St. Cloud

Raven

You know some of my story now, not all of it. I haven't mentioned my golden parts, but I'll tell you more of those later on.

As for Gray, I can't tell you much about his golden parts, because I only know about his raven pieces.

For some reason, I've taken notice that the  raven parts of us tend to reach the world before the golden. The bright is hidden by the dark.

It makes sense though, because people are interested in the horrific scenes of our stories. It's more entertaining. No one pays attention to you if you volunteer hours and hours of your life into making food for the homeless. No one cares if you knit sweaters for the sick. No one notices if you donate your old belongings to the needy.

But everyone pays attention if you have sex on the weekends. Everyone cares if you drop out of school to do crystal meth. Everyone notices if you steal money from your parents to buy drugs or condoms.

People won't look at you if you get straight A's and a scholars award. Yet they'll look your way if you got drunk while driving and killed a family of four.

It's the raven. People are intrigued with it, and as cruel as it is, it's just the simple preference of humanity we can't change.

I've come to think that maybe that's why people choose to make the poor decisions they do. Everyone wants attention, and if the only way to get it is to intentionally mess things up, then why not have at it. Everything is thought to fixable right?

Well when words get around and stories become twisted, the raven becomes venomous to the minds of those surrounding you, and then things become somewhat unfixable.

Like first impressions.

Like Gray's first impression.

He was a part of an raven crowd. All dark spots, no light or gold. People liked it, the reckless behavior and dauntless activity was different. Everyone was attracted to Gray and his friends, including me, but since everyone had all eyes on them, I knew there was no way Gray and I would ever cross paths. There were too many other people ahead of me that had better shots at becoming friends with them.

Plus, I kind of didn't want to cross paths anyway. I had my impression of Gray and his friends imbedded in my head. 

The wrong influence. Mean. Rude. Know it all. Stuck up. Too good for everyone else. Ignorant. Empty headed. Bad.

All of these were the negative impressions I had on Gray. All of it wasn't my own, it was the things I heard from my friends and from other people in the school. Though since I hadn't met Gray personally, I took their words for it.

I didn't look for any gold parts, because the raven was overwhelming.

I'd see him in the halls of school everyday, he and his friends would be laughing loudly or making stupid jokes. At lunch I'd hear them from across the cafeteria, throwing food to each other. When last bell of the school day rang, they'd be the boys to all pile in one car and race out of the parking lot to do God knows what.

So I guess you could say I didn't even try to find any gold parts in him. He just didn't seem to have any.

Yet when the month of June came to a close, we began to talk.

Somehow, with the luck of me being awake at 12 in the morning and he the same, with the force that seems to operate for good in a person's life, an odd shaping circumstance and opportunity, an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that led to a favorable outcome; we began to talk.

We exchanged conversations through the night, and for a couple of hours I began to see sparks of gold that I thought ceased to exist.

"You can take me on that adventure now."

And so it began. The gold intertwined with the raven.

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