trying to use prompts things. this one is “fall aesthetic”
the idea isn’t like ‘write explicitly this’
it’s “hunh do something, anything at all”
I sat on the shitty little dorm bed and looked through imgur posts on my phone. This was the beginning of my new life, they said, when they left me here. Sure, my mom was tearing up as she said it and hugged me for the last time for a while.
Classes didn’t start for another week. Orientation week was probably a load of bullshit, and it was starting the next day. Going to university was going to change my life. Probably. It looked and felt cheap and boring so far. The buzz and hum of girls outside my room eager to meet each other was comforting, or off-putting, or nerve-wracking. My dorm was a bunch of double rooms and some single rooms, and they were all girls my age on my floor. What was there possibly to complain about?
More footsteps outside and the sound of friendly girl 1 and friendly girl 2 greeting someone new. Louder. “Oh, I don’t think your roommate has arrived yet…” the voice of the RA bounced off the door. What a surprise my roommate-to-be was in for.
The door opened quietly and the RA retracted her verbal misstep. “It’s fine, I’m here. Hey. Cool to meet you,” I exude like a sigh. My shit is pretty tidy and I’m already set up. From the looks of her face she’s going to be claiming a lot of counter space for cosmetics or clothes or “girly” things. Whatever, that’s cool. Do what you like. All my quiet, internalized energy begins to emanate from my skin or something, like I’d just been waiting for her to come in, come into my life, stop me from being alone. I kind of want her to be just mine, don’t go away, just chill with me.
She smiles sheepishly and introduces herself, so I respond in kind. She’s cute. She’s pretty. She’s fashionable. She begins to unpack her junk carefully and she hums nervously to herself. She’s taller than me. She’s got a kind of deeper voice than me, she’s kind of … hot?
I don’t want her to leave. I ask her some shit about where she’s from, somewhere like Georgia - but not a hick, she laughs. I tell her where I’m from. I tell her that my thing is fine arts, like drawing. I ask her why she wanted to come here.
She turns around to face me sitting on my bed cross-legged, she leans against her bed like some kind of model. She didn’t want to be around -there- anymore, that’s for sure. I smile coyly not asking what she means and assuming something like the worst which twists my smile like a wet towel dried by an angry mom. What’s your thing, then, and maybe it’s something like fashion and design.
I’m drowning myself in her attention and I know it, so I try to stop. I ask her if she wants help, and leave it at that. She laughs that I wouldn’t know what to do with her stuff anyways. I’d be offended but she’s honest and I like it and her and so much.
Back to my phone, its blank screen, my eyes following her hands or hair or legs or nose as she navigates the room we’ll both call home for a while.
She finishes putting her stuff away and jumps onto her little bedroll of a bed. She can probably tell I’m just casually watching her, probably. She looks over to me and I look out the window between our beds like nothing’s special. The leaves are yellow, red, green, or absent. The little naked twigs of branches remind me of me, and the filled-out leaves with beauty and color remind me of her. Feels like fall.
