Work Text:
May 4th
The first day of the school year had always been something to dread, something that lingered at the back of my mind long before it arrived. Yet now that I’m sitting here among familiar voices and the low hum of routine, it feels l more like stepping back into something that had been waiting for me all along instead of a harsh beginning to face
Math class moves slowly, though maybe it only feels that way because everything about it is so steady and predictable, unlike literature. The math teacher speaks in a calm and unhurried rhythm while explaining things, something that will not last once the year finds its pace.
There’s this guy.
He sits just ahead of me and answers questions with an ease that feels almost practiced, (though it probably isn’t), and there is something just a little frustrating to me about how naturally it all comes together for him.
There is a boy asleep a few seats away, as he often is, let me call him H. The teacher notices, and she calls it out with that familiar blend of slight irritation and amusement.
It’s him who follows it up. “What a surprise, H sleeping again, never studying shit.” and the class responds exactly as I’d expected, laughter rising quickly and easily as though rehearsed long before this moment.
It isn’t a particularly good joke, not really, yet I find myself laughing all the same, because everyone does and thus not laughing would feel like standing just slightly out of place. And in that moment my gaze drifts forward half-deliberately, searching for something I already know will be there.
He’s smiling.
He always is, when he makes a joke, whether it truly deserves it or not, as if the reaction is something he never doubts, not once, something everyone gives him without hesitation. It suits him, frankly, that kind of certainty, the way things seem to incline toward him without much effort.
He is handsome without effort, his beauty resting on him with an easy permanence, intelligent in a way that does not announce itself yet is never questioned, and liked with a quiet inevitability. Even the smallest things gather weight in his hands, his words carrying a subtle gravity simply by being his words.
Others can be funny. I can be funny too; I would even call myself amusing on occasion. Yet it never quite settles the same way his jokes and his actions do and never lingers in the air as long, it is not something people talk about.
It is simply something that is.
Most people, if they could somehow look inside my mind, would take it for love. I cannot entirely deny them. There is something in him that invites such a feeling, something easy and unguarded that makes affection feel almost inevitable.
He is handsome without effort, a little sly, amusing in that careless way, clever in his studies, capable in everything else. It is difficult, I’d even say impossible, to find a place where he falls short, and perhaps that is where it begins.
Because each day I spend beside him as his friend, or close one I hope, something else takes root in me, something quieter and far, far less generous.
Whenever I am left alone with myself and the quiet of my thoughts, it gathers slowly, not all at once but in fragments, in moments so slight they almost escape notice, until I feel it settling beneath the surface, taking root in places I cannot quite reach, something that resembles the envy in it’s greenest and ugliest form, something that inclines a bit too much towards self-contempt.
And yet, when I am with him, the green drains of its color. Conversation comes easily and laughter between us feels unforced, and for a while I am allowed a gentler version of myself.
In those moments I almost believe it, that I might be worth something after all, that I am not entirely unlovable. But the feeling never stays, however much I resent its leaving. It fades as soon as I am alone again, leaving nothing behind but the echo of it, and the quiet knowledge that it was never mine to keep.
Night makes it worse. In the stillness of the night, with nothing to distract me, the same thought returns in different shapes. I try in ways too small to notice, to become more like him, yet with each passing day it grows clearer that I am moving in the opposite direction, that there is a distance between us that cannot be crossed no matter how carefully I measure it.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live as him, not just to be seen as he is seen, but to feel it from within, that ease, that certainty, that absence of doubt he always seems to possess. I imagine a life where I am chosen without question, where friendships do not feel conditional, where I can look at myself, at my face, as my chest, without that quiet, creeping nausea that lingers long enough to be felt and grows a little heavier each day.
It is a foolish thought, I know, but it returns all the same. What would it take to become someone like that? What would I have to, and would gladly, give in return? And I cannot imagine the price being anything but ruinous.
For all I know, I would give everything.
Right. Math class. I had almost forgotten…