out of reach { sabine x kendra }

out of reach { sabine x kendra } Aug 26, 2023 19:07:34 GMT -5

Quote

Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Aug 26, 2023 19:07:34 GMT -5

🌻

seventeen is unbecoming of me.

Ma found me smoking behind the barn one night in the balmy beginning of spring, reading an off market copy of A People's History by flashlight. then the next day, the contents of my drawers were unearthed, a pile of contraband on the kitchen counter – books from an old poet hung during the dark days, newsletter from republic rebels, cartons of cigarettes, a gram of cheap weed wrapped in the battery pack of a radio, and my mother – wearing a soberingly grim expression.

Ripred, i am seventeen and i feel seventy, exhausted by the way i have tried to belong in my own life. i search for sense between the dark slits of trees, in the low fields that fold and stretch into each other. but little by little, life becomes smaller the older i get. in the morning, she told me i was done with school. when fall comes, i'll be taught at home by a tutor.

the creek holds more than a decade of my grief, carried in the current, flowing over the stones. i think about drowning in waist-deep water. i think about how i have screamed here, cried here, buried myself here. it's kind of strange, how my own mother doesn't understand me though she's who made me. sometimes it feels as if we were cleaved by a great big wound, flesh unknotted, unable to stitch back together. we were closest when i was in her womb. maybe it's the only time we were.

on the school field, Armin stands there drenched in afternoon sunlight the colour of butter. the air smells like freshly turned earth. in 2nd period, i threw an eraser at the back of his head, carved with the words meet me, lunch. he looks up at the sound of footsteps. the lines of his baby face are sharpening every day.

"she found it."

he arches an eyebrow, adjusting the leather strap of his bag.

"Ma. your weed."

"oh." for a second, he looks like he's thinking, brow furrowed before the shrug comes, unceremonious, lazy. the sun catches his outline as he turns towards his watch, glinting silver on a wrist. "i'll see you on Sunday, after church. hide it better this time."

now there's laugh that wants to bubble up. i feel nearly deranged when it stutters in my chest. i kick at a clump of dirt in the grass. "i'm not coming back to school in the fall."

"Sabine –"

the undertone of sympathy's a knife on skin. but then there's a thud a few feet that interrupts him. i'm there already, swallowing the conversation to my belly before Armin's got anything to say. a curtain of dark hair falls over her shoulders as she looks up. can't say i remember her name. the disturbance's welcomed though.

i give her my hand. girl's got an apology on the tip of her tongue while her hand's raw with grass stains, and i smile at that. "silly to say sorry to me when you hurt yourself."