in some time, figured out the basics of making a meal without giving someone potential food poisoning," Chef said, in a volume meant to be heard by Walter.

"Well, maybe if you taught us, instead of failing at Flappy Bird everyday, I would be less of a disaster," Walter muttered. He was lucky that his comment never made it through to Chef's thick head, or a whack on the shoulder with a spatula would have been in order.

Walter shook his head at the memory and dipped a spoon into his pot. He lifted it up to his lips and sipped it, then spat into the sink, and switched on the faucet, letting the water rush over the tarnished taste buds. He should really drop this class. Or stop cooking. For the benefit of humanity, probably both.

"More salt?" Walter asked himself. "Well, it already went wrong. How bad could it get?" The disgraced teen cook (if he even had enough credibility to be called 'cook') grabbed a salt shaker and started pouring. It got kind of fun, so Walter ended up shaking the salt and the pepper shakers like maracas, humming the song that people did the conga to at forced family events.

"Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha CHA!" The lid of the salt shaker fell into the gurgling liquid, emptying all the salt along with it. Walter was sure that if he cried, his salty tears would only add to the mess he made, so he resorted to a deep sigh, and hid the evidence of his disaster before Chef could come and yell at him again. It seemed to be her new favorite pastime, as Flappy Bird was really giving her a run for her money.

"Hey. Walter, right?" He looked up from his bubbling concoction to see someone leaning on the counter next to him.

"Walt's the name, cooking's not his game." He replied cheekily, dying internally.

"I'm Samantha." She giggled.

"Samantha Costello?" Emily once mentioned her or something, he was sure.

"Yeah." Samantha's smile dropped as she cast a cursory glance at his supposed dish, if that. "Hey, you want some help?"

Walter glanced at his murky mixture and nodded gratefully.

"What are you cooking?" Samantha scrunched her noise in disgust as she stirred the contents of the muck and sifted through them. "Is this... a whole tomato?" She spooned out a large red mush.

"Well, it was supposed to be pasta and sauce, but it's not exactly..." Walter chanced a glance at the burbling, unidentifiably colored muck and shuddered.

"I take it you're not great in chem either, huh?" Samantha chuckled. Walter was startled at the pleasant sound of her voice.

"Are you kidding me? I've got great skills in chemistry."

"And so do I." Samantha smiled at him as she dumped his pot's contents into the sink. Walter stared as the over cooked muck flowed down the drain.

"I knew that was coming."

"Sorry, not sorry. It had to be done." Samantha pulled a new pot out of the cabinet below the sink. "Fill this with water and set it on the stove, then grab three tomatoes. We're doing this right."

Walter gave her a military salute. "On it."

The rest of class passed as if only a single second had elapsed. Samantha Costello was funny, friendly, and laughed at his puns. Every. Single. One. He knew it was a difficult thing to enjoy even one of them. But to find something so absurdly hilarious about them all that the girl had no choice but to cover her face as she guffawed behind her hands was crazy impossible... and yet here he was.

"Alright, you'll love this one," Walter said with an eager grin.

"I bet I will," Samantha replied earnestly.

"So there's this cactus farmer, right? And he has some potted saguaro sitting outside his farm, and some passerby sees them, and walks over. The cactus farmer says, don't pick them up, please. The passerby picks one up anyways, and says, why cacti?"

Samantha lost it. Walter felt very pleased with himself and found himself noticing the waves of her chestnut hair, swept up into a messy bun, and the freckles dusted across the bridge of her nose, like little stars.

Samantha didn't even notice the pot boiling over with water onto the stove, and Walter was too captivated to break the moment.

So maybe life could be. bearable after all.