unrequited love.

Chapter 1

Nevaeh:

Fuck.

I wake up to the sound of my alarm blaring through the battered speakers of my rusty, second hand phone. I violently tap at the snooze button until the whining stops, and read the clock. Too fucking early.

I've tried to adopt this new routine of waking up at 6am for the past week, so that my body clock would get back into 'school mode' for September.
Hasn't really worked.
I end up just pressing snooze and folding my duvet over my head in protest.

After about half an hour, a second alarm goes off. It plays for about two minutes before I actually get up to press stop. Eventually, I sit up on my bed and reach across to find the light switch, before turning it on and smacking my head back down on the pillow.

The light shines brightly in my dimly decorated bedroom. My mum always tells me that I should add some colour to my room, but I like the black. I like it because black is an easy colour. There is nothing complicated about black. Black is dark, black is simple, black is my favourite.

My room is also very simple. I've got a double bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a bookshelf (full of books I'm never going to fucking read) and my guitar.

My guitar.
It's the most beautiful guitar that you will ever see. It hangs like a painting on my wall, a piece of art to anyone who looks at its glistening, charcoal body. Playing it is my only way of escaping from the outside world. So I find myself drowning in my giant grey bean bag chair, holding my instrument like its a new born baby, strumming away with my headphone wire tugging loosely on my messy plaits.

Escaping is easy.
I've had a lot of practice.

Music is just one of the things that I'm always doing. Along with: sleeping, eating, complaining, sleeping more, revising and taking pictures of anything I find pretty. I think photography is the perfect way to capture beauty in all of its essence. I asked mum for a polaroid camera last Christmas, and no doubt she went against me and ordered a pink one. It sits on my top shelf, the only dash of colour in my whole room, so it's hard to miss. The pink colour isn't ugly, and I don't really have a choice because I've used it about 4000 times, taking pictures of landscapes that I've seen on my travels, or close up candids of my friends when they weren't looking. My school actually asked me to take the class pictures last year, and those pictures were stuck in the leavers 2021 yearbook. My year.

I usually hated everyone from my school. Well apart from my best friends, Loren and Amie. They might just be the only things I had left at the end of year eleven. I had no idea what I wanted to do for sixth form, just me and my camera trying to follow a path of some sort. It's bullshit that they make us pick our future at such a young age. I mean I was fifteen? How the fuck was I supposed to know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life at fifteen?

I decided to pick photography as an A-level, along with history and home economics. Loren took history too, her dad was a history teacher at my secondary school and so she was heavily influenced by him. But she also has this newfound love for learning about history. I don't really understand how though, I mean they're just really old, dead people that did some stuff in the past and now they're rotting in their graves and we are learning about it. What ever happened to not dwelling on the past? I don't give a shit about what happened if I'm honest, Im just freakishly good at history for some reason, so it's an easy pass.

Photography is my favourite lesson. We learn about angles and effects and famous photographers who have taken celebrities pictures on the red carpet and everything! We get to use these cameras that look like something from the future, the quality of them is fucking incredible. Amie and Loren think that I'm silly for taking photography, they said that "it's not really a proper degree because I could just use my phone and press the circle on the camera app" but I don't care what they think. They're both very posh, intelligent people with large houses and lots of money, and I am definitely... something.

I don't mind my sixth form. It's small, but filled with inspired students hustling and bustling down the corridors. Each room is the same size, the same colour, the same tables and chairs put in the same place. Everything is the same and simple. There's nothing complicated about my sixth form, and I'd like to keep it that way.

Until I found him.