Yall need to follow urinecredible. First off that url, second she has hot korean men and depression and funny shit rolled into one blog and will flip if you even mention KurLinz its adorable. Gogogoooggogogo
because someone (urinecredible) actually did reblog the post i made several weeks ago regarding ficlets, i've decided to post this here. a promise is a promise, after all. this is the working prologue to my senior thesis. i'll probably take it down once the spring semester begins and i have to heavily work on it, but for now, it will remain here. feel free to comment with suggestions, (constructive) criticism, etc., but please don't comment just to tell me it sucks. it probably does, but that's my issue, not yours.
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Some people should come with warning labels. They should walk around with them hanging from their necks or flashing in neon lights above their heads so people know what they’re getting themselves into. I don’t know what mine would say. Probably something like Warning: will bore you to death, which would obviously be detrimental to my social life. While I may not wish that I had a warning label hanging around my neck or above my head, I do wish that Wren had come with one. It could have told me that she was slightly addicted to coffee; it could have told me that she was prone to following whims and split-second life-changing decisions; and it could have told me that I would fall totally and hopelessly in love with her.
Wren Storm came into my life with all the grace of a bull in a china shop. I was collecting the mail from our mailbox one afternoon when she ran me over with her bicycle. Even then, she was tiny—the bicycle looked as if it had been made for a giant beside her small frame—and her short blonde hair stuck out crazily in several directions. She didn’t seem remotely sorry for having run me over; she stood there laughing with her hands on her knees while I picked myself up and tried to shake the stars out of my vision. Despite this seeming lack of concern, however, she came by the next day to make sure I hadn’t sustained any lasting injuries from the accident, and soon after that we became friends.
That had been when we were nine. By the time we reached high school, Wren was dating extensively and I was playing bass clarinet in the band. She would spend dances flitting from one partner to the next, wearing bright colors and tulle and looking like a fairy. I would spend them sitting against the wall with a bottle of water and wondering just what I was doing here in the first place and secretly hoping she’d want to dance with me. Of course, she never did. To her, I was just Grin, which made me totally undateable. I’m not entirely sure when I realized I was so in love with her, but I think it might have been right after our high school graduation. We were sitting on top of the picnic tables in the park, and we were both a little drunk, and she started talking a way that she usually didn’t.
Wren never said anything heavy in conversation. While I felt like I knew her better than anyone else, that didn’t mean that I thought I actually knew her. So I was surprised by the tone her voice took that night.
“Peregrine,” she said, and that stopped me. It was the only time she ever called me that. “Do you ever think about dying?”
I looked back at her. She was lying back on the picnic table in her white graduation dress, her makeup smudged from sweat. A few fireflies lit up around her head. My breath caught in my throat, because I had never seen someone so beautiful in my entire life. The night was so dark, but here were these fireflies, and here was Wren, and it suddenly didn’t matter that college was waiting for us at the end of the summer, that Wren was going to art school and I was going to business school. All that mattered was this night.
It took me a moment to find my voice. “I dunno,” I said finally. “Not really. It’s one of those things you try not to think about, you know?”
She looked at me, only moving her eyes. “I don’t know. I think about dying all the time.” She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “I think about dying because I think it’s so inherently tied in with living. Life is all about dying—it’s the endgame. I can’t do anything after I die. I want to do so much before I die, Grin.”
This wasn’t something I wanted to give much thought to. I didn’t know how long this mood of hers was going to last; she shared things this deep with me so rarely that I felt I had to cradle this moment like one would a bird. Wren was apt to fly away at the slightest provocation. So I thought the best course of action was just to keep her talking. She probably didn’t really want to hear what I had to say, anyway.
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“I want to be noticed.”
In that moment, Wren made perfect sense to me. I saw her life as a struggle, a small girl trying to make her way in a big world. Her parents, one a successful lawyer and the other a doctor, were often too busy to pay much attention to Wren. My parents and I had been the ones to attend her art shows, while her parents remained largely absent. But I also felt a little indignant, because didn’t she know that I noticed her? That I couldn’t not notice her? Wasn’t that enough for her? Didn’t she know that no one could possibly notice her in the way that I did?
“I notice you,” I said, my voice slightly rougher than I intended in my earnestness.
She didn’t say anything. She just smiled, in a way that almost seemed pitying. Then she was gone, walking home across the grass in her white dress and bare feet, fireflies blinking in her wake.
That night stayed with me all through college. Maybe it was that night that prevented me from having steady relationships. They always tended to peter out after a month or two. Other girls came and went, but there was always Wren. She was the only one who stayed. And even though I knew she wasn’t the type to hold down a relationship, knew she slept with lots of guys and was probably not the kind of girl you want to try to tame, part of me felt like she was mine.
