Freefall ✓

04 | summer flowers

It's nothing really. Nothing but a place where I was happy.

—Katniss Everdeen (Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins)

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Have you ever experienced something so bizarre that you come to a point when you're not sure whether it had actually happened or it was just a product of your imagination?

Because I have.

Leaning against the humid bark of a palm tree, I breathed in the briny aroma of sea breeze and contemplated the horizon, where the sky— now a pale tint of orange—met the sea. I wished the peacefulness of the scene could somehow be passed on to myself.

The cold, blissful liquid from my water bottle was a cascade surging on the arid desert of my throat. I was very well aware that my drenched-in-sweat T-shirt, the strong wind, and the cold water were classical ingredients for catching a cold, but didn't really care.

My lips let out a deep sigh. The sun was already getting low and I had yet to run back so I turned and started jogging.

I was doing this mainly to avoid my father and all the moving-in-to-a-new-house fuss, but also to relive all the nostalgic memories of my childhood, I guess. I knew that reopening old wounds was no good for me but I couldn't help myself.

It'd been six years. Six. We hadn't visited once. This was the first time I set foot on North Carolina ever since I was twelve.

This place had once been my happy home. But it felt way too far from that now. What I've learnt is that home isn't a certain place, it's a feeling. Sometimes that feeling didn't belong to a place but to a person. And with that person now long gone I didn't have a home here.

My mind went back to wondering whether yesterday's encounter with that girl was real or just a product of my imagination.

Would that have even been possible?

No, I decided. It had to be real.

Those honey eyes, those sunkissed cheeks. . .and that delicate scent of her perfume. Summer flowers. She smelled of summer flowers. It was fresh and sweet. It was, above all, real. So real.

She had changed since I last saw her. Grown more beautiful, no doubt, but that wasn't what struck me. Her attitude was completely different. She was defiant, bold, and so desperate to seem unaffected by everything.

I knew that type of people. The heartbroken type. They hid under a mask, tried to appear standoffish to protect themselves but deep inside they were anything but that. And maybe she did manage to convince most people of her aloof appearance. But not me.

Maybe it was because I had known another version of her.

She might have changed. But her eyes were still her eyes — the flames behind them warming the sweet honey trickling inside of them. The honey I remembered so well.

It's funny how much a stupid childhood crush could stick into your memory. Was it even a crush? Heck, I was eleven, what did I know about that back then? All I knew was that she intrigued me, made me curious. She wasn't like other girls: I never saw her in those girlie groups, gossiping about whatever sixth-grader girls gossiped about or knitting friendship bracelets. Whenever I saw her she was alone, her nose always in a book and that adorable look of intense concentration on her face.

I had never talked to her. I didn't even know her name. Why didn't I just ask her when we were kids?

Of course, when I moved to New York I forgot her, moved on if you like. I was going through too much at that time to be thinking about anything like that.

I tried out all kinds of stuff that could distract me. Mostly sports. And mostly dangerous ones. Ones that required tons of concentration. Bouldering, slacklining, even a light form of parkour.

I settled on skateboarding and tried to redirect all my energy to this new hobby. I used to go out almost every evening to learn new tricks and flips. I fell a lot, got injured, bled. But it was good. I didn't mind the pain that came with it. Actually, I needed that pain. Anything to get my mind off that perpetual feeling of remorse constantly eating on my insides.

New York never felt like home. But it was better that way because home was the last thing I needed at that time. It helped me to get distracted from everything. There was a moment when I even thought that I was already okay.

But when my father announced that we were returning, I realized that whatever efforts I put into healing over my past had been purely pointless—a downright waste of time and energy. At the moment he mentioned it, it was as though all of the stitches that have been holding my heart together all those years suddenly tore apart leaving it to deform into a bloody mess.

I didn't understand the reason for my father's decision.

He would never say it to me, but I knew that our sudden change of location from a small calm town to a hectic noisy city had to be because of Mom's passing. I supposed he needed his own distance and time. But why, after six years, he decided that it was time to come back? He said it was something to do with a new job, but I knew there was more to it. Had he moved on already?

You'd think that a parent's death would result in the closure of the relationship between the other parent and his son. But if something had changed in our relationship, it was that we'd drawn even farther apart.

He was never home, I almost didn't see him. Part of me stayed naive and believed that it was "just work" but the other, more realist part guessed that he was probably avoiding me.

Sure, he provided me with all my financial needs and yes, I appreciated that. Money was never a problem for my father. But there were times when I had really needed him and he hadn't been there for me. And that wasn't okay.

But yeah, I've grown used to it. What else can you do regarding a situation you can't change other than to accept it?

It may have been for the better, even. With no one to support me during hard times, I became more self-sufficient— you could say—in that aspect. More immune to tragedies. Or at least that's what I told myself and hoped.

My thoughts wandered off to that girl once again. She didn't recognize me, I think. Why would she? We never even got along. Plus, that was six years ago and I liked to think that I've changed.

But there was a moment, I'm sure, a flash in her eyes where I noticed that she sensed something. Maybe she didn't remember me completely but a tiny fragment of me managed to survive in her memory. And for some reason that made me feel a bit happier.

My heart flipped in my chest when I caught sight of a now old and slightly tattered zip line hanging between two palm trees above the beach sand. It was still there.

All at once, I was a seven-year-old kid again demanding 'one more time!' while my mother laughed softly, the corners of her hazel eyes crinkling in admiration as the auburn waves of her hair bounced. She was lifting me up and I was joyfully sliding down the zip line once again, feeling as if I was flying.

Ouch.

I was doing it again. I was hurting myself. It felt like a knife being dragged down my heart. The well-known feeling of guilt was building up in my chest again, tighter than ever.

I turned my head around abruptly and picked up my pace. No, this was definitely not good for me. Maybe I shouldn't have gone out to this minefield of happy memories, where every wrong step could lead to a new explosive heartbreak. Maybe I should have stayed at the new house helping out with the moving in.

And to think that tomorrow was the first day of my senior year, at some new (but, according to my father, good) school I've never heard of and knew nobody from. It was really the last thing I needed right now.

Yeah, this was going to go by just great.