I tilted my head as I stared into those light-brown eyes that made my heart find a new pattern of beating. I felt sick from his questions. One was so light, and the other soaked in heaviness.
I wouldn’t answer him, because screw him for being so weird and invasive and, well... weird. He was so freaking weird.
My eyes moved from Ash to the classroom toward my left. “Well, this is me.”
He turned to see the door and arched an eyebrow. “You take Spanish?”
No, I don’t. I just need to lie and say this is my classroom, so you’ll leave me alone.
“Yup,” I replied. “I mean,sí.”
Ash smiled. A real, big, wide-toothed grin that made me feel so odd inside. “Bye, Karla. Or, well,adiós, mi amiga.” He shot finger guns my way and made a clever clicking sound as he made the gesture. It was corny. It was cute. Whatever.
I pushed down the smirk that wanted to escape.
6Ash
Adiós, mi amiga.
What was that, Ash?
I probably sounded idiotic saying “adiós”to Karla, but it was the first thing that came to mind. She was lying about taking Spanish class. I’d only crossed paths with her a few times, but Karla was a terrible liar. The moment she said she took Spanish class, her eyes darted away from me, and her cheeks went flush. She was searching for an excuse to rid herself of me.
I couldn’t blame her. Sometimes, I could be too much. I talked a lot and asked invasive questions. I didn’t like small talk. It felt so... small. My mind was too wild to deal with small topics. Ever since Rian passed away, I didn’t like small talk. It felt empty and like a waste of time. Although I did ask about her favorite candy. That seemed small enough. Did I toss in a question about her sadness right after? Sure. But what was life without big questions?
Adiós.
That was so stupid, Ash.
I liked my new school well enough. Not for the learning, but for the people-watching. One of my favorite pastimes was watching humans be humans. Sometimes I felt as if I was failing at the simple task of existing, but then I’d witness other people, and it appeared they were just as screwed up as I was. Were living people as interesting as the dead? Not in the slightest, but they did make for interesting backdrops in my life.
High school felt like a tailspin. Everything moved so quickly. People bumped into one another as they traveled down their paths at a rapid pace, never apologizing for knocking into someone. Teachers gossiped about teenagers as they sipped their coffees and argued about politics. Couples broke up during first period and were back together by third. Being shuffled from class to class with people you sort of knew—but didn’t really know—was a strange experience. I found life to be an odd concept. Over the past few months, death made a little more sense to me.
I wasn’t always this way. I used to love my old life so much, and there was nothing odd about living. I loved my friends, and I loved my old school. One might’ve even said I was popular. That was until I learned my little brother was bullied by my friends and they were the ones who’d convinced Rian to take his life.
“We didn’t think he’d actually do it,” Jeremy had said when he showed up to the funeral. “We were just messing around with him.”
After that, I didn’t understand life, or people. After that, I hated popularity. It was funny how one situation could make a person view life through a whole new lens. I used to love being alive. Now I barely tolerated it. Then I met Karla. A girl who made life a little bit more intriguing.
After saying “adiós” to her, I thought about her the whole way to my math class. She was the black sheep of our high school. She didn’t fit in like the rest of the characters in the building. She stood out, even though she hated that fact. Not because of her limp or scars, but because of her darkness. I didn’t know that darkness could be a person until I saw Karla at the cemetery. I knew she was dark before I’d even spoken a single word to her.
In one of her many letters, a line stood out to me:
Sometimes I wish I was among the dead more than I was the living. I think that would make it a little easier to breathe.
I’d never read words that I understood so clearly.
I thought about death so much that it scared me sometimes. It didn’t scare me in the way people usually talked about being afraid. It wasn’t like a fear of heights or dark alleyways. It was quieter than that. Slower. Like a whisper against the back of my neck that never really went away.
I didn’t want to die. That wasn’t it at all. I thought about death because of my brother. I wondered if he thought about death often when he was alive. Did death hover around him? Did it lurk in the shadows? I wondered if he thought about it for weeks before, or if his meeting with death was a rushed decision that he regretted the moment he turned into stardust.
I wondered if he was OK on the other side. I wondered if he was happier.
I think the moment he left, death lurked around me. I liked it that way because the more I thought about death, the more I thought about Rian. I wasn’t ready for the thought of my little brother to fade.
If anything, I envied death. Death seemed easy. Living felt harder, messier. Living meant carrying things like grief, and guilt, and love, and hope. All those emotions seemed to tangle together, making it almost impossible to know one feeling from the other. Life also meant playing our past mistakes on a continuous loop in our minds, wishing we would’ve done things differently.
Ever since Rian died, it was like I inherited his emotions. Every day, I felt like I was on the verge of crying. If this was how Rian felt all the time, I could see how his feelings could seem like a curse. Maybe that was why photography was so important to him. My brother was a great photographer, andsomehow, he’d always captured the world’s softness in his pictures. His sensitivities were seen through his work. Maa was the same when it came to her cooking. You could taste her deep feelings and love in every bite of food the same way you could see it in Rian’s photographs. I wasn’t that lucky. I didn’t have a creative outlet for my newfound feelings. I didn’t know how to deal with what I felt.
