Chapter 6
Ash
Adiós, mi amiga.
What was that, Ash?
I probably sounded idiotic saying “adiós” to Karla, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
She was lying about taking Spanish class.
I’d only crossed paths with her a few times, but Karla was a terrible liar.
The moment she said she took Spanish class, her eyes darted away from me, and her cheeks went flush.
She was searching for an excuse to rid herself of me.
I couldn’t blame her. Sometimes, I could be too much.
I talked a lot and asked invasive questions.
I didn’t like small talk. It felt so . .
. small. My mind was too wild to deal with small topics.
Ever since Rian passed away, I didn’t like small talk.
It felt empty and like a waste of time. Although I did ask about her favorite candy.
That seemed small enough. Did I toss in a question about her sadness right after?
Sure. But what was life without big questions?
Adiós.
That was so stupid, Ash.
I liked my new school well enough. Not for the learning, but for the people-watching.
One of my favorite pastimes was watching humans be humans.
Sometimes I felt as if I was failing at the simple task of existing, but then I’d witness other people, and it appeared they were just as screwed up as I was.
Were living people as interesting as the dead?
Not in the slightest, but they did make for interesting backdrops in my life.
High school felt like a tailspin. Everything moved so quickly.
People bumped into one another as they traveled down their paths at a rapid pace, never apologizing for knocking into someone.
Teachers gossiped about teenagers as they sipped their coffees and argued about politics.
Couples broke up during first period and were back together by third.
Being shuffled from class to class with people you sort of knew—but didn’t really know—was a strange experience.
I found life to be an odd concept. Over the past few months, death made a little more sense to me.
I wasn’t always this way. I used to love my old life so much, and there was nothing odd about living.
I loved my friends, and I loved my old school.
One might’ve even said I was popular. That was until I learned my little brother was bullied by my friends and they were the ones who’d convinced Rian to take his life.
“We didn’t think he’d actually do it,” Jeremy had said when he showed up to the funeral. “We were just messing around with him.”
After that, I didn’t understand life, or people. After that, I hated popularity. It was funny how one situation could make a person view life through a whole new lens. I used to love being alive. Now I barely tolerated it. Then I met Karla. A girl who made life a little bit more intriguing.
After saying “adiós” to her, I thought about her the whole way to my math class.
She was the black sheep of our high school.
She didn’t fit in like the rest of the characters in the building.
She stood out, even though she hated that fact.
Not because of her limp or scars, but because of her darkness.
I didn’t know that darkness could be a person until I saw Karla at the cemetery.
I knew she was dark before I’d even spoken a single word to her.
In one of her many letters, a line stood out to me:
Sometimes I wish I was among the dead more than I was the living. I think that would make it a little easier to breathe.
I’d never read words that I understood so clearly.
I thought about death so much that it scared me sometimes. It didn’t scare me in the way people usually talked about being afraid. It wasn’t like a fear of heights or dark alleyways. It was quieter than that. Slower. Like a whisper against the back of my neck that never really went away.
I didn’t want to die. That wasn’t it at all.
I thought about death because of my brother.
I wondered if he thought about death often when he was alive.
Did death hover around him? Did it lurk in the shadows?
I wondered if he thought about it for weeks before, or if his meeting with death was a rushed decision that he regretted the moment he turned into stardust.
I wondered if he was OK on the other side. I wondered if he was happier.
I think the moment he left, death lurked around me. I liked it that way because the more I thought about death, the more I thought about Rian. I wasn’t ready for the thought of my little brother to fade.
If anything, I envied death. Death seemed easy.
Living felt harder, messier. Living meant carrying things like grief, and guilt, and love, and hope.
All those emotions seemed to tangle together, making it almost impossible to know one feeling from the other.
Life also meant playing our past mistakes on a continuous loop in our minds, wishing we would’ve done things differently.
Ever since Rian died, it was like I inherited his emotions.
Every day, I felt like I was on the verge of crying.
If this was how Rian felt all the time, I could see how his feelings could seem like a curse.
Maybe that was why photography was so important to him.
My brother was a great photographer, and somehow, he’d always captured the world’s softness in his pictures.
His sensitivities were seen through his work.
Maa was the same when it came to her cooking.
You could taste her deep feelings and love in every bite of food the same way you could see it in Rian’s photographs.
I wasn’t that lucky. I didn’t have a creative outlet for my newfound feelings.
I didn’t know how to deal with what I felt.
Most days it felt like drowning in a world that was emotionless.
Feelings felt like punishment for having a gentle heart.
A few of my old friends tried to connect with me after Rian died, but they didn’t really understand how I’d changed.
I didn’t blame them. I exhausted myself a lot of the time, too.
I knew Karla’s heart was gentle, even though she tried to seem hardened. I saw myself in her letters. Her words felt so familiar to me, like she’d crawled into my brain and transcribed every thought.
I’d never met another person who had the same thoughts, up until I read her words. I understood why it could be easier to breathe with the dead. Most people were wandering through life holding their breath. Afraid of failure. Afraid of heartbreak. Afraid of living.
That final breath before death probably felt like the best exhale of one’s existence. I wondered if Rian’s last breath felt that way.
Seeing Karla’s words first and then meeting her in person made me release the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.
What was it about her sadness that seemed so comforting to me?
She walked through the halls with her hair covering her face, especially the side with the intense scars, and her stare seemed fixated on the floor, as if she were counting every tile throughout the building.
She was soft-spoken. Each word seemed as if it was dipped in hesitation of some kind. She moved slowly with her limp and made sure, or tried, to stay out of everyone’s way. That bothered me. I didn’t know why, but it did.
I sat in math class, fidgeting with the small red toy truck in the pocket of my hoodie.
The classroom was loud. Not because people were talking, but because of the busyness of the shuffling paper and pens.
The fluorescent lights overhead had a slight hum to them as one flickered in and out.
There was even a small crackle sound that came from the intercom that shared the morning announcements.
I sat in the back corner of the room, staring at the backs of everyone’s heads, thinking about Karla. I welcomed the thoughts of her. It was nice to have someone living occupy my mind.
Adiós, mi amiga.
I’d never live that down. I wouldn’t blame Karla if she avoided me for the rest of the semester.
After class, I ran into Karla in the hallway twice. Well, I didn’t run into her. I didn’t even speak to her. I noticed her, though, walking out of her not-Spanish class first. Then I noticed her walking into the cafeteria.
I had to remind myself not to stare at her for too long. I knew she hated when people stared at her, but for some reason, I couldn’t look away. Not because of her scars or anything, but because she felt like me. Lonely, but OK with being alone. Sad, but used to the sadness.
I wondered if she’d want to eat lunch with me. It would be nice to have someone to sit with, though I wasn’t certain she’d want to sit with me. I’d been sitting by myself at the end of the table where the band kids ate. They never interacted with me, but I watched them a lot.
The band kids talked about crap I didn’t understand, and behind our table were the theater kids who definitely talked about stuff I didn’t understand.
For some reason they were obsessed with a guy named Aaron Burr and this dude named Hamilton who should’ve said no to some chick in a red dress.
Don’t even get me started on the popular kids’ tables.
I used to sit with those people at my old school.
Now I had nothing in common with those kinds of groups.
Most of them were bullies, and there wasn’t anything I hated more than bullies.