What Was Simple In The Moonlight By The Morning Never Is
axolotlnerd-campcamp (axolotlNerd)
The winter wind was cold, biting at the edges of his skin as he walked out to his car. There were people yelling at him behind him, but he blocked it out. They were near strangers to him. He’d heard it all before, and what they were saying stopped mattering a long time ago.
Imagine a teenage boy. Just your run of the mill, average teenager. Gets good grades, gets in trouble more than most, but still tries his best regardless. Imagine him sitting in his car, a beater that leaks carbon monoxide into the vehicle so you have to keep the windows open or risk dying. Imagine that car. Imagine the rust on the edges of it’s metal, and imagine the way it bumps along the road, unsteady and unregulated. Imagine this teenage boy not caring about the fact his car is so run down.
You’re very good at this. Nicely done!
Now, imagine a friend of his. No, not that one, the other one. That’s her.
Now I want you to imagine a teenage girl, who’s absolutely not your run of the mill, average teenager. She doesn’t have great grades at all, plays hooky with her friends on test days, and more than anything wants to be an olympic athlete. Imagine her catching rides with friends because she doesn’t own a car. If she did own a car, imagine it would be black and probably a little old, a Jeep that didn’t have great mileage but was her’s and that’s what would matter. But it wasn’t her’s, so it doesn’t matter.
Here’s the hard part - imagine these two teenagers as the closest friends you could ever wish for. Imagine these two very different people in two very different situations living the same life.
There’s a lot more I could tell you about these two people. I could tell you that the girl’s name is Nikki, and the boy’s name is Max. I could tell you that Nikki loves sports and is on the football and field hockey teams, and I could tell you that Max wouldn’t have given two shits about sports if he’d never befriended Nikki. I could tell you that Nikki might have ended up dropping out entirely had Max not been so determined to get her to graduate. I could tell you they had another friend named Neil, who is important to both of these teenagers but not important to this specific story. I could tell you so much more about these people.
But I won’t. That would simply be a waste of your time.
That would simply be a waste of you.
Max drove in his car down the highway, not even looking at road signs as he sped away from his home. He had done everything except the thing wanted to do most, and that was get his parents words out of his head.
He hated the nights like these - he just felt that he couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t make his shitty car go fast enough, he couldn’t get far enough away and he couldn’t forget the only things he really wanted to.
Useless.
He wasn’t sure if this was an echo of the yelling he’d heard or a remark to himself. Maybe he knew that no matter how fast he drove, he’d never get the words out of his head. Maybe he didn’t. It didn’t matter very much. Not a lot mattered then.
Eventually, Max started to slow down. For a second, he panicked, thinking his car was breaking down. He breathed, then realized he was slowing down on purpose yet was not in tune with his body enough to notice. He let his car slow down to a normal highway speed, pretty fast but not as fast as the kid wished he could go.
