Lost To Never Be Returned

Heather sulks into the room, surprised a rain cloud isn’t over her head or that the room doesn’t immediately drop ten degrees. With her arms crossed over her chest, she surveys the room, internally groaning at the arrangement of the chairs. She’d been hoping for rows, that way she could hide in the back row, only speaking if she had to, but no luck. The sad plastic chairs are pushed together to form a close knit circle, only enough room between each chair to allow someone to walk between them. She feels someone move closer until she can feel them next to her. She turns her head just enough to survey the body next to her. Taller than her, but that’s not saying much at her petite stature. He leans over, his shaggy light brown hair falling towards her. “What’s your name?”

“Are you blind?” she scoffs, pointing to her nametag they’d made her fill out before entering the room. Not that the name on the tag was her actual name, but it didn’t matter. She was here for one reason, and one reason only; to get her mom off her back.

He laughs, deeper than she would’ve expected from him. Must just have a baby face. “Yeah.”

She laughs back, confused as to what the joke actually is. Maybe he’s just one of those assholes who likes to make fun of other people’s hardships. He doesn’t keep laughing, just looking straight ahead. Her face drops, suddenly realizing that the joke he had been laughing at had been her. “Wait, seriously?” she asks, really hoping he’s kidding. She didn’t consider herself to be the best person in the world, but certainly better than the snappy person currently residing in her head. “Shit, sorry,” she mutters, wishing a hole would open up and swallow her whole and take her anywhere but here.

He shrugs his shoulders, “Happens more than you’d think.” He moves forward, reaching forward and shuffling some of the chairs around before taking a seat. “People expect the whole cane and shades,” he says, gesturing for her to come over. Without a better option, she throws herself into the uncomfortable chair next to him, crossing her legs and resting them on the support bar. “So your name?” he questions, sticking his legs out in front of him, resting the heel of his right on the tip of the left. Heather squints in confusion at the action. For someone who claims to be blind, he sure has a good grip on the layout of the room and sense of perception.

She looks down, seeing the name Sara written in her own excessively curly print on the plain white name tag stuck to her hoodie. “Katie,” she says, testing him. 

“Damn, here I am wasting time with you when I’m supposed to be talking to a petite blonde named Heather,” he says, looking at her over his shoulder. His eyes are the lightest shade of blue she’s ever seen, but not at all blurry like she would’ve expected, although for that she blames untrue media depictions. She’s about to question him, on his claim to be blind, on why he’s supposed to be talking to her in the first place, but she beats him to the punch. “Susan over there at the table is friends with your mom and warned her that you might try to dip out early so I promised I’d do my best to convince her otherwise, unless you really are Katie, or Sara,” he says, a knowing smirk on his lips. “I’m legally blind, not completely,” he says, offering his hand out to her. She takes it, shaking it hesitantly. “I’m Mark.”

She scoffs, not believing a single word out of his mouth. He knows far too much and is telling her far too little. “Well, Mark,” she says, her words dripping with unsaid accusations, “what’s in this for you?”

He scoffs, moving his arms to mimicking my posture, “Converting you to follow our lord and savior, Dr. Thompson, obviously,” he says, no hints of him joking, not even a crack of a smile. He reaches forward, punching the air next to my arm, trying again and hitting it lightly. “Kidding, Jesus, you need to relax,” he scoffs, pushing himself off the chair, the feet rattling against the linoleum floor. “I know you’re being forced to be here, but it really isn’t that bad.” He moves around, pushing the chairs with his feet. He pauses across from her, turning around and staring out the window. 

A few more people trickle into the room, some stopping at the snack table, others lingering on the outside edges of the room, obviously not wanting to be there as much as her. 

Mark continues circling around the chairs before dropping back into the seat he’d claimed before. “How’s the leg treating you?”

Scoffing, she pushes herself out of her chair, intent on making a beeline for the door, but he sticks his legs out, stacking them again before she can catch herself, she trips over his ankles, falling hands first on the ground. She pushes herself up, rolling over to land on her butt, the cold from the tile seeping through her thin sweatpants. “Well, since you seem to know everything about me, I guess I’m done here, no need to stick around for the sharing circle,” she mutters, moving around his feet and continuing on her path.

He stands up, quickly catching up to her. “Do you want to get out of here?”

Heather stops moving, turning to face him. She’s tempted to punch him for mocking her. Maybe she should, he probably wouldn’t see it coming, maybe he would, but she doubts he’d be able to move quick enough to get out of the way of her fist. The only thing that makes her consider otherwise is the look on his face. “Seriously?”

Mark shrugs, “There’s a coffee place on the corner with a barista that makes a mean lemon muffin,” he says, nonchalantly knocking his head towards the door. She eyes it suspiciously, as if it’s all a trap, that her mom’s waiting on the other side of the door. “If you’re interested that is, I mean, we can always stay here for some great group bonding,” he says, his last words growing in cheeriness that Heather doesn’t even think she’d be capable of at the moment if she tried. Freshman year, maybe, but now? She doesn’t have it in her. She pokes her tongue against her cheek, a habit she’s been ridiculed many times before that she seems incapable of riding herself of. She always does it when she’s contemplating something. She silently weighs her options. Before she can change her mind, she starts heading towards the door before Mark can rescind his offer. He trails behind her, staying silent until they hit grass. “When I first started to lose my sight four years ago, I lashed out, threw things, when I’d trip, I’d punch whatever was closest which resulted in me needing stitches a few times,” he says. She turns to look at him, but his gaze in one the ground. “It’s understandable, when your body starts to betray you, it’s natural to be angry, but people don’t get that until it happens to them.” He looks at her, but this time it’s her that’s looking at the ground, watching her real foot and her fake foot hitting the concrete.

“I was a cheerleader,” she murmurs, not realizing she’s crying until she’s standing still and Mark’s holding out a package of tissues to her. “I was a cheerleader and now I can barely walk without stumbling.”

Mark stands and waits, waits for her tears to stop, the tissue thoroughly soaked. He gently pushes at her arm, urging her to move towards the bench behind them. She sits first, pathetically looking up at him. He sits down, handing her another tissue, just in case. “I was a photographer and noticed it was getting harder to edit the photos, thought it was just because I was spending too much time staring at a screen, they looked blurry, so I went to get my prescription checked, maybe get some of those blue light glasses, I mean it’s not like I had twenty twenty before, but this was different. My vision started rapidly decreasing so fast I needed a new prescription every other month, and then by the end of the second year I had to have this one replaced,” he tells her, tapping his left, his glass, eye then stacking his feet again. “I noticed you watching when I did this earlier,” he says, gesturing to his feet. She nods lightly, not even bothering to murmur an excuse. “I do it to test my vision, as long as I can see the general outline of my feet, I’m good, and hey, one day you will be too and I’m not going to tell you that on the days you can’t see that, just think, if the doctors hadn’t caught it, you could’ve lost a lot because that’s terrible advice, you’re allowed to mourn what you’ve lost, you’re allowed to have days where it consumes you, but all that matters if you’re here,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, casually leaning back against the bench. She knows she shouldn’t, that they barely know each other, but right now she doesn’t care. He is the only person who’s talked to her like she isn’t a test subject, but a human, a teenage girl at that, so she leans back, placing herself into the crook of his arm, the first physical contact she’s had in the past six months that wasn’t part of a medical examine, and relaxing into him, content to just spend the next thirty minutes like this, listening to the passing cars and the steady beat of his heart.