“I want to live there,” I smiled, tilting my head like I was trying to understand what I was actually saying. A smirk was playing at my lips, but I felt a part of me truly meant what I was saying. I want to live there, in all of its decrepit essence.
I craved the teardrop puddles crowded on the soaked asphalt, the overgrowth, just the entire fatality of the paired houses as they lay dying next to each other.
It goes back to the little girls with hearts for fixing, the crazed teenaged girls who want to be the one to give the boy with nothing to live for the smile, the ones searching for the bad boy to “just be good” for them only.
I was one of them in my own way, only slightly less psychopathic. I wanted to show these houses what vitality was, to feel their walls breath in sync with my own troubled thoughts.
“There…?” His eyebrows knit together and delicate lines grinned from the side of his crinkled cerulean eyes. “Come on, Mel,” Miles sighed at me, tugging on my arm. When I didn’t respond, he nearly ripped it out of its socket.
I shrugged him off and found a place on the ground to sit. The leaky ground was frosty beneath my bare legs. It had been an unusually chilly April day, and the wind had chilled everything. I didn’t know when I left my house this morning in jean shorts and a slim tank-top that this would be a problem.
I crossed my legs, looking up at Miles. Why I sat down despite the gross ground, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was because I knew it would piss Miles off. I wanted to dissect every part of these houses… They looked dissected enough already.
Silence hung in the air like the smell of smoke trailing from a cigarette. I smiled up at Miles, watching as he rolled his eyes, sighed, and plopped down next to me on the cold road.
“You’re so difficult,” he told me, jabbing a finger into my ribs as he leaned back on his hand. To be fair, I was difficult, but he hadn’t even tried this time.
“What’s so great about these houses?”
Hell if I knew, but I felt like I was falling in love. I was an explorer drawn out with wanderlust and creative innovation. My mind established a story in everything my eyes could process, running rampant with wishful ideas of a future and an abandoned past.
What happened in these houses? There were too many possibilities to fathom. Maybe two rueful families shared a property dispute, so close together. Or an overbearing mother begged her husband to build a house for their little momma’s boy of a son to live with his wife. Two lovers who desired space. Siblings who loved each other more than life, but couldn’t stand to share living responsibilities. Best friends from childhood who beat the odds and life-long hard ships. A home for business, a home to live in.
“Noah, what do you think you’re doing? My mom is going to hear you.” I mean, I knew he was an idiot, but I gave him enough credit not to show up at my house at three a.m. Sure, he knew I would be awake, I was always awake, but what was he doing here? Now?
“Vivi, your mom is going to hear YOU if you keep yelling at me instead of coming out to see me. So quietly, get out here!” He was whisper shouting at me from a mere ten feet down from my bedroom window.
I stayed where I was, facing him down from the confines of my bedroom. He wasn’t wrong, I was the one yelling. My mom would give herself a heart attack from scolding me if she woke up and found me talking to Noah this late at night. Noah was my best friend, and all my mom could picture was us having sex every moment we were alone.
What could my course of action be? The stairs creaked, the floorboards groaned, the walls bellowed at the slightest whisper of movement. The window was ten feet off the ground, I didn’t have Rapunzel hair, and there was no way I could trust Noah to catch me. Dutiful and strong was not in his job description.
“Noah!” I cupped my hands over my lips and looked down at him, waving the light from my phone at him to get him to check his own cell. I had texted him questioning how to get out of our house without waking the baby who sleeps so light a falling tack could wake her.
“Tree house.” His text gleamed at me, and I sighed as I watched him retreat out of my vantage point to our little tree house next door. A humble sticks-and-leaves house was constructed next to our classic home. Noah and I had spent many times in there as hobbling tots, but I hadn’t set foot in it in years. It was sturdy, but a major eyesore. My father had helped build it with planks of wood. We decorated the outside with all the crap we could find on the streets. But kids can find potential in everything, and we couldn’t have wished for anything better.
I had a small window that faced it, and it was a short distance of a couple meters away. If my memory served correct, my dad had left a few discarded planks, and if Noah’s brain was working correct, that would be how I would escape this house tonight.
I was right, and he was still an idiot. A loud noise erupted around me, tackling the carefully placed silence of this house. He had managed to get the wood across, and it banged onto my windowsill with the grace of an elephant on stilts. Profanities bounced around my brain, threatening to spill across my tongue as I looked across the wood panel to Noah, looking as frightened as a deer in head lights. I countered his facial expression with my own death glare. The seconds that followed were agonizingly painful as anxiety bit at the air. My ears prickled for the screeches of Izzy, my baby sister, the footsteps of my angry father, or the shrill scolding of my mother. I exhaled after a prolonged amount of time, deciding that the coast was clear.
I slipped out of my window, deciding to simply crawl across the board and tumbled into the small room of our childhood abode.
“You idiot!” I groaned as my knee scraped the ground and I felt safe enough to yell at him.
“Sorry! I wasn’t thinking!”
“You’re never thinking!”
I glared at his tousled hair lit only by the outside moonlight, gleaming exceptionally bright tonight. His emerald eyes held their own luminescence. I sighed at him as he slowly slid the board that formed the bridge to my room back inside.
“What’s this?” I stood up, taking in the unfamiliar objects in my surroundings. A telescope sat propped facing our little niche that captured the wide abyss of sky, Polaroid pictures lining the usually bare walls, and a few blank pages of paper lay stacked in the center surrounded by pastels.
“Noah, unless my parents have been hiding out in our tree house, what did you do?”
I saw the silhouette of his smile peak at me in the half dark, and it was driving me mad to not have control of this situation, to not have control over his surprise visit.
“I know what you usually do, up so late at night…” I felt a claw grip my heart with excruciatingly painful talons. A knot rose up in chest and I felt the familiar darkness seep in. What I usually do up so late is wallow in my pathetic pity, reading or writing and trying to distract myself from the inevitable depression that comes with the arrival of the speckles of stars. I dream of escape, I dream of death, I dream of morbid secrets I discover in my scars.
“What do I do at night?” I breathed, daring him to tell me what we both knew, daring him to make a difference.
“You sit up, dreaming of our wedding,” he smiled, but I knew it was halfhearted. He was doing what he always did, lightening the mood. There are some moments that even light will not shine in.
“You wish,” I tried anyways, feeling the rhythmic beating of my heart. I idly wondered how a person who feels so dead could have such a vigorous semblance of entity.
“But seriously, I didn’t want you to go through what you have been going through again, and I know I can’t do anything to stop that. But for tonight at least, I’m going to make it bearable.”
The night unfolded into something monumental for the both of us. He did something I could’ve never done on my own; he brought me out of my head and into a manageable reality. Even better, he made me a night worth living for. He showed me Polaroid pictures of our adventures through adolescence together. He showed me the stars, and he spoke about them as if they were a creation from his own fingertips, a work of art of his own doing. He talked about their names, their own personal role in bigger constellations. And he showed me a picture of a dog riding a bicycle he made out of the pastels, which looked like a kindergartener had made it. I told him he should stick to his intelligence of the stars; his creationism with pastels wasn’t working for him.
Ten years later, when we were in our twenties, our little tree house was constructed into a twin house to my parents’. I was less than thrilled to be so close to them, but it was the price I paid for preserved memories. We painted it a mix of hopeful shades of blue and secretive shades of violet. We had brought our memories to life in an inanimate object. Funny, the place I had so dreamed of escaping became my only sanctuary.
However, just as quickly as life was born on our house, nature swiped it from existence as a tornado came through late at night. Our houses didn’t see it coming, and neither did we.
“So, what story do you think this one has?” Miles tilted his head in the direction of the collapsing purple one. I stared at it for a long amount of time. Shrugging, I kissed his cheek softly and stood up.
“Who knows? But I’m going to live there,” I told him, stubborn as ever, and sure of myself that it would happen. I would live there, fix it up a little, and create a story of my own.