pull me close | (wonder)

[umber vivuus 12a 🥀 [dars]]

titus abel
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IT'S HARD TO DANCE WITH A DEVIL ON YOUR BACK
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Things are getting better.

They still aren't perfect, and I don't think they ever will be, but that doesn't mean they aren't still good. I think I am starting to grow on my newest foster parents, and I think they feel a bit guilty, using me for free labor. The boys in school see me in the hall, and sometimes they stay away. And it is all because of her. She has given me some sort of confidence, instilled it within my core, just in the brief encounter we had in the middle of nowhere. "Meet me here. Same time next Friday." The words made me feel like I was flying, and I haven't let them go yet. It is like I caught them in a jar that I keep with me at all times. Every time I think of them, my chest grows heavy and I can't stop myself from smiling.

It has been a week, and I stare into the clock, watching as it's hands so delicately pass over each number time and time again, every time getting closer to the time when I am free. Only minutes remain, then seconds, then with a loud alarm, school is over. I have already collected my things and exited the door by he time it once again grows silent. I beat the onslaught of people, all almost as eager to escape the walls that confine us for the majority of our childhood as me, and I race down the same dirt path, taking quick hurried steps, but forcing myself to walk. Calm down. I tell myself. She is just a girl.

A girl that I like.

Once, in my third year of school, a girl named Tiana gave me cherry flavored chewing gum, and I gave her a teddy bear. We held hands and told everyone we were "dating" but it was a lie, because we literally have never laid eyes on one another outside of a classroom or a playground. We told people we kissed, which was also a lie, because when she told me to I froze up and the nerves and embarrassment were too much for me to handle. Still, everyone thought we were adorable until two weeks later when she got a new boyfriend who's parents were wealthy enough to give him loose change every day for a snack.

That was my first relationship. I know it sounds naive, but at the time, I thought my feelings for her were real. Like now, when I am ducking through the fence and running across a field of wheat to the single apple tree on the far side. Does she even like me? Probably not as much as I like her, but she at least enjoys being my friend, so there has to be something, right?

Wrong.

The tree is abandoned, like it usually is when I go to it. I still remember the feeling of shock making my fingers tingle like static raced through them and pins were pricking the ends when that fiery hair of her's caught my attention. She never noticed me, too engrossed in her journal to notice anything until I spoke to her. Now, it was as if she'd never been here. For a terrible moment, I wonder if she has forgotten, or if she ever planned on returning at all. I yank an apple off of a low hanging branch and sit down. I lay my head against the tree, and take a large bite out of it. The tree, the property, it is all abandoned. The owners passed away years ago, so the wheat grows wildly out of control, and the apples fall to the group and wither away eventually. It has been my tree ever since. I was actually willing to share with her.

Maybe it's a good thing she didn't show up.

OOC: TABLE CREDIT GOES TO LEI.

[Wonder]

JORDAN s n o w
∞

[presto]

On a broken shelf in the corner of her sullen room, there sits the small collection of the little possessions that she had, which in turn meant more than anything in the world. Leather bound, paper clad, tossed and turned - they were children - dropped in water and dried down with a blow dryer, ripped in corners with a cracked back. They had personality, is what her sister used to say every time she would mumble about the dreaded state of her books. Her books. They were everything to her and though they seemed to dwindle more and more, either by simply disappearing or by being wrecked from her atypical habit of running away from problems (and life in general) there was no where else to seek comfort within the fences of her own demises.

But hidden away from this affluence, there lived in her life a series of novels, poems, stories of varying degrees of difficulty that inspired Jordan, served a purpose of dedicating her to write stories further and beyond the reaches of a closed mind. There were somedays that an iron block wall stuck in her mind, and on these days, her silver fingers glistened lightly across rustic pages, absorbing bits of literary masterpiece.

"The Fall of the House of Usher," she whistled through yellowing teeth, there was only so much one could do for dental care in such a state of living, but one only had to smile with their lips - no need to show any extreme happiness. Once upon a time, it didn't start like that. Even with fireside stories, she dare not read Poe to any of the other kids. Jordan thought, perhaps, that the world was dreadful enough without gothic romanticism etched into impressionable minds. But she fell in love with the flow of words, the use of language, the way that there were things that she didn't know - she learned. And in a world that wanted to knock down every living person, burden and refuse to teach, there had to be a certain amount of self-improvement somewhere, right?

Right.

Clutching the book close to her heart, she escaped the confines of the orchard home without stopping to talk to anyone, bumping into a mumbling Odell on the way out. Sun beating down, burning her frail skin, she couldn't help but to stop for a minute and take in the weather. An intrepid heat that swarmed her lungs, a herd of mosquitos sending pin pricks across her sober organs - there was an almost pain, but more uncomfortable teasing that the heat provided. It'd been a while, for sure, since Jordan had made a quest out into the day time, it was usually in the night time where she found her inspiration from the moon. It was then, she wrote, and it was now she slept.

However, the days that demanded that reading be done, the days she needed to slip away from the blocks set through her mind, she twinkled through the town to her favourite reading spot - a solid oak tree, split and harrowing, domineering above the rest of the forests. A series of spiderweb limbs, making forks just small enough to give a perfect reading spot for the eager learner - just enough for her. The black book cover burned against her stomach, attracting heat faster than any other part of her. It intensified quickly, though she grew to ignore the sensation as she thought of the gothic tale she had to read today.

This would be the third or fourth time she'd picked up the short story, obsessed with the language and the dark tale - insert, language, the supernatural - it was enough to inspire any low-life writer with a quill or pen, and perhaps, in this world, in this time, it was enough. She thought of an anxious Roderick, trembling in his own tower, waiting to meet his inevitable doom. Trembling at the thoughts of thunder storms, she too was afraid of the wind, and conflict. Perhaps she could line herself in a copper-wired vault and hide away from prying eyes - she noticed, a boy, walking, treading near her tree.

Looking? Looking.

Hide.

No, don't hide.

She wondered if tonight there would be a storm, she approached. The shadowed figure revealed itself in intense light, there was only so long the sun could hide a formed body - "Oh, Titus. Hey." She smiled, without the teeth, of course. She had seen the boy, in times through the halls, once before he'd been at her tree. "How are you doing?" She was as placid as placid could be, plane jane carrying a story of death in her fingertips looking to rest her sorrow-filled mind. It was no longer time for fairy tales.

[/presto]