Her Name

What was her name again? If I remember correctly, her name was unusually long and difficult to pronounce, but then again, my memory of her is barely still there, just a faint sliver of it hanging in the back of my head. As I would tag along with the other kids of the school, she caught my attention, even though no one else seemed to notice her. Not one day did I go without seeing her sitting at the corner of the painted mural of the school mascot, seemingly peeling from the shadows. I looked around to the kids playing ball on the blacktop, without even a care in the world. I was curious. It seemed as if she had a superpower. Her face was different from the others too. It seemed aloof, yet something else remained on her face in the very corner. It was only noticeable if you looked deeply, but there was a sense of melancholiness and despair in her face. Curiosity overtook me and on one fateful day where her body seemed to have disappeared from that spot on the floor that seemed to be ingrained there forever, I saw her in the halls. My friends asked me everyday from then on why I had spent everyday talking to her when I could be doing something else like playing ball, or chatting amongst my peers about the latest school news, or anything really that had seemed particularly different about that day. I shrugged and continued to talk to her. One day, I looked at her very closely. She was pale, with a faint sense of redness on the corner of her cheeks, her glasses hanging loosely on the bridge of her nose. Pretty, is the closest word to my description of her. Yet how could someone so beautiful seem so unnoticed? She had a gentle voice too and everyday I had never got sick of hearing it as her words had such a unique touch of passion and emotion. It’s a blur to me what happened after all of that. But, all I know is that she did not show up anymore and her presence left traces that nobody else could see but me. 

My Void

I pointed to the star. Mom, look! I said. She told me it was a special, beautiful star and to make a wish. I wished I was like that star, glowing above all the rest, up up up in the sky. From that day on, the same star appeared in view from my bedroom window everyday but it seemed to get dimmer and dimmer, like a candle burning out in the presence of the night air. Its radiant light seemed to get so dim that I forgot about it, drowned into the array of documents in front of me and the blue light bursting out of my computer screen filled with various letters and numbers. I noticed my mom no longer talks about stars to me. The only word I hear from her now is about my future and the life that she claims I don’t take seriously enough. Where did that star go? I wish it could take me far away from these words that I let seep into my mind even though my heart feels like a hole that is being carved larger and larger. My head is drowning within the lightless void in the sky. The star becomes darker, darker, darker. The words on the paper are jumbling in my mind, an overwhelming amount of symbols rearranging shape and size. Days go on and on and the same feeling overwhelms everyday, a will to move forward, a hand reaching up to that star, but it disappears within my reach. I try to focus on what was in front of me, my pencil and my glasses that never seem to help me see clearer even though I readjust them again and again. The words are still jumbled within my mind and my hand won’t move. My head is telling me to continue, that if I finish this one I will be able to finish the next and then the next and my mom will come back and embrace me within her arms once again. But hours, hours, hours passed away and I gently rested my head on that wooden desk of mine. The world melted away and the words that jumbled in my head crumbled away slowly, slowly, slowly.  As my eyes closed more and more and more that last light from the outside disappeared within my grasp.