Seeking Solace

20- You Are Your Own Worst Enemy

I never expected my life to be like this, so filled with happiness just from one person. Every time I look at him, I think can't help but think of all those stupid what ifs; what if Gerard never moved to this town? What if I had never gotten up from the table that one lunch time? What if I had made it to the library that day instead of wandering down the hall? What if those pictures had never changed me?

I say the same things to him, but he just sighs and tells me not to think about it too much. I know he thinks the same things all the time. We want to keep living in the present for as long as we can, because we have no idea when it'll all end. There's no if there with us, no matter how hard I try to put it there. It's not going to last with us, because in the end, society and the people who were meant to take care of us will tear us apart because they believe it's the right thing. My mother will push me away from Gerard. Gerard's father will try to beat it out of him. There's no point in thinking about that, and things go so well for the next few weeks, it's amazingly easy to forget to think those thoughts.

After the shit with Chris and the detention I have to serve for it, we do a lot of things together, things that I've always wanted to do with someone but never admitted to. We go to the park after school, on a really weirdly beautiful sunny day, and lie down together on the grass, on this hill that overlooks the rest of the park, crests over the treetops so you can see out to the houses and the road and the cars that scooted peacefully by on lazy, sunny afternoons. We don't talk. Gerard doesn't even draw usually. We watch the sky long enough that the moving clouds make it seem like you can feel the Earth rotating with them, long enough that I absorb the blue and pure white and breathe it in and forget about everyone and everything around us except his hand in mine, long enough that when I finally look away and have to force myself back into my reality, the world was too dark and real from what I remember before I looked up.

We go to a comic book store, pick up comics and flip through the pages, stop to read parts of issues if we have time, buying them and hiding them at home if we have the money, realizing that reading them here, surrounded by pop art and vivid colors is the best place. We go to music stores, skipping past the noise and painfully desperate stuff to the albums that I had never dared to look at before. It wasn't just pictures that made up art, Gerard told me, pointing out cover after cover, it was in the music behind the covers, the melodies, the lyrics and the songs that you felt more than heard. I don't understand that part- how can you feel a song without physically touching it? Aren't all songs just sounds anyway?- but I figure I will eventually. He'd shown me art when I'd wanted it, shown me everything I'd missed before, so how can I not listen now?

We stay away from people for the most part, Alicia checking in every so often just to make sure we aren't getting too much shit from everyone else, James and his friend always being there in the art room almost every day, but mostly we stick to ourselves. We create a world for ourselves, one where only we understood each other, one where this is the only way to survive. We leave behind the dirty looks and disgust. My 'friends' stop looking for me. I stop being afraid that they'll come after us again. I stop hurting. I smile.

The scars on my arms began to fade.

We're happy, so amazingly, unbelievably happy, that even the new bruises that Gerard hides under long sleeves and a smile for me don't hurt so much any more. Things are almost [i]normal[/i] even though I thought I hated normal.

And I guess, since I hated normal, it couldn't stay that way.

It's sometime in the morning, 3 A.M. maybe, on a Saturday. When I wake up, the first thought that comes to mind are the last hours Gerard and I had spent together in the local library with books and pictures because the Great Flood was happening and we couldn't go anywhere. For a second I'm paralyzed by all the good feeling, until I wake up enough to realize that my phone's ringing at ass o'clock in the morning and expects me to answer it.