Summertime (Frerard)

1: Do You Believe In Hate At First Sight or Should I Walk By Again?

"Get the fuck out of here!"

The door was slammed in my face, the impact missing my face by millimetres, and his words echoed around my head for far too long, leaving me thinking moreso about the way he shouted, and the way he hated like it was nothing than what had set him off in the first place: it was just alcohol, and surely this wasn't really him, but it seemed that I was really running low on times that I keep lying to myself like this.

Turning away from the back door that had previously only just avoided a rather painful collision with my face, I began to head towards the woods, and tried my best to put this all behind me, but like my mother's ghost, his words haunted my mind. I tried not to think of her, especially in times such as these, because she wouldn't want to see the fucked up mess that her cancer had caused, not at all, but I loved her, and I still do, and she was the one hope in my life: the one hand to hold, that although long gone, I'm still desperating clinging to.

Behind the 5ft fence that surrounded the perimeter of this house, grew a vast expanse of trees. It was beautiful in a ramshackle kind of way, in a messed up kind of way, and that was exactly what I needed: beauty in the unthinkable, and the ugly kind of beauty that no one would even consider stealing away from me.

My mother used to take me out into the woods when I was younger: when everything was okay, and I could go home and smile, and it even hurt a little to think of times like that now, but I had to think, and I had to try, for her, at the very least.

I used the woods as an escape from my father, who was as weighed down with debt as he was with alcohol and seemed to have taken a particular disliking to me after mum passed away: it was just bitter, long buried, now alcohol fueled hatred, and it should have meant nothing, but despite this all, he was still my father, and once, even if a long time ago, he loved me.

It was almost as if he blamed me, and really, maybe I shouldn't have blamed him, because I was practically my mother born again, but when the alcohol spoke of hatred, it was always hatred of the forest and how it had meant so much to mum and me, and somehow that hurt just as much, because the woods were as much a part of me as my mum was, and I was determined to cling on to the one that I still had left.

-

It was July and the temperatures in Jersey were searing; the sun seemed to cut into my pale complexion like its rays held thousands of tiny daggers and it only seemed to find some sort of sadistic delight in my suffering, and there was probably a perfectly good explanation as to why I deserved such sunlight born hatred, but all I could see right now was that the bastard of a burning star had taken my vampire like appearance far too seriously.

The leaves which laid upon the ground seemed to also be feeling the maniacal destruction of the sun, their golden tones were drained away by the egotistical, blithering mass in the sky, leaving dull brown remains that made too much if a crunch as I stepped on them. I didn't like it; it disturbed the forest, which seemed to hold some sort of unspoken rule of silence after my mum died. I liked to think the forest was in mourning, because she'd helped this place as much as it had helped her and not just her, it had helped me too.

One time, mum told me how in the 70s she gathered up her friends and protested again deforestation, because did the world really need another housing estate for snivelling bastards to sit upon their thrones, constructed entirely out of dollar bills and they'd bide their time away contemplating which was bigger out of their house and their ego. The council said that they'd take no notice of the 'tree hippy bitches' and their indepletable supply of optimism. Yet the forest still stands.

As I approached my favourite clearing, the one mum and I visited most frequently, I knew in an instant that something was wrong; the air held this artificial scent that was so heavily distributed that it was almost sickening. The leaves had been pushed aside, almost as if into the shape of a path and most obviously, a low humming sound resonated from inside the clearing. It was quite clear, someone was in the clearing, in the woods, my woods. Needless to say, this unsettled me; the forest was always desolate in a serene kind of way and now someone had taken themselves and their careless demeanour and whacked it all over my forest: I hated them already.