Well… there sure are a lot of one days in that paragraph. But I think one day is a part of everyone’s story. It doesn’t only start a story, it signifies a beginning. And even though I didn’t start my story with one day, I sure want to make it up by making that one day my day today. See how fascinating it is to link all five words that rhyme together in a sentence?
Blessed Scott Orson left me to my own business after I shined brightly like a star for scoring an ultimate yes from Heaven. I rocked my recitals too—my composition nailed the intervals of music in thin air and it flowed vigorously in harmonic bliss. I was overjoyed that I cannot contain my ridiculous grin from showing. I look like a loon. It’s something that Scott would say. He even showed me my reflection in the mirror to prove his hypothesis. I wasn’t totally myself since I was in cloud nine, but not until he whacked me with a question that I fell back to earth and its organisms.
“So, where’s the paranormal activity showing?” oh~ translation: where’s the date gonna be?
Fuck the duck. I think I just melted with my smile on the floor.
How can I be such a humungous fool? Everything else got shut down when I heard Heaven’s mighty yes. I didn’t get her number. I didn’t give her the time. I didn’t give her the place. I said nothing as I left her classroom this morning. And now, I penalize myself with the headache of over thinking things at once. My good friend, Scott, knows about my stupidity before I do. He very much likes to think ahead. So, he kindly offers a double date at the diner nearby. But I said: I’ll have to think about it.
This is not a date. We are just going out. I try to remind myself.
Anna’s a bit aloof to the world. She has her own piece of Paradise just inside herself while I patiently wait outside if ever she’d open her wrought iron gates for me. If I take her with Scott and his “new girl” then it will be a date. Plus, it will all be “Scott talk”. I will not have Heaven for myself. Call it selfish but I call it my day. Just me and Heaven. No hell and no earth. Just me and her.
Finally deciding where to take her and what cliché thing to do, I stick my note on her locker and I wait.
***
Heaven meets me at the end of the staircase.
She holds up my stick-on and I smile back at her.
I’m glad she came. Her response is a tentative smile but I’ll take all my chances to savor it. A smile, no matter how small can be a good start.
She folds my note and she places it inside her coat’s pocket. I lead her up the staircase not knowing what to say to her along the way. What do you say to someone you like without scaring them away? Is silence also a guy’s loudest cry or is it a cry of cowardice?
Distracting myself, I thought of the things that Scott might be doing. Will he hold her hand while they come up the stairs? If he talks to her, what flattery will he say? I don’t know. I am not Scott Orson. I cannot be Scott Orson. I should not be thinking or acting like Scott Orson. Scott will sweep her off her feet once he sees her. That is Scott but I should be Dominic Savio. But how will Dominic Savio act towards Heaven?
“Thanks for not going for the cliché meet ups.” Anna says and I turn to her, startled. “I kind of grew out of them.”
I swallow hard as my head spins to what Scott and the guys might me doing up stairs. My knees shake at the waiting surprise.
“It’s not a date.” I laugh nervously as I say and she looks ahead of us. That bought me enough time to fidget on my phone.
Dominic: Cancel d surprise.
Scott: WTF?
Dominic: Just do it.
Scott: U better hv a gud explanation to dis, little wanker.
Dominic: Fine. Now g8 off d fckng roof.
Whatever I said, I knew my plan got backfired and worse, I didn’t want to think of the arduous ways Scott and the guys are doing to get off the roof without us seeing them. Not to mention Scott’s unshakable acrophobia.
Scott: M gonna kill u l8r Dom.
Anna turned to me just in time I hid away my phone. I cleared my throat to once again rephrase my point like a well spoken spokesman.
“Like I said, it’s not a date. Besides, we can all use the fresh air and it’s outside. I did ask you out.”
I opened the door to the roof top, wishing Scott and the guys are no longer there.
Anna chuckles beside me. “You did ask me out.”
I let out a sigh of relief when I found no sign of the guys. She moves in front of me and her eyebrows meet.
“Are you okay? You seem… agitated.” She noticed. “Do I make you feel nervous?”
“Huh—no. I’m fine.” I prompted. “Totally. I just feel…” I try to mush up some words inside my head but the room for vocabulary got shut. “…nervous.”
She sniggers. “Nervous seems fine.” She lets out a deep breath. “So, what are we suppose to do now?”
I looked at the edge of the barrier where I remember I first saw her up here. She was trying to commit suicide—or so I thought. She seems to be a fan of Daredevil and Spiderman stunts.
“Try and not kill ourselves perhaps?”
She follows my gaze to the barrier and she sneers at me. “We don’t have to go over there. Besides, we can stay up here and do whatever you want.” Her eyebrows meet. “What do you want to do?”
My eyebrows rise. “Aside from having sex?”
Her eyebrows rise too and I bite my tongue. “I mean… I very well practice the ah… value of asceticism. Abstinence is my ah… core value—”
“So you’re celibate?”
“W-what? No! I do want sex. It’s just that I have hormonal allergies right now.” I pretended to sneeze.
She splutters. “You are queasy.”
“No, I’m not. It’s the side effects of hormonal imbalance. I just want to talk to you.”
“Did you ask me out so that I could be your counselor?”
“No. I really just want to talk to you.”
“About hormonal imbalance.”
I squeeze my eyes shut in frustration. “No.” and then she laughs. That sweet, soft laugh that sounds like a blooming of a rose.—yeah right, as if roses have sounds when they bloom. I must have far good sense of hearing than I thought.
“I was only teasing you. You seem very tense like your head’s been placed somewhere else.”
I lighten up a bit. “I like to hear you laugh. I think it’s one of the nicest forms of melody I’ve ever heard.” Her smile drops like the setting sun.
She starts to walk away from me and she settles on a wooden bench facing the northern Alps.
“I’m sorry.” I said as I invited myself to sit beside her.
She turns to me, her eyebrows meet. “Why are you apologizing?”
“I was worried I hurt your feelings.”
She snorts. “Oh, my feelings. Don’t worry about those, no one else does. But thanks anyway.”
“Well, I do care.”
She simpers at me. “But of course. You make it a habit to pry on me.”
I snicker and she answers with a steady smile. I scoot beside her and she narrows her eyes at me playfully. It’s nice to see her adjusting to me. It makes me feel comfortable too.
“Since you made me look like an intruder, might as well grab the opportunity to intrude.” I smirk at her. She plays with eyebrows as she faces me. “What’s your story?”
She twists her lips to the side as she looks away. “I don’t have one.”
I recoiled from her as if she pinched me. “Everyone has a story.”
She shrugs. “Well, I’d be the first that you know. I don’t have one. There’s just nothing to tell. I live and go along wherever life takes me.”
I snuffle. “You sound like a death note.”
“What? Am I boring you or am I weirding you out?”
“Both but not really. There must be something good to tell. Come on. I won’t judge. You’d be surprised to know I’m a fair listener.”
She looks skeptically at me. I sighed in close defeat. “What do you do in life?”
She giggles. “Um… practically I breathe. I breathe for a living.”
I gape at her.
She raises her eyebrows at me. “What? Breathing is a very important essential in life such as saying that shopping improves the economy.”
I shake my head in complete fascination. “That’s very practical of you. I wish I get paid for just breathing.”
She pokes my arm and I poke her back.
“Nuisance.” she mutters.
“Why this place?” I start with another question. I think it’s fun unraveling Heaven. She hides too much behind her thick cumulus clouds.
“Because no one will find me here.”
“That’s entirely not true.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Right. You found me here.”
“Why do you avoid people?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
I huffed at her. “Base on my calculations, I’ve so far asked you a total of three questions.”
“Why do you keep on pestering me?”
“Why don’t you just answer the questions?”
She scoffs at me. “Because they are null and void.”
I cringed at her. “Not all of them.”
“Why do you ask so much anyway?”
“Because I wanna know your story. I wanna know you.”
She sighs in defeat. “It’s like what you said before. It’s much easier to walk away than to fight for what you really want.”
“Why walk away then?”
“Because every hello always ends up with a goodbye. I hate goodbyes.” Her face crumples with the last sentence.
“Me too.”
She laughs. “At least we can agree on something.”
I smirk at her. “I’ll give you that.”
She smiles back. The sun sets ahead of us but with the light that comes from her smile, it feels like sunrise again. I’ve never seen such light that could resonate in the dark. I’ve never been more awake in my life to bear witness to it.
“You know, it’s not that bad to socialize with other people. It’s not like it’s gonna kill you.” I said and her glow vanishes again as quickly as her smile had risen earlier. I should stop saying words that can break her smile.
“Words can’t kill people even though they can be as sharp as knives. But people can kill people.” she says.
I shrug. She has a point. “Love also kills people and it’s a word.”
“Wrong again.” she snickers. “It’s sadness that kills people.” she turns to me and I look at her. Her eyes bore deep into me like shards of ice. “It’s ironic how people think that someone’s killing them when they’re still alive. People should stop trying to be the victims. It’s a stupid thing to say and it’s stupid of someone to think that way. Love is a two way street. We have an option if we want to get hurt or not.”
“Yeah, but no one’s really stupid. All of us are Einstein smart. We’re just not smart enough to be smart.” I wink at her and she nudges my arm. “Besides, hopeless romantics are always popular.”
“The martyrs you mean.” She sneers at me. “Don’t let the world know how stupid you are. Instead, let the world know how stupid it is.”
I lean my arm on the backrest as I face her. “Oh, a connoisseur.” I leer at her and she glares at me. “But I still think love kills people—emotionally.”
She scoffs at me. “Tragically, over thinking is what kills you. The Great Gatsby’s an example. He had loved the wrong and right girl and he died for it. Now, that’s the best way to say: love had killed you. You carry the word to your grave.”
“Hm. Bad choices do make good stories.”
“Of course. Without adversity, life wouldn’t be so anticipating. The story would end immediately.”
I look at her coyly. “I thought you don’t have a story.”
She raises a teasing eyebrow at me. “I still don’t. But I have friends, Dominic Savio.”
I snort. “Really? Aside from me?”
She gawks at me. “Are we friends? I was suddenly reminded of your broken promise by asking me out.”
I scoff at her. “This is not a date.”
“Oh really? Then what do you propose to call it?”
I smirk at her. “So you do want to call it a date?”
She rights herself and she clears her throat. “You’re a definite flirt—for a guy.”
“At least you’re not a taciturn around me. That’s a start.”
“Funny.”
I snicker. “You have a bizarre way of showing LOL.”
“It’s called reticence.”
“9GAG.”
“Whatever.” She rolls her eyes skyward. “I still have other friends.”
“Like who?” I challenged her.
“The monster under my bed for one.” She retorts and I laugh at her. She glares at me at first but then, I must look like a clown because she laughs with me.
For a moment, I took the time to stare at her. I stare at her eyes as they move to study my face; they pass by my skin like a bust of wind. She bites her lip as she takes a deep breath.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
My eyebrows crease. “Why not?”
“Because I know that look and I don’t want you to feel that way towards me.”
I felt myself slip away from the present and be numb to the world. I thought the force field in my heart was strong enough to hold her rejection. But even an earthquake could break it now. I turn to her and she’s looking at me.
“Do you like me?” I ask her.
“I don’t want to.” She almost whispers.
“But you do.”
She sighs as she looks me in the eyes. “I do.”
I smile at her. It’s not much of a smile but I did. Because I know, with every bit of “I can’t” she says, there’s a struggling “I do” in the surface. A smile is my way of saying “It’s okay. I can and I will wait for you ‘til you’re ready”. And if she doesn’t have a story to tell, I am willing to share my pages with her. It may not be as good as anyone else, but a shared story gives a good feeling even just being a part of it.
Besides, I still have a couple of heart beats to spare.465Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrkakCDVZw8
