This short story is based on the girl’s pov in slide by goo goo dolls.
Another day with such heavy rain outside; I pulledt out a blanket to warm myself. With a pen in hand, diary laid flat on the hidden part of the bed under the blanket, trying to find justifications regarding the life that I had never really lived; just a little girl trying to figure things out as she kicked out the world and got kicked back in return.
I grew up hearing things the likes of ‘you shouldn’t be too grateful with anything, try harder!’ and ‘keep looking at the stars and find your way up there!’; basically, points about how the life has never been too precious. But as a rebel in my own way, I cherished john’s presence instead; I was never good with math but was clever enough that he meant a lot in my life: john’s a man living his dreams about the abandoned lands of zanarkand, concerts and blitzball games played inside a giant, fancy sphere filled with water and breath-taking arhictectures, yet he sang more of his dissapointments and how a misfit he was louder than any of his self-assured fantasies.
He handed me cigarettes from day to day, I gave him lots of times from afternoon to afternoon. He’d climbed up the giant tree leading to my room, later we’d dance in unison to our feverish rituals of bewitching and caressing; he freed me to dance along with his natural rhythm, causing impeccable waves of euphoria as he dragged me deeper into his world of freedom where electric guitar distortions, bold drumbeats, and dreamy lyrics outshone the lacks of forgiveness.
As much as I had always longed for the great escape; we never saw it come to pass in the very end. The once fancy freedoms he offered me have now turned into leaps of ashtrays as the inner me begged harder and harder to be released from the chain of sins. We were forced to sing the chorus as the tribute to our sins, and although he did not even show any intentions of running away, sometimes I felt that our dawns would soon be replaced by gloomy afternoons where hunters and thieves would come to ground us down.
“May, put your arms around me.” he said to me in one faithful day on the park outside the boarding school, both of us had been cut free ever since; I got disowned by my mother, and my father had also refused to call me a daughter anymore: may was dead, and in my case, ready to be transformed into someone else of bigger chances and possibilities, despite the initial ignitions were nothing but mistake. “trust me…
“what you feel is what you are, and what you are is beautiful.” John did not act strong either, instead, he showed me the vulnerable side of his only so that I could see that he was no salvation either, and that we were both in this together.
//photography by devina
//editing and writing by me
