How we meet

Chapter 12

As N left your cottage his heart started to glow with warmth. He, just like you, didn't know. N was moved by the venipede's voice. To hear the words your closest friend wanted to say to you. The ballets he would sing in your praise. The stories he has to share with the world even though you were the only thing important to him. He told N of the cottage, how he had helped you clean. How he wanted nothing more than your praise. He said something to N that made his heart skip a beat.
"I want to fix my mistakes." a simple sentence that N had heard. A simple wish, one that was too complicated to be something easy.
He left your home, he entered the green abyss that surrounded your house. Like you the trees reached down stroking his hair, thorns tore at his legs, scratched his skin. Leaves took root in his hair, getting caught in tagles of a pale green.
His hair got tugged and he snapped twigs as he walked. He was almost jelous of the way it never happened to you.
He saw the way you walked with a dancer's grace. The way the plants never grabbed at you when it was you in the woods. The trees seemed to dance with you. Surrounding you in yellow green colors that complemented your movements with poise and elegance. You looked completely in place here, surrounded by the trees you called your home.
He found himself on the bank of the river. He was entranced with your elegance. The reflection in the water was a crystal clear stream that housed the pokemon with care. He watched leaves fall from the sky, twirling down to kiss the surface of the water. He watched the cattails sway in the wind. Dancing pedoves making them bend down with them. The swooping birds and the crawling bugs. He rested there watching them peacefully.
You were jealous of that. The way N could waltz right up to a pokemon with no care in the world. He embraced life so much better than you. Pokemon seemed to trust him completely. He could whisper a word to comfort a heartbroken pokemon. A single stroke of his hand he could have the most angry pokemon stop in his tracks. To have his emotions validated and understood, to know that someone would listen and hear their needs.
You were envious of how he could do such a thing but you couldn't understand Venipede's basic requests. You hardly understood him when he followed you away from your hometown. Him stalking you through the grass had horrified you. As much as you admired pokemon you couldn't trust them.
You laid in bed counting the cash you had left. Piles of coins, stacks of bills crumpled and wrinkled. You didn't have much left. A small cracked jar was left in the cabinet when you first found the place. You fished it out of the box you had outside of the house. A handful of coins found their home in the cracked jar. They danced and jumped, trying to leap out of the jar once more. You hoped to bring them to the bank later to get them exchanged for cash or something.
It was relaxing, counting coins. A stupid thing really it didn't do much. It lets your brain wonder, to relax and to process what has happened at the gym. You had just frozen. Your anxiety boiled over and burned your throat and eyes. Your tears running down your face. Your worries now melted away.
The coins were taking the place of his words. The sound of them hitting the bottom of the glass jar melted into the sound of his voice. The comforting words that were spun-round in your head were comforting you all over again.Life here was better than it was back home. Leaving was hard, you felt out of place and lost when you first left your old home. It was better now, you didn't feel alone. Here everything felt nice.
If only you could have brought those words, and that voice into your dreams. They weren't there to comfort you then. You were left abandoned and alone. In a storm that you couldn't see. A battle that you couldn't fight. you tore at your mind. Your fingers dug into your skull, you pulled at your hair and you screamed as you woke up. Your body shook with sobs you coughed up apologies and pleas which the recipient would never hear. Being left alone all over again, unable to prove your worth all over again.
In your dreams, no voice could comfort you, no coins, and repetitive sounds could kiss you awake and hold you as you sobbed. At night you were left defenseless and alone with your worst second-worst critic and your worst fear.
You were left abandoned, stranded in a hall of books. They were stacked up alongside you caging you in. The smell of paper and ink choked you. You felt sick as numbers ran through your head. Equations and probabilities flooded your mind, they took over, corrupting your thoughts. Flowers wilted and dripped ink as you wrote. Solving equations perfectly again and again. It was too predictable, too much at once for you to care. You skipped through pages and still receive the perfect scores that they required. You looked blankly at the papers, the red marks that deemed you perfect, deemed you had worth. How you hated how the blood-stained pen determined if you were worth it.
You hated how the numbers were so predictable. You had understood it all so fast it left you bored and empty. You were unable to do anything though. The chains may not have been steel but they held you in place nonetheless. There wasn't a way for you to get away. The stress, the boredom and that goddamned father. You did everything that man wanted but look where it got you. So you stopped. You faked incompetence. You lied about answers you understood perfectly. How fast the words of minimal praise changed to screams of disappointment and disaster.
Spending every waking moment in those woods was the best decision you ever made. You gave that man everything yet you got nothing in return. Yet you knew that you could never see him again because you would want nothing more than to prove your worth all over again to prove that he needed you. You wanted his love and you hated him almost as much as you hated loving him.