"The Boy" by Abigail Abdi

He always smelled like an open field, like fresh cut grass and cool air. Every time I saw him there was a piece of grass on his shoulders and his hair was disheveled. He fascinated me. There was something about him that screamed life, and not that dumb teenager life. Actual life. He was everything I wasn’t. 

Free. 

Maybe he was freedom too; that feeling of exhilaration and fear you get on a rollercoaster. He was all of it and more, and I wanted it more than anything. 

We always walked home together but never side by side. He would walk in front of me, shoelaces untied and backpack hanging off of one shoulder, always stopping to admire the green leaves on the trees or to breathe in the lingering petrichor from the ground beneath them. Sometimes he would nearly wander into the street to look at the flowers on the trees of the house across from us and my heart would stop before he quickly righted himself on the sidewalk. He looked at the world with wide eyes as if he was seeing it for the first time, or savoring it as his last.

He was green and I was red. 

I was the color of blood and the sunset on an open sea. Dark and turbulent, a life force that flowed through passages already determined, restricted from making my own. I never strayed from them the way he strayed from the sidewalks trying to follow a crack to see where it led. They had always been there and I never changed them. 

I never looked at a tree and wondered when the flowers would bloom. I never walked with my face turned to the stranger across the street humming a sad tune as she pulled the weeds out of her yard, wondering what her story was. There was nothing I looked at as deeply as he did. I saw the world and I didn’t like it so I never thought about it. But he stands and watches the woman so I stand and watch him. His breathing, the fidgeting of his fingers with the cord on his backpack, the shift of his hair in the warm summer breeze. If I could paint him I would. Brown and honey and forest green. The canvas would become my world. 

I take a deep breath and turn away to walk past him, only hesitating when I hear the soft whispers of a song that sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it so I let it go. 

Our roles have reversed and I allow myself to think now that the distraction of life is gone. The space between us grows as he continues to stare at the humming woman and I make my way to a house of gray and white and a world devoid of color.