Trying To Endure

Prologue

SONG: Reyko - Spinning Over You

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Derek Matthews

Oscar Wilde once said, "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist."

Living is a mystifying complexity to commiserate with. Great-Uncle Grae, one of my favourite and close relatives, the brother of my malicious grandfather, supposed that if one is open to insight, if one is not mindless, if one has small knowledge of everything, living is not hard. At the same time, it is challenging as you have accepted the hidden, deeper and darker consciousness. The dots connect together, the pieces to a puzzle. Trials and errors, deaths and survivals, dusks and dawns, accountabilities and revolutions, can make one powerful.

There is so much more to living. No one is fully good. No one is fully bad. Including myself, and those around me. 

To live, you must have an equilibrium of the light and dark.

It is Friday the first of a humid June day.

The sun burnishes the clear sky, licking our skins with unendurable heat. No bristles of reinvigorating wind to demolish the breaths of hell, even nature is still, too tired and baked to move. 

Music thundering from large speakers, people amble around Ines Chey's modern-styled, marble-white, two-storey mansion, either shirtless, in their bikinis or wearing thin clothing. Few are dancing; some are submerged in the immense, spherical, aquamarine-tinted pool. Others, drunk and high, propel their hands into the air full of smoke from cigarettes and blunts, mingled with the stench of sweat. The fluid in their cups leap out as they sing, dance and stomp the searing floor like wild hooligans. Some pass out with a face-first hit, and instead of helping them, I laugh and move. I'm too disorientated to help, anyway.

Ines's parents are gone for an anniversary trip to the Maldives. Thus, she decided to host a pool party — probably an ill-disciplined, deadly act because when Asian kids disobey their parents, according to Ines, it doesn't end well. 

Her parents are apparently stricter than Aunt Marlene, and that was enough to make me think the claim is a lie. My aunt is an incredibly tough woman. No one — I repeat, no one — is on her level of adamant.

We need an escape after an intense two weeks of exams — a majority of Edgewater Independent students hosted parties for the sake of it. The twins had theirs a fortnight ago, and their house is still wrecked and cluttered to this day. Naila is having hers on Monday. Theo organised one for Friday. My brother and I, on the other hand, cannot hold parties in the Manor for some odd reason — Marlene disapproved of the idea, said it would cause chaos, and the last thing the Staff wanted was cleaning up the rubbish of a bunch of reckless teenagers. We prepared the ultimate endgame at one of Uncle Thomas's country houses.  

Everyone from our year is here — the wannabe roadmen speaking in their cringe-worthy, slang-accented, attempted-deep voices; the basketball and football players magnetic to the tens of girls swarming around them; the preppy students in posh attires screaming Gucci, Louis Vitton and Cartier; the smart kids blabbing about the latest projects from renowned billionaires, and even the introverted students are here, murmuring and huddling in the corners.

At the bar my friends helped to set up, I swung an arm around Jasmine Jones — a close friend of mine, a sister. She's dressed in a faded-grey tattered crop-top, pink shorts with rips and white sandals.

"You seem bored."

"I am," she deadpanned.

"You have a Cherry Revolution." I shake my head, disappointed and tsking. "Might we get a stripper? We can afford tons." I tilt my head. "Or I can be one."