Shadows

So as some of you may know from TikTok I've taken a slight break from working on Whirlwind Seduction to focus on an untitled hockey romance to implement some writing tips from a great mentor and some exceptional books. I have writer's block. So I found a prompt and ran with it, and it was about first love. It's fascinating to explore those times and feelings now over half my life later. Still, it was a cathartic endeavor for me. Enjoy!

The Shadows

The low hum of the fluorescent lights that checker the ceiling has permeated my skin. The blood pulsing through my veins vibrates at their frequency. It’s worth it to be here though. Near the computers.

I’m a step beyond a latchkey kid. Sometimes I don’t see my mom for days. The small mercy is that my stepdad is a fleeting thought. He’s never there when she isn’t, either. It might be lonely, but I have a computer at home too. It sits in the corner of the living room, a Walmart desk shrine of hope and intrigue that casts the rest of the space into uninteresting shadow. Muted. I think I’d notice the contrast more if the shadows didn’t consume most of my life. The computer in the living room is the last pillar from a functional home. I’m a 90’s kid and the internet is new and scary. Not to me. Stranger danger they say. As if the strangers that drift in and out of my life aren’t dangerous enough. Still, it’s a formality. I can’t be supervised by ghosts, and often the living room, the halls and every other room are empty, save for me.

At home I chase the emptiness that echoes around me away through brightly colored games and online friends. Here, in the school computer lab I chase it away with Kai. I wish I could say school was my reprieve from suffocating shadow, but the scar of my broken home is a visible deterrent to the other kids. They don’t know the serenity prayer or how to introduce themselves at NA meetings. Their parents' demons aren’t as visible as mine. As gruesome. I have a few friends, though I won’t remember their names this time next year. I’ll be at another new school. It barely makes sense to get attached at this point. It’s a free period and I’ve found a browser application that lets me create flowers. I like the symmetry. I love how people share their creations, a little garden of human interaction. Beauty.

I showed Kai a few nights ago. He has been sending me flowers he creates. It’s dreadfully romantic. We live in the same country but so far away it might be irrelevant, except, we share a school system. He can message me here, in the computer lab to my student ID. He can chase away the shadows that press in on me surrounded by people. It was a calculated risk connecting this way. He knows my true name now, but being whisked away or silenced forever should his intentions be deadly, doesn’t scare me. Alternating nights I wish for either option myself anyways. If only he knew what an expectation he was building in my young Jr. High brain. I’m hopelessly in love with him. A dangerous aspiration for the different girl. Luckily, he’s different too.

He has long flowing blonde hair and the fact it makes him pretty makes me giddy. My existence is too coarse to examine why his prettiness is so pleasing to me. A few years later when I finally kiss my first girl, I’ll think of him, just for a moment and those long flowing locks. Still I’m fortunate he exists in the computer. In the flesh our incompatibilities would be too great, this illusion would shatter. He’s golden light, I am a beast in the shadows, barely keeping my head above unending darkness.

Soon the checkered lights of that school are as distant a memory as the friends I’d show the flowers he made me. Kai remains constant but my heart has started to crumble. It’s a year later and we are not dating, the distance, the difference in our lives. The boy who made me flowers is now the boy I share music with. He’s still here. It’s enough. My computer sits in the corner of a new living room. The same Walmart desk is on its last legs after several moves and my heart hammers violently against my rib cage as I read his message. My name is stylised with spaces between each letter on MSN. So is his. Consciously or not I mimic his style, he guides our tastes but always makes room for mine.

The wound of my dysfunction only makes itself more apparent as I grow and school has become a waking nightmare for me. Every day I’m poisoned against myself, told of my beastly existence. Mocked for my dark skin, my thick frame, my not good enough. Never good enough. Now Kai has announced he is moving across the country, to me. The shadows recoil just as quickly as the poison in my mind demands we never meet. It hisses and seethes nipping at the gaping hole where my self worth used to be. It wins. For months and months it wins but then, the phone calls start. We talk on the phone, I call his house and ask to speak with him and his mom answers and seems warm. He takes the phone from her and she tells him not to be on it all night, her tone is musical, light, and unserious. Teasing.

He messages, and I call. In my house the words tossed in my direction are never warm, always heavy. He chases the darkness enveloping my being away and finally we agree to meet. My dad has resurfaced, and it seems an opportunity I would be remiss to waste. He is warm. It makes his noticeable absence hurt all the more, but at this moment I need his warmth and a ride and he is here. He takes us to a festival and my heart skitters wildly in my chest the whole time. I can’t enjoy a second of our time together because the poison floods my mind. Convincing me in person Kai must just see what those at school see. An unloveable beast.

He still calls for a while after. But then, we drift apart. I don’t know which one of us slipped away first. It could have been me. The shadows pulled me under for a while. My sole focus, surviving. It could have been him, worn down from being my light, burnt out.

Days turn to weeks, fall into months then break into years and I’m getting ready to go to University, something I dreamed of but never expected. Now, in my late teens I have something new and shiny in my toolbox. The shadows still consume me but the fire of sex can chase them away for a little while. The promise of it seems to make me more tolerable, and it gives me a taste of what I think love is. Unfortunately I’m learning it burns out quickly.

My boyfriend looks like Kai, but he doesn’t make room for my tastes. He extracts them with cold precision like a surgeon. Within a year his “I love you’s” seem to have a hidden message. I start to hear “I love you, so I get to hurt you.” Never palpably. Our walls bear the brunt of our arguments. Sometimes he hits himself. The subtext is clear, though; soon enough, it will be me. I stop arguing. That is to say; I stop having opinions. It’s easier that way. If not for circumstance we’d cease to be, but I cling to the love that was there and will it to come back. What I thought was love.

It doesn't, and soon I drift into the shadows. I am there but he doesn’t see me. He has friends and my computer and me, the girlfriend he tucks in the corner when he needs one. Then, Kai reappears. We find each other. My boyfriend doesn't care if I flirt with Kai as long as it keeps me from interrupting his game. Sexting is on the table. It shakes the dust from my forgotten soul and again Kai is chasing away the darkness that consumes me. The loneliness. I sit on my bed and pour all the words I’m afraid to speak out loud into my emails. Kai responds with reverence.

My dry, dusty, and chipped heart starts pumping back to life. He lights my veins on fire with anticipation. With every email, every reminder of the more whole person he knew before the years passed. The timing is wrong. I know that I shouldn’t, but I’m chasing the light. It’s explosive for a week, and then like rays of sunshine slipping through my grasp, he’s gone again. Not before leaving one last gift. A crack in my relationship I can’t ignore, the one that would save me. Have me seeking distance and eventually freedom.

My shining light once more, burning impossibly bright and then forever a shadow. Now, I sometimes wonder if my first love was a ghost. He floats through my early adolescence as such. I can’t picture his face anymore, just those long golden locks. A dusty memory that only calls to surface when an anecdote about first love comes along. A crucial stepping stone to the life I have now, bathed in warm light. My azure sky in memories of suffocating darkness.