➳petrichor

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Petrichor - the smell of the earth after rain

After the encounter with Gerard, the day passed much the same as any other one so far. Rob made me mop the whole of the ground floor 'while I was at it'. Really, I think he was just trying to teach me a lesson or something. Probably that lesson was 'don't mess with Rob' but honestly all I was getting was 'don't mess with Rob when he's got coffee in his hand.'

Of course I would have preferred to not even have to encounter Rob, but that was, sadly, impossible.

When he let me go at the slightly later time than usual, I remarked how the sky looked strikingly beautiful. Usually on my way home I put my head down and switched off, but today was different. The usual pale blue was dusted with light clouds, but spiralled through with gold and pink and red. They splattered the powdery sky like butterfly wings, or paint trails, catching my attention with their rather angelic-looking colour. A welcome change to the stony grey, I stopped outside for a while, just to look at it.

It was later than usual, I knew that. I was probably wanted back home, but really, nothing so far this summer had been anything of my choice, and whilst the complaints in my head were endless, not one word had passed my lips. After a few seconds of deliberation, my mind was set on the clearing in the woods.

It was a nice place to go, although school and homework had meant that my once-regular visits to the clearing in the woods had become rather sparse. It had been my favourite place since I was a kid, when I'd been playing out with my friends, I'd ran away during hide and seek, and they'd never actually found me. That night, I snuck back out to go there again, to just sit by the stream and watch the sun set between the trees, bathing everything in gold. I hadn't told anyone about it- I'd kept my clearing in the woods a secret- and now with the chances to do what I wanted dwindling with the threat of college, and the sky such a tempting shade, my feet were practically taking me there of their own accord.

The woods were at the back of the neighborhood, and often full of kids playing in there. At least, there had been when I was younger; not so much anymore. Odd stories about the woods and video games meant that the majority of the kids now just stayed inside. Although I wasn't a kid anymore, it didn't mean like I couldn't act like one if I really wanted to.

There had been many things in those woods whilst I was growing up. Dragons, magic, that kind of childish shit. Now, at seventeen, I can say that I knew there were no such thing as dragons, much less such a thing as magic, and the calling to the place was simply to look out over the city, to watch the lights begin to gleam through the darkening twilight.

As I made my way through the cracked back streets, the sky began to darken. Sod's law, really- that as soon as I wanted to do something else, something a bit different, it was ruined. The angelic colours merged into one grey sludge, like when you're painting. It starts off really nice, the first brush swirling the water through with blue, the second with gold, and the more you use it, the more sludgy and grey it becomes.

However, my house was further away than the woods were now, and it had started to rain, the now-slate sky splatting fat, cold drops of water onto the pavement in front of me; that certain type of icy rain you only get in summer, that probably only seems so cold because you've spent the past few weeks boiling yourself alive. I was going to go to the woods anyway. It might be raining, but at least the leaves would make a nice noise, and the sky would compliment the city lights that I loved so much.

In fact, I thought as I ducked underneath the first canopy of the forest- the thick leaves made it so I wasn't really going to notice the rain. It was oddly quiet, too, the only sounds being birds in the branches and the splattering of water above. My shoes crunched with every step, and I knew that if I tried hard enough, those footsteps could quite easily belong to someone else.

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