You Were The Colour Inside My Eyelids
You met him when he was studying for finals in the library during your senior year of high school. He was half-asleep on the couch, except it was your favorite couch, and he was really fucking tall, so his feet dangled off the end, and you couldn’t even sit anywhere near it, and all the other sections of the library either smelled like death or were used for, well, not-studying.
You sat down next to him, your back pressed against the couch, and he sat up so quickly, it reminded you of a rocket ship. He flailed his long, lanky legs so spastically that it hit you in the nose and you started bleeding all over your computer case.
He swore and used the flannel shirt he had been using as a pillow as a tissue, basically slamming the shirt against your nose, and you swore back at him, and held his shirt to your nose for the next forty-five minutes, which eh spent the first ten of apologizing profusely, and for the rest he let you read what he had been working on before he fell asleep.
His professor had forgotten about the necessity that was finals, and had hellishly decided that all of his students had to write a short story as their finals.
You read it, and after five minutes you had discovered that he was an absolutely glorious writer, and that he couldn’t spell for shit. He had three-quarters of a green spiral notebook all filled up with magnificent words that seemed to have spilled out of the sky, like the sun had been wrung out, like a wet dish rag, and all of it had fallen into scrawly letters in various hues of pens.
The next day you made him buy you coffee, to compensate for the bruise on your nose. You also made him bring the notebook, and once he bought you the coffee, you stole his notebook and began reading over it, occasionally using your bright blue pen to fix a spelling error.
He asked you if you were now his official editor. You stared at him and told him yes. He shrugged and refilled your coffee, you smiled at him and you both fought over who paid the check. You won.
You walked home with him, just so you could keep reading it, and occasionally he would poke you in the rib cage so you wouldn’t run into a street lamp or mail box.
He had to pry it from your hands when you sat down on his neighbors porch to keep reading, because HOLY SHIT HE WAS A FUCKING AMAZING WRITER OKAY. You both laughed when he was trying to pull the notebook out if your hands and he tripped backwards into his mum’s flowers.
You started to hang out more, because he wasn’t a good speller at all, and you needed something as good as this story in your life.
You went to an amusement park, and pooled all your money to give to the carney before you got on the ferris wheel, and you stayed there for two hours, and eventually, you almost forgot about the notebook, and you talked about music.
You took the shit out of his favorite bands because of their weird name, but when you got home you downloaded their album, and it was rather amazing.
You never told him though, because even though you were a piece of shit, he was a sarcastic asshole who would make fun of you for being wrong.
Which is exactly what he did when you went to the beach, and threw candy at eachother, and both sat on a giant inflatable dolphin in the sand, when he heard you humming one of their songs.
You tipped over the inflatable whale and you called him a jackass of a beaver and he called you an arrogant bitch, and you ran around the beach, and you couldn’t find you umbrella or anything afterwards, but you saw some girls in the ocean with your inflated whale and you threw seashells at them.
When you drove home he told you about how his brother and sister in the military, and how he was proud of them, and so was his whole family, but he just didn’t want to join.
And suddenly he was everywhere, colouring the insides of your eyelids, and filling your heart up with so much happiness it leaked into your bloodstream and got tangled around your veins and ribcage.
He was there at the abandoned train station, with all the half burnt trains still at the station.
He sat in one of the seats and wrote, while you walked up and down the aisle of the cart, talking about your niece, and your sister and her husband who wasn’t nice enough to her.
He was there at a fast food restaurant where they eventually told you to leave, since you had been there for three hours and all you had bought was a small soda.
He was there at a fancy hotel lobby, where you claimed you were meeting someone, both refilling on free coffee, until he was writing with shaking hands and your food was just a tapping blur. A woman that neither of you knew came downstairs, and you walked in step with her until the concierge couldn’t see you.
One night you both ran into eachother at some lame party, so you ended up going into a random room that turned out to be a bathroom, and you sat in the bathtub, and he sat on a mountain of towels, and you talked, and he just made you laugh, and maybe it was the alcohol, but your lungs burned from how happy you were about having a friend like him.
You yelled at the random partygoers and refused to let anyone in the bathroom until you heard someone threatening to break the door down, so you went out the window, and he hurt his leg, and his face went so white it looked like the moon spat at it.
You wanted to tease him, but settled for calling someone and telling them that your lame friend fell out of a window and hurt his leg. He gave you the finger while you gave the doctors his information, not realizing that you somehow knew it as well as you knew the pattern of the spiderweb of blue veins on the back of you hand.
You even partially dragged him into the ambulance, and stole some kids bike outside the party to ride along next to the ambulance.
The next day the doctors said it was a minor break, and you smiled so big that you thought the sky would have to split open just to make room for the happiness. You ran into his room and screamed at him that he was okay, and he screamed back that he knew he was okay. You brought him pudding that entire day, until eventually he dumped it on your head and told you to stop, because all he wanted to do was eat a burrito.
He came over with crutches and you continued editing his book, which you had almost forgotten about. You both talked, and he even tried to play your dad’s guitar and you threatened to smash it over his head.
The cast came off two weeks later, and he got his finals results back, and he ran over, his face sweaty, and out of breath from running, clutching his paper in his sweaty hands screaming that FUCK YES HE GOT AN A!!!
You both screamed and jumped around, and then you both ate popsicles and walked around town, just talking, and occasionally stopping at some old convenience store to buy ice cream or tortilla chips.
You ended up sitting on a back porch at eleven o’clock at night with a cranky old lady yelling that she would call the cops on you, when it started pouring, and you couldn’t find your way back, so you ran around in the rain, laughing, and smiling, and you just felt so happy that it felt like the northern lights had exploded in your stomach.
You finally found your way home, and ordered chinese food to your porch, where you both ate it and debated the various pros and cons of different types of chicken and their sauces.
He ate the last piece of chicken and you you began smacking him with the garden hose, calling him a tin can full of deer piss.
You both ended up falling asleep on the porch until he woke up at one in the morning, screaming that you were graduating next week AND HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE ARE GRADUATING NEXT WEEK I AM NOT PREPARED HELP ME! You told him to go back to sleep, so he threw an empty chinese food container at your head until you sat up and talked him down to a state of sanity.
On the second to last day, you were scared as hell about graduating, and didn’t know what to do, so you found the address of a publisher and made a copy of the notebook, and sent it to her. And then resumed panicking because you were not ready to graduate.
You laughed when he couldn’t find the arm-hole thingies in his graduation robe, and he tied your hair into the tassel in your cap, and neither of you went to a party that night, you grabbed the notebook and went to Macy’s where you both splayed out on the biggest bed you could find and talked about college and how much macaroni and cheese and ramen noodles you would probably both have to eat to have any money whatsoever.
A woman asked you to leave, so you slunk away and sat in a box of giant stuffed animals and talked there instead, until the woman started walking towards you so you sprinted out of the store.
You were helping him pack, and you checked your email on your cell phone and screamed, because the publishers had emailed you back.They wanted to publish it. You told him that someone wanted to publish what he had written, and he dropped a box on his foot and yelled, but didn’t bother to move it. You saw all these emotions flicker across his open mouthed face, and you felt fear stuck in your veins, dark and icy, strangling and piercing.
Finally he screamed because OH MY SHIT ARE YOU SERIOUS! THEY WANT IT!
He picked you up and spun you around and you felt so happy, like the sun had dripped into your chest, and that bright fiery, happiness, was stuck in your chest, you yelled so loud the stars quivered and rearranged the constellations in the very sky.
You both celebrated by singing some old rock song, that you both vaguely knew the tune of, but didn’t really know, jumping around and laughing over your own words.
You wore a nice green dress to the meeting with the publisher, and he wore a button down and jeans, and you told him that it was supposed to be formal, as you looked at his sandals, and he scrunched his eyebrows at that, and stubbed his toe.
During the meeting, he took off his shoes under the desk, and you were both so happy that when they handed you the contracts, he kicked his leg and the shoe hit the ceiling. The publishes looked embarrassed, and ushered us out quickly, telling us to send the contracts whenever possible.
You were both so happy that you cried, except he denied crying.
Eight months later, you sat in the coffee-house, and you paid the check again, and you cried again while you looked at the copy of the book, the book that he had written.
You opened up the book, and there in small letters it read, ‘For my best friend, who thinks that coffee is an even trade for almost breaking your nose’.
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