matchawaffles-blog

[matchawaffles-blog]

matcha musings

Its 1AM when he calls

1AM when his whole world falls

So he picks up the phone and dials me hoping, praying that i’m not asleep

He’s like hey I’m sorry I know its late

But i need someone to talk to

Can you stay awake

So I shift, sit up, turn on a light

yeah wassup you alright?

Then he breaks down cause its 1 AM and

He should be sleeping too

But his thoughts won’t let him

Its a darkspace its overwhelming

Feeling like he’s sinking

 down in the depths of his mind that make him feel like hell

While hes pouring out his soul

I listen and whisper affirmations of the boy i know

That things will get better

That he’s been feeling great

That his girlfriend loves him and that he has to look forward to marrying her someday

I tell him he shouldn’t give in to his terrible thoughts

That he should keep up with therapy

Take the meds that will help the chemical imbalance in his brain

That he can look forward to the sun after the rain

Its 1 AM when i get a call

He’s okay

And that’s better than hearing

Sorry ma’am you were the last number he called today

[matchawaffles-blog]

Her eye twitches at the sight in front of her. Exams are over and her friends had decided to get shit faced drunk and normally that would not have been a problem. Only they decided to drag the baby of the group , the smallest ball of fluff that Senna has ever met to the bar they frequent. She’s being over protective she knows, Binji is twenty years old and is legal to drink ( barely), he’s able to make his own decisions its just that this particular one was stupid. 

His eyes are hooded, and when she finally manages to track down all her friends  with the help of the most sober one out of all of them - thank god for  Camio and his high tolerance to alcohol, Binji has his head on her shoulder. Her friend group is too stubborn to leave so Senna and Camio amuses themwith shots ( water for Binji on her insistence). 

It’s not until Senna notices that Robin is pouring Binji a shot does she actually have a drink herself. Taking the liqueur and downing it with ease before Robin can even sneak it to Binji. There’s a low blow whistle from Robin and Binji pouts having wanted to take the shot himself. She pats his head to pacify the younger, although it has less of an effect than when he is sober. 

“I wanted to drink that.” He whines and Senna rolls her eyes.

“Let me be your knight for tonight.”

“So you’ll save me then, no matter how much trouble I get into.” Binji waggles his eyebrows and Senna gives him a soft smile. 

“Just for tonight.”

There’s a snort and a few chorus of boos from the more drunk of their friends. As the chatter shifts from the present moment to talk about the plans for the summer. All nonsense ideas with  words being slurred, Senna tunes some of it out, focusing more so on the ideas Binji pitches in. In between sips of water Senna catches the look that Camio is shooting her. Binji gets up to pee taking a few of the other boys with them, leaving Senna and Camio along with two of their girl friends who have pushed together to have their own private conversation.  

Camio comes to sit beside her and the look returns. Her stomach churns, Senna blames it on the shot. 

“You’re so whipped.”

“Shut up.”

[matchawaffles-blog]

It���s his smile that gets her. How one can look so innocent and then change within a matter of seconds its beyond her. His smile contorts his expression into something far more sinister than she’d like to see. He hasn’t changed not even after two years in an underwater prison. 

“Long time no see.” He says, his tone of voice amused, as if he thought he had more time before she would seek him out. He steps closer closing the large space between them so that their face to face, only a few centimeters apart. 

They stare for a moment and slowly her hand moves to cup his cheek. He brings their foreheads together and she grimaces before she’s dropping her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, shoving him away. 

“I was hoping it would be longer.”

-matchawaffles

[matchawaffles-blog]

He’s passed out on the table, face down on a stack of papers when she arrives home. The apartment is messy- they haven’t been able to clean in a while thanks to part time jobs and school taking up most their times- if their mother had still been alive she would have scolded them. Her father dismissing their mess with a shrug and silent offer to help. It’s on days like this when she misses the warmth of her parents, of the lack of responsibilities where she only had to be a child and not a second mother to her younger brother. 

She’s twenty but her friends say she acts older, having no choice but to grown up and grow up fast since she was twelve and her younger brother only seven. They bounced around for a while form relative to relative living off pity of the circumstances until she turned eighteen and found a cheap place for them to live on their own.  Their apartment while small was theirs. Ruffling her brothers hair as she passed by the kitchen table, she smile softy as he stirs. A groan escapes his lips before he re positions himself and his breathing becomes even again. 

She tidy’s up for a moments stacking books into neat piles and throwing stray clothing items into the laundry basket down the hall near the washroom. It’s nearly dawn, she’ll be back into work in a few hours taking up a double shift because some guy cancelled earlier today and she needed the hours. Things would be easier if her brother got a job to help out, but she’d rather not make him apart of the burden. He needed to go to school without distractions, get a degree without having to struggle like she did. Balancing school and work was difficult and if she could save Hughie from that then she would. She still had three more years to save up for his college fund, stuffing whatever tips she got from her second job and twenty percent of her pay from the grocery store gig into a savings account for him. 

She struggles to move him from the table to his bed. Hughie is a sleeper who is neither light nor heavy when he falls under so he wakes after a few jostling moments and with her helps stumbles into his room. When he’s tucked in she moves to clean up his papers, stuffing them into his notebooks and thumbing a finger over the ninety percent that’s written in bold over a past test she finds while somewhat snooping. He shows her his grades sparingly, out of the two of them hers had been average enough to get by but not enough to be outstanding. He was kind in that way not wanting to boast but she wished Hughie could be more proud of himself. She wanted him to show her every high grade and beam at the praised instead of hiding it. 

Where he was smart, she was resourceful. They’d survive they two of them against the world. Her biggest hope being that he’d be happy with his life in ways that she hadn’t been able to. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

You say we’re cruising down lovers lane.

But honestly it’s more like a full stop. 

-matchawaffles 

[matchawaffles-blog]

“Nice to see you without the kid.”

She eye twitches. The idiots crouching down on the side of the road having a smoke are talking about the cute full ball that carries a camera wherever he goes. She has long decided that he’s a kid that need protection. She feels older sometimes when they are together, he’s often too excited too playful and damn to cute for his own good. They way his eyes sparkled when he talks about something he’s passionate about, its a childlike innocence that his favourite thing had been corrupted yet by the reality of the world. Then there are the times when their age means nothing but numbers. The four year difference is completely gone in during times of hush whispers and serious gazes, of low voices and comforting shoulder squeezes. She wants to protect him for as long as she can. Her reasons however albeit a bit selfish, only for the fact that she wants to continue to see that sparkle in his eyes light up his face. 

“What do you want?” She narrows her eyes and crosses her arms in front of her chest. She’s already irritated today, her brothers ticking her off with comments of her finding a real job. As if transporting superheros wasn’t something to be proud of.

“Just to talk.”

“I don’t talk to trash.”  The group is up on their feet at her words. Hand slip into pockets and stay there. Classic fronting behaviour that she’s seen on the streets time and time again. They forget like many do, her power of teleportation isn’t a powerhouse. She can’t make fire shoot from her hands nor can she call up the earth and smack rocks in her face at will. All she can do is teleport from location to location and only if she’s not drained. She has limits, and its because of these limits that she learned to fight and fight dirty.  

[matchawaffles-blog]

 She chooses who she interacts with carefully not too keen on people. She prefers books to people if she’s being honest liking the stories books told much better than those of her peer group. She does have a small group of friends formed together through time and sometimes she thinks sheer luck by how different they are from one another.  She holds them in high regard and its not often that a particular friend - childhood neighbor - would ask her for a favour. 

He is the last person she wants to help. But if its for the girl who was one of the few who noticed that she was drowning and held out a hand, she would do anything. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

She writes in her spare time, stories about silly things and one that’s more serious and about her mother. While her father thinks she’s typing away on her laptop working on a paper for school – and sometimes she is- she’s writing something, anything to help her slip into another world much different than her own.

[matchawaffles-blog]

Sometimes when things got difficult and she felt overwhelmed she would go to the ocean. The roaring of the water and the salty air calmed her. The crashing of the waves on the beach always seemed larger than the crashing of her world and helped pull her out from sinking too deep into her thoughts. The ocean allowed her to breathe, to take a deep breathe and forget the hustle of her life. With just her and the water she felt at peace. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

She is more of a thinker than a speaker. Hesitant to voice her thoughts because they might be rejected or dismissed as idiotic. Thinking is easier and she doesn’t have to face the possibility that her words come out wrong or display her as an odd character. She may know what she means but that doesn’t mean others will. Misunderstandings are common in life and many have come out from the fact that she voiced her own opinion. What she says and what she means are synonymous and in a world where meaning has to be found through hidden messages and games, she always loses. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

She wants to be a name that will never be forgotten. A flame that won’t fade even in the harshest of winds and have a voice that will make a person turn their head just so they can search for whom it belongs to. 

She wants to be somebody to someone. If only that someone were to exist. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

When the last member of their friend group finishes their exams he insists on a road trip. When he insists, its hard for the others to say no. He rarely speaks his mind often, allowing conversations to flow with him giving an occasional response or using facial expressions as substitute for words. So when he does speak up and actually makes the effort to plan something they go along with it, knowing it’s important to their less than vocal friend. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

The shelves are empty somedays and filled on others, littered with flower petels that turn into wax figures at her touch. They dance upon her will and revert back to petals when she pleases so she can tuck them into her pocket and scatter them among the shop. Only her place is not so much a shop as it is a bar and not so much a bar as it is a rest stop. A place for weary souls and all beings immortal alike that are done with their duties for the day to come and drink and be marry. A place for humans with enough desperation to find and stumble in looking for the souls of those that they lost. A place where she keeps watch over the souls that neither the heavens nor hell wants. A place that she doesn't remember buying but now owns. A place she has owned for more than a century. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

 It wasn’t brought on by jealousy or a situation where she would be lost forever to him that made him realize that platonic feelings had become so much more. It was a quiet moment, one where the silence was comforting and the only sounds were the squeaking of the book cart wheels as the librarian did her rounds of put backs. He had been staring -he would say at something behind her later in an effort to mask his embarrassment. She had looked up, they locked eyes and he decided that she was who he wanted to cherish. 

[matchawaffles-blog]

She looks up from her notes ready to nudge him awake. He having put his head down for a nap as soon as they found the library space- only to see him staring. He blinks once, twice, before he realizes that he’s been caught staring and quickly turns to rummage through his bag, fumbling for study material. 

She suppresses her laughter, albeit doing a poor job as the tips of his ears turn red from embarrassment. 

“You like what you see?” She teases not bother to look up from her notes. 

“Shut up.”