Countdown

Sometimes I witness stories unfold and shift perspectives. This is one of those stories.

You remember it even now.

Sometimes, sometimes when it hits you the worst, it’ll make you sit in a corner, shut the the world out, blast music and countdown everything up till now, because you try to pinpoint the exact moment when things began to fall apart.

Venit autem nunquam moritur.

Ten.

You meet her just like the way you meet anyone first: you crash in. She’s new and talking to a friend of yours and you step in, sling an arm around his shoulders and are in the middle of talking his ear off when you notice what you’ve interrupted. The girl looks up at you and scrunches her face like she’s trying to figure you out and you smile because you know she can’t. You can tell she’s smart, perceptive and something which makes you stop because you can’t place it. You introduce yourself and now you think there was an inkling about what was going to happen, but you brushed it off. That’s all, you concluded back then.

But it wasn’t.

Nine.

It’s been weeks and you have talked to her more since that day. You can tell what she thinks of you: you’re loud, impulsive, sometimes rude, but you’re fun. You know that you were right about her when you first met her and you know you still can’t place that thing which made you stop that day.

She waves you over and you smirk.

You’ll figure it out. After all, you always do.

Eight.

Sometimes it surprises you when she intrigues you. It’s been a while since people have had your full attention and that’s why it makes you blink at times when she says something and you want to know more, to ask the why’s and what’s and how’s.

The smug look on her face makes you think she knows.

Seven.

You realise after eight weeks that you love the stuff she’s told you about. That sometimes you try to find out more just so you have something to talk to her about. That there’s more to her and you still can’t figure eveything out.

You scratch your cheek.

You don’t understand.

Six.

Everything starts to fall together in the middle of September. It’s a school festival and the teachers have told the two of you to get something from the storeroom and you’re trying to avoid tripping over your feet in the dark when a moth flies past and she jumps and you laugh and say something which makes her hit you and rolls her eyes and that’s when the bulb above you flickers to life and you look at her, really look at her in the blinking light, at the way she stands, annoyed, hands folded and something tugs at your heart, something which makes you feel both powerful and weak at the same time and you think it must have showed on your face because she laughs and asks you if switching the light on really scared you that much and you trip over your feet, this time even with the light.

You still don’t know if it was an accident or if it was because you wanted to hear her laugh again.

Five.

You’re lying on your bed when you finally realise what that something about her was. You realise what that tug at your heart was. You realise what it means when things still don’t make sense and that you don’t want them to.

S**t, you think. S**t.

Four.

Everything starts to fall apart at the start of October. You make the first domino fall without even realising, when she’s telling you something and the way she’s trying to hide her grin almost makes you miss a step and you panick because your mind screams hide, hide, hide and you cut her off. You watch as her smile fades away but you are too busy being relieved to notice that the whole pile has slowly started to crash around you.

You walk away.

Even now, you still wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t.

Three.

It’s defense mechanism, you realise.You’re used to pretending, but now you’ve met someone who makes it hard to do that, makes you not want to do that and eveything in you wants to run, to stop this, to understand. You do it even without realising: brushing her off, pushing her away, saying things you don’t mean and you can see her slowly start to close off, see the way confusion turns to anger and then to tiredness and it hurts because she thinks the part she sees is all you are and you want to tell her you aren’t, it’s the other part you’re more worried about because it drags you back the moment you want to get a little closer.

You know she won’t undertsand and sometimes you think it would hurt more if she did.

Two.

I messed up, you think now as you look at her across the corridor with her friends, look at the way she tenses when your eyes meet and the way her friends glare at you when she’s telling them something about you. She brushes off apologies now the way you brushed her off all those months ago and you try to convince yourself that this is for the best. So you do what you’re best at: you be as loud as you can, watch her roll her eyes in annoyance because that still makes you smile.

You’re fooling her, you know, and you want to laugh because even that makes you sad.

One.

You look at her out of the corner of the eye and even now you almost want to tell her, sorry, I am so sorry, I never meant to, it wasn’t like that because I-

Because I-

Zero

She walks by and you don’t say a word.

You closed your eyes then and now, in your room, you close your eyes again.

It resets. Like it always does.

Venit autem nunquam moritur.

It comes, but it never goes.