#675

"I like flowers in your hair."

I set a flower over her ear and laced it through her hair. It was white with stripes of red up the center of every petal, with flecks of red strewn over every petal. She smiled and she wore it through the rest of the night. It was carnival night and we were walking among the stalls, looking at this and at that, laughing at some of the more ridiculous trinkets and considering buying some of the others. In the end we only ended up buy glowsticks which she wore around her neck and her wrists. She put some on me too. So far from the oceans, I lost myself for a while. 

I was a very quiet child. I kept to myself and there was always a barrier between me and the others. I didn’t feel like I connected and I still don’t. I’m a solitary soul, more comfortable with myself, alone, than I am with others. It was more pronounced, then, though. I talked to almost no one and though I sometimes wanted to know certain people better I wouldn’t reach out to them. It was only later that I realized that getting to know people better would only disappoint me, I didn’t know that the people I construed people to be when I barely knew them was inevitably much nicer, more virtuous, more intelligent than they would actually end up to be. I didn’t realize that as a whole humankind would be so disappointing, not then. Instead, it was just shyness and an unwillingness to put myself out there. What would I say? I knew that I wasn’t good at speaking so I thought about it and  what to say and so I’d sit until I’d lose my opportunity. Then I’d give up. 

I was on my computer playing a game when I met her. A chat room for people interested in fantasy. A temporal space in time that no longer exists now…we were role playing. She snuck up behind me and started a conversation. She asked what I was doing and sheepishly I explained. It’s a part of my life I’m still nervous talking about, it still makes me feel ashamed. I don’t even like writing it here…..

….but the next day she was there doing the same thing. And we talked. And talked. She opened me up in a way no one else has ever done and I felt for her.