#makeanewstart

Click.

The strobe light makes a soft ticking blip of a noise as it flashes, its light flooding the cramped room in defiance of the dead black that replaces it a split second later.

Click.

I raise my cup in the air and whisk my fingers through my hair, swapping it over onto the other side of my head as I swing my hips like a pendulum timed with the jumping bass beat.

Click.

She catches my eye because she’s so still. She stands, arms at her sides and eyes hollow, while everyone around her moves, silent but so busy, individually but so similar to surrounding bodies that they blur together like movie extras.

Click.

He catches my eye because he stands out in a different way: he is walking. People sway around him and he steps through them like parting grass.

Click.

She sees him. She must. He sees her. He might see only her.

Click.

Her eyes must find him, because the game begins. The game, the hunt. She quirks the side of her mouth up and tangles her fingers in her curls, cocking her body into twisting, curving, intentional shapes. She draws him closer, or perhaps nothing could have stopped his pace.

Click.

He is using his arms now, his dance one of forwardness and destination. He is pushing himself toward her, plowing through the torsos that slow him down.

Click.

She’s dancing, and she turns almost away. To tempt him. Their eyes make contact, and then his hand against her arm. He could be aiming for something else, something beyond her. She could be another human to pass.

Click.

But then he’s dancing too.

Click.

They twine together, distinguishable and separate but moving in unison.

Click.

And then they disappear, almost, because they blend in. They are like the movement around them, letting the products of a pair of speakers dictate their motions.

Click.

They are together, yet they have each other.

Click.

She is not still, now. He is not pushing away. And so the space around them, the unspoken, respectful but rebuffing distance that defines them as other, disappears.

Click.

“Come on,” he said, and he held out his palm like a suggestion. “Dance with me.”

Dance with me.

I stared at his hand, suspicious. Dance with me. It would have been a benign invitation had I not known him, had I not watched him pick up three girls in a row the night after Their Talk. She had changed him, maybe temporarily and maybe not. Or perhaps she’d just set him free. Either way, I leaned away from him. Before I could configure an inoffensive question, my mouth asked, “Why?”

My face must have scrunched up into something like a grimace, because he rolled his eyes and flipped his hand through the air, renewing his offer. “Just dance with me.” He shook his head as though that could brush off my thought processes and skid us through this moment the way he wanted.

I crossed my arms over my chest slowly, pursing my lips and intentionally narrowing my eyes. I wasn’t disgusted with the idea of dancing with him. We were comfortable enough that the prospect didn’t hit me with the self-consciousness that crippled most of my first impressions, but I knew his track record. I knew his penchant for self-destruction. And I knew that this was the moment I could pass on the opportunity to let him hurt me alongside himself. This was the offer, the question, the line. The place where I decided whether or not to care.

“Give me a reason,” I insisted, raising my eyebrows at him. A challenge. He could deal with a challenge.

With an exasperated sigh, he let his hand flop to his side. “I don’t know, because I’m asking?”

I blinked, waiting.

“Because…” he searched for a second, then shrugged. “Because I want you to. Because this is a great song. Because it’s fun and we could both use that.” He sighed. “Because we’re friends. I don’t know. Whatever reason will make you say yes.” He bounced a little on the phrase say yes, as though he were a little kid begging for something.

I paused for a moment.

“Because we’re friends,” I repeated, enunciating friends with a small, accepting smile.

He eyed me skeptically out of the corners of his eyes, watching me hop down from the barstool.

I had always wanted to be invisible. I had wanted the ability to jump into no space, hold my legs to myself and hold my breath, to make myself so small that I could be without being seen. I had wondered at that ability, wondered if it could give me more than what I already had. I had wondered if it could let me hear thoughts admitted only to some people, if it could mean I knew more and had more and felt more because I could do more without it being known that I was doing it.

But then the door swung open. I saw his face, saw it change when it found mine, and then react.

His features compacted into hard impassivity; some form of aggressive stubbornness spread like dark ink wicked across the thin paper of his face. He shut down and retreated, but with brute force and the loudness that told me he’d poured half of his anger himself. After a shuffle, he stepped back and away from the doorway, raising a hand in a blunt gesture, and then he was gone. His voice echoed down the stairwell once, then rang silent.

Its own heaviness swung the door back home with a thud. It was quiet for a heartbeat, and then conversations resumed as though the interruption had changed nothing.

It had changed nothing.

Yet now, his past sank into the room. It pulled me down with it, its weight a steady pressure on my shoulders as I stood, breathed, and made myself move.

I let the shiver run through me, the sad drag of bad news oozing into my bloodstream, and let my tired eyes rest for a slow second.

I did not want him to see me. I did not want to see him see me.

I’d been drifting. My mind was toying with the edges of sleep but letting it evade me, letting it slip away before I dipped into dark nothing for the night. I could still sense the closeness of my covers around me, the safe weight of them present against me in a way that reminded my tired body of falling asleep next to him. I’d left my desk lamp on, and its light leaked in through my closed eyelids. Maybe that was why I was only halfway to dreaming. Maybe the light was anchoring me to awareness, maybe it was the reason I was still thinking and wondering with the rest of my consciousness.

I heard the squeak of the bathroom door down the hall and waited for the clack as it swung closed again. I heard a trail of footsteps, my ears following them down the hall and away from where I was until they faded into the humming, living quiet. A skateboard coasted outside, its wheels jumping heartbeats over the cracks in the sidewalk. It faded away, hard wheels on rough cement, until I could no longer find it in the white night noise.

I must have drifted farther. I could sense that the time had passed, but had not experienced it passing. There were more sounds now. Another pattern of footsteps tapped in the hallway, then stopped abruptly.

That was wrong.

BAM bam bam.

The knock came hard and fast, ending in a silence so complete I wondered if it had ever been broken. I stiffened, waiting, my ears tasting the moment and almost ringing with strain. Quiet poured into them, deceitfully calm. I made myself breathe, feeling my heartbeat kick up a bass beat in my empty eardrums and willing it to slow down. The covers were still bundled around me, but their safe heat had disappeared. Goosebumps fizzed like hackles along my arms, tingling up to the nape of my neck before they settled into my body as a dull shakiness.

I sat up. The air in my room was cold and still around me, its once-cozy blueness frozen away. I waited for another moment, wondering if the knock would come again. Wondering if he knew I was home. Wondering if he was listening, if it would be better to hold still and be invisible to his ears.

But the crack under the door was interrupted by two foot-sized shadows, unmoving and unmistakeable. He wasn’t going anywhere.

My feet found the floor, cool wood pressing back against my bare soles. I flipped the covers back over the space I’d left, wanting to hide at least that small home. Somehow, concealing it felt like keeping it for myself. I pulled a sweatshirt on over the cold and hugged it around my arms.

Slowly, I approached the door. I hesitated after each step, knowing already that I’d twist the lock and find him standing there, expectant. He would be waiting for me.

I paused close enough to reach out and touch the knob, realizing how few inches of safe dark wood separated me from the door. He must have heard me walking; the foot shadows shifted slightly. The movement rushed me.

With a bracing breath, I reached for the cool metal of the doorknob. I wrapped my fingers around it, purposeful yet careful. I rotated my wrist. The latch unhooked with a deep click and then I was letting the yellow hallway light spill onto my face.

There he was, sloping shoulders and baby face. His lips pouted limply and eyes were round, staring at me as though they expected an apology. He was slouched forward with his legs locked so they looked distorted, bowed out of proportion with the rest of his body. His shirt was too big, and cut so that the neckline was a lopsided boat. He was wearing too-tight jeans with an odd flare at the ankle where they ended at just the wrong length, and he had them partially tucked into a pair of long, shiny, lace-up boots I’d never seen before. I barely recognized him from the slouchy boy I’d fallen for.

“Hi,” I offered, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Hey,” he responded, and then his stance shifted. He wanted to come in. He wanted to talk and to tell me his thoughts because I used to ask for them. He wanted to change things, to clean up the mess we’d torn our future into.

But he didn’t speak, for long enough to let me know. He was swaying, too drunk to stand still and too drunk to realize it. He was breathing, loudly, through his nose, unaware of the animalistic character it gave him. And he was staring, giving me undivided attention but not seeing me. Not reading the disinterest on my face, or the exhaustion. Seeing my face as close and looking back at his, instead of watching me sigh and shake my head.

I shouldn’t have answered the door. My thoughts rewound, and I watched myself roll over and stuff a pillow over my ears to block out the existence of the boy in the hallway looking for me. I watched myself breathe slowly in and slowly out, my consciousness settling into peaceful dreams. And I watched him knock twice more, sigh, but then leave. I watched him give up and walk away.

Now, I turned to look over my shoulder at my bedroom as it really was. The bed was messily made, and my towel was still draped over the back of my desk chair. The floor was blank wood, the walls white, the ceiling high. It was my place, my sanctuary and home. My room.

I took a step back into it, looking for the comfort it held with a closed door. A locked door. A door that blocked out the millions of things that made my heart pound. That shut away the angry fingers on my arms, that muted the sound of my name used as a swearword. A solid barrier against the desperation and the begging, the guilt and hurt and bad. My locked door, which barricaded him out and kept me protected and warm in its cozy volume.

xoxo still jealous of your ny lifestyle and general awesomeness

PROVE YOU WRONG

YES i just heard that one it is so so beautiful 

The event itself, whenever it commenced, was nearly silent.

Its reaction, however, had started with a shriek and a low yell. A commotion had grown around the initial realization, footsteps drumrolling along corridors and down stairwells as people sated their desires for an eyeful for themselves. They rushed to windows or stampeded toward the doors, pulling on coats and hats to keep warm.

The excitement had died down now. All had returned to a hushed, breathless shade of normal.

He shrugged up his shoulders, hunching them toward his core as he fell from the last stair and landed on the lobby rug. The heel of one hand pushed open one door’s handlebar, and then the second as the first heavy latch thudded back into place behind him.

Wind whooshed in, a slight resistance against the wood he forced aside so that he could step outside. The air was bitingly cold, but in a somehow muted way. With its chill, it swept through his throat in with a frigid freshness that jerked a shudder from him.

“I wish it would snow,” she had said.

He looked up at the flakes as he dropped one foot after another down the cement steps that pooled in sidewalk at their base. They drifted down in tiny specks of ice from the flat white sky. As he lifted his nose toward their origin, he almost smelled the cold the way she’d described it; chalky and frosted like white seaglass.