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I wake up and stare at the ceiling for a good ten minutes, water my
plants like I normally do and air my sheets. I’m still learning to do
various mundane adulthood activities like getting the mail and not
being disappointed upon hearing phrases such as ‘I’d rather just be
friends’. There’s a cafe I go to almost every day because their music
isn’t amplified. I sit indoors and get a cup of coffee with as much
cream and sugar as I normally do and a sandwich. A familiar tune is
playing. Ah yes,
NorwegianWood
by The Beatles. I was in the company
of people I didn’t know, staring at the empty parts of their face
pretending I knew what I wanted to see. A small bug crawled beside
the windowsill, its speed suggesting it was more than the average
amount of sad. A man orders a hard-boiled egg from a coffee shop.
He only eats the egg white and leaves the untouched yolk as a perfect
round ball in the porcelain plate that kind of resembles the sun.
In the afternoon I work part time at a record shop. The shelves
were filled with vinyl records covered in thin layers of dust, certain
ones more than others. One day, a girl entered the shop and said
she’s a new worker. Her job was to listen to The Beatle’s Rubber
Soul album to make sure the quality was up to scratch. She had a
flattering side profile and wore a straw hat. Her clothes looked at
least three times too big for her body, as was her soul. We went to a
cafe after our shift, because since we were the only workers there we
might as well get to know each other.
I asked her why she always wore the same straw hat. She gently
brushed off a fly to reveal text written in small print on the side
reading
18 Till I Die
. It was a song by Bryan Adams. I laughed because
it was obviously a joke, being 18 till you die means you die when
you’re 18. I’ve always wondered why people talked about death so
carelessly. The conversation drifted on, each weary line chained to a
cigarette. Her name was Dawn and her birthday was in April. We
talked about similar things but my idea of lilac was a bit darker than
hers. I started to feel my chest tied down by a weight, or something
more sinister and the unfamiliar black in her eyes became my
favourite colour. It takes time to understand things, the same as it
took me time to understand why sometimes I see people looking at
the ground and smiling a lot. My love was subtle but deep, like water
you first mistaken as shallow, but it wasn’t the type of love Shakespeare
wrote about, with flowery language and iambic pentameter.
Autumn came and I went to the cafe for lunch. Many girls went
Untitled
Crystal Hua
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