Angeline

She’s not wrong. I am nothing if not rare. Still, Angeline bugs me to no end. Do you know how incredibly infrequent people like you are, Ben? It’s a blessing you were born. Yes, yes, Angeline, a blessing. As if I weren’t aware. My whole life, my whole existence, a blessing. A blessing should still be allowed to be a cynic though. A blessing should still be able to laugh at the world. So when Angeline comes to me with her gratefulness nonsense, I’ll tell her, Do you know, Angeline, what it feels like to wake up with a hundred noisy people crowding around you? It’s a tragedy that I was born. I wish I could have stayed inside the center of that flower, drinking nectar, the soft petals cool against my skin. But that trillium just had to bloom so badly. I went back and smashed that flower into the ground on my second day in this world. 

The dirt is soft beneath my bare feet. Angeline says I’ve never once wanted to wear shoes. Angeline. If you knew anything about me you would know that I remember everything, from the biggest of things, like the day I was born, to the smallest things, like the gemstone on the broach of a stranger whom I passed years ago in a crowd. It was jade, by the way. Polished jade, carved in the shape of a lion’s face. It gives me migraines, how many things my brain forces me to remember, and it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. I am so old, in fact, that I’ve watched Angeline grow from a girl barely older than me to a weathered woman with wrinkles in her face and calluses on her fingertips. 

A starry sky reflects in the puddles. It rained this morning. I wish it had rained a little more. It isn’t wet enough, or dry enough, just somewhere in the middle, an unhappy medium, if you will. I stomp my foot in one of the little puddles that seem to litter the ground. The stagnant water stirs, and clouds of silt swirl like a tiny hurricane. I take pleasure in watching such destruction, even if it’s this small. Tiny disruptions in the stillness of the world are my specialty, ripples in the pond. I like to pretend I could read the future by stirring the silt of a puddle and watching the way it swirls in it’s complex patterns, like some sort of witch. I’m not even sure if that’s what witches do. Angeline sure doesn’t do that. 

I realize that Angeline’s name forms on my lips more often than I’d like it to. She’s just so contradictory. She’s the source of my problems, and admittedly the source of all things good in my life. She would say the same about me, not to my face, surely, and not if she knew I was listening, which I often am. I’ll never let her get away with anything. She’s the type who would try to pull something over on me, or hide something I want to know. Something she knows I want to know. But everyone is deceiving these days it seems. In every face I see I can pick out something. A hidden secret, something they’ve smugly gotten away with, someone they’ve screwed over. 

My head is throbbing out of control now, more than it ever has. I feel it in my gut. It’s time. The bottoms of my feet are numb. The air smells of night, mossy and empty. I tilt my head back as I walk, and my arms float up, almost not under my own control. They want the sky, they want the stars. Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben. I whisper my own name until it doesn’t seem like a word anymore. Every time it escapes my mouth, rolling off my tongue and into the air, I imagine it forming a little weightless version of me, the soul of my name, floating up into the stars. Maybe if there’s enough tiny Bens up there the real me will be able to join them too. I want to stop here in this clearing, flop down and whisper my name to the stars, but it isn’t far to the spot. Just a little longer. It’s ironic, I’ve only been there once, but I know exactly where it is, exactly how to find it. 

I’m pushing myself forward, stumbling through the trees, leaning on them when I need to, when I’m hit with a stab of pain in the center of my forehead. I almost expect them to ask me when I have ever let them lean on me. When will you let me rest, Ben? You take so much and give nothing in return. They’re just trees though, and I know they won’t do that. But still, I never rest on one tree for more than a minute or so. And I never rest on the big maple. It seems like he’s got some kind of grudge against me, like he’s always looking at me, and if I rested on his trunk for just a second those big roots of his would lash out at me, puncturing my skin and dragging me down into the soft earth. It makes me hurt all over just thinking about it, so I hug my sides, arm’s crossed, and make my way past the maple a little faster than normal, enduring the throbbing of my head as it is filled with new memories. 

Angeline knows I sneak out at night. If she doesn’t, she’s quite dumb, but from years of observation, she’s not a complete airhead, so she probably knows. Needless to say, she sure hasn’t stopped me yet. I guess she knows what it’s like to be homesick. Whenever we visit the sea, she gets all misty eyed, and not just because of the salty spray getting in her eyes. The sea spray does irritate my eyes though, and sometimes she turns to me with her own teary eyes and gives me this meaningful look like she thinks I’m crying with her. Maybe she is an airhead. I don’t know. Angeline is sure something. 

The patch of red trilliums is a welcome sight. I stumble towards it, head throbbing, and lay down in the moss. The smell of the trilliums is familiar, not far off from rotten meat, but familiar. Makes sense that such a rotten boy was born from such a rotten flower. I’m quoting Angeline, in case you were wondering. I guess she’s right. I’m not the best, but at least I take pride in not being the best, just like these flowers. They know damn well no one wants them here, but they bloom every spring anyways, over and over again. 

Water seeps in through the fabric of my shirt. It doesn’t feel cold, oddly enough. I’ve never really felt cold in my entire life. But that raises the question, if I’ve never felt cold, then I don’t know what it feels like, and therefore I very well could have felt cold before. But you know, I think I’d know if I were cold. It would feel like a blanket, but an unwelcome one, it would feel like negative space, biting at my skin, and I have yet to feel that. 

I’m slowly sinking into the moss, my chest rising and falling like the hills. The feeling of endless falling is so comforting to me. So I let my body fall into the moss, pretending that I’m deep underground, my heartbeat in my ears and the world left behind me. Ben, the boy who sank into the ground, and became fertilizer for the flowers. That’s the story they’ll tell of me. Ben, the boy who joined the stars. And then a thought stabs at my mind. Angeline. Can you please forgive me? Angeline. When you looked at me at the ocean… Did you know? Have you always? Angeline. Tell them about me, will you?