Far From Home

This is a love story. This is not the type of love story you find in a love song. At the same time, it is exactly that.

Rosa enjoyed her tea in the way that she enjoyed her dreams: warm and cozy, rich, and altogether too sweet. Rosa was a dreamer. Her mother was inclined to chide her over her inability to differentiate between her dreams and reality, but she failed to take it to heart. There wasn’t a lot that she took to heart, other than good literature and the piano. Even though she stopped playing two years ago, piano continued to hold a certain significance to her, like an old book almost forgotten but treasured through the years. It was the love one could only feel for a lifelong friend; a childhood memory; a lullaby traced through a mother’s lips. Rosa’s mother used to sing to her every night. Her fingers would trace the keys with a graceful effortlessness that over the years Rosa would be unable to achieve, no matter how hard she tried. Even now, despite how infrequently her mother’s hands came into contact with the piano’s smooth surface, the melody would flow, and wrong notes would meld themselves in with the song until they seemed almost more fitting than the original. There were a few songs that struck Rosa whenever she heard them. They were all different, some in English and some in French, but they all caused a certain feeling in Rosa. She would feel painfully nostalgic, blissfully melancholy, filled with an almost improper sadness not from the songs but from the associated memories. Joyful love songs aligned with scraped knees on the playground; slow and sentimental ballads mixed with nights on the back porch in Nice playing cards and watching the stars.

Sometimes, when Rosa wasn’t dreaming about Joyce or Woolf, when she wasn’t gazing out her window pondering the intricacies of words, she would think about love. She could dissect a paragraph down to each word and yet she could not identify one of the words she heard the most. She did know what it was like to be in love. She was in love with Nick Carraway and Atticus Finch, and Huck Finn, and Sydney Carton a thousand times over. She could identify exactly which parts of their personalities she appreciated. But even her friends laughed at her when she told them. She swore they were real. They were complicated, just like living human beings. Just because their life had to be written into them didn’t mean they lacked humanity.

But then there was Charles. She could pinpoint what she liked about him. She liked his eyes, light like a faded sky. She liked how the veins lifted slightly from his hands. She liked his habit of running his fingers through his hair. She couldn’t figure out why, though. He wasn’t visibly adventurous, hadn’t proven himself heroic, wasn’t endearingly flawed and yet essentially flawless. He was just a person. And for some reason, he was the most complicated person she had ever met.

Rosa woke up on Saturday morning to the sun making stripes across her body and Kafka crossing himself beneath her left hand. She must have fallen asleep reading. The last time she had seen the clock it had been past three. The little hand now hovered halfway between one and two. She had slept in. She disliked sleeping. It cut out of her time thinking; she rarely dreamed outside of consciousness.

On Monday she went to school. She had classes. The air was starting to hold that biting winter tinge and she watched it swirl in the tree branches outside of the building. At lunch, instead of eating, she walked from English to the hallway to read. Along the way, she heard music. Charles was stoic, but when he sang, he didn’t suppress his emotion. When his voice made its way in its soft waves toward her, she felt something tugging at her. There was something pressing in her heart, at once filling it with a richness and accentuating its emptiness. She followed his voice until it was just around the corner. One step and they could be face to face. She could smile and tell him how beautiful he was and maybe he would smile back at her. She leaned against the wall and slid until she was sitting with her knees against her chest. They would talk until he told her he liked hearing her think out loud. His voice stopped and he played a few slow chords to transition into a different song. She would ask him to go somewhere after school and they would rush to a cafe to escape the cold and drink tea and their conversation would flow as peacefully and naturally as he shifted from song to song.

--

Charles did not drink tea. He drank coffee, sometimes. When he did, it was purely for the caffeine; he detested heat in most forms. For that reason, Charles loved his city, Montreal. He loved it more than he let on. Charles was cool. He was indifferent. He wore cashmere sweaters and messy dark hair and walked by with a detachment from everyone else that made his straight spine seem bent with the curve that warranted invisibility. He walked through school with his eyes on the ground. He walked home with his eyes towards the sky. He lay on his bed with his guitar in his hands and the curtains drawn and his eyes tracing the glow-in-the-dark stars lining constellations along the ceilings and walls of his room. Charles was an observer.

On Saturday Charles sat on a park bench with his guitar and sang. He loved to sing. He loved a lot of things.

On Monday Charles woke up at four. He traced circles on the surface of his guitar until his eyes closed. He fell back asleep two minutes before his alarm rang. He walked to school and let the cold air skim his face until his cheeks were red and his breaths diffused in warm clouds in front of him. At lunch, he sat in front of his locker and thought about his life.

“Excuse me.” Charles stopped the strumming of his fingers and opened his eyes and looked up. A girl stood before him. Her name was Rosa Louise Reese. Everywhere she went she went with a book and a contrastingly humble and affected look in her eyes. She was the type of girl you would imagine running into in the library. She had probably read more than all of the English teachers at the school.
“Hm?” He couldn’t imagine why she would talk to him. Maybe he was bothering her reading. Something about the red tinge along her cheeks and the way she was tracing the edge of her shirt with her fingers hinted otherwise.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just, well, I heard you and I thought you sounded nice.” She had a pleasant voice, some sort of accent barely pushing itself out when she pronounced her Rs, and she gave a small cough.
“Thank you.”
“Do you mind if I sit here and listen?”
Charles shook his head. People often showed slight interest, but nobody had ever asked his permission to listen to him before. He wasn’t sure that he liked it, but something in his head told him to. She had good intentions. She sat down, a little too far away, and looked at the ground. He noticed her hands shaking. Normally he wasn’t affected like this by how others felt. But it caught him off-guard. There was no trace of what he thought she would be like. He usually wasn’t so off in judging people. He realized that while he was thinking he was absently focusing his gaze just over her shoulder and she kept glancing up at him and then immediately glancing away. He smiled a little at the youthful feeling of it all and began to play.

Author's Note

This is not finished. This is not polished or edited or planned or plotted. I hope this makes sense. I hope it is realistic. I hope it is not silly or pointless and yet in a way, I hope it may be exactly that.
I would love any reviews. Advice or criticism or words of hatred. Words.