It's Not Just In My Head [Part One]

                      Dev

   When I wake, I'm staring at a blank white wall. I have my arm tucked under my head to serve as a pillow, since the bed I'm lying on seems to be absent of one. Gathering my thoughts, I attempt sit up, and immediately regret my decision. Pain lances through my head as I try to lift it, and I collapse back on the bed and lie still. After a few moments of taking several slow breaths, I try again. Successful this time, I straighten and lean against the wall that the bed is pushed up to. From this position, I can see the entire room.

   The room itself is relatively small, with eggshell-white walls and an pale gray-colored carpet. In the corner parallel to the bed is a single window. It has no drapes, and the blinds are shut, the cracks letting in only thin lines of sunlight. Across the room is a heavy door painted a metallic gray. On the floor lies a pillow, the one that I assume belongs to this bed. "Could I have thrown it while I was sleeping?"

   When I move to go to the door, something stops me. I look down at my body and find myself clothed in a pair of blue jeans and a simple white t-shirt. My feet are bare, and a bit cold now that I'm no longer under the sheets, but that isn't what catches my attention. Two things adorn my arms: on one wrist there is a thick cuff of dark, worn leather, an item that seems familiar to me, though I can't think of why; on the other there is a thin white medical band. 

   My chest tightens. Finding it a bit difficult to breathe, or to function in any way, I lean my head back against the wall and stare at the ceiling. "I'm in a hospital?"

   Suddenly, I hear a click, and the door opens silently. A man steps into the room and pauses when he sees me. Then he smiles, turns, and shuts the door behind him. Uneasy, I straighten and keep my back against the wall, my legs up on the bed with me. Even in my nervousness, I try to look casual. 

   The man walks to the window, still smiling, and takes a chair that stands under the windowsill. Then, setting it down in front of me, though still a safe distance away, he sits and looks at me. "Good morning...or rather, afternoon, I should say. I didn't think we'd be seeing much of you for some time. Don't take it the wrong way, though, I'm quite happy you're awake."

   I stare at the man. He seems decent enough. He has a nice smile, I think. His smile made his eyes look thinner, just slivers of hazel shadowed by dark eyelashes. His hair is a near black peppered with silver and gray and brown. A white coat is draped over his shoulders, showing up strongly against the dark plaid shirt he wears fastened up to the top two buttons. When I finish studying him, I realize he's looking at me in the same way I'd just been staring at him. He smile falters only slightly and he shakes his head before grinning. 

   "Sorry, I guess you don't know me." He holds out his hand. "Dr. Sherman, but you can call me Andrew." 

   Hesitantly, I reach out and take it. "Dr. Sherman," I reply in a polite yet bold voice. He nods in understanding before take his hand back and looking at his clipboard. "Devon Blake. But I hear you prefer being called Dev, is that correct?"

   When I don't answer, he moves on. "Sixteen years old, going into your junior year of high school, good grades, no past experiences with severe illness or injury-."

    "Then why am I here?" I cut in, my voice quiet but urgent enough to stop him. 

He looks up at me, and his eyes, I'm surprised to see, are sincere. He lowers the clipboard and leans forward. "Dev," he says, and I try to mask the irritation I feel when he calls me by my nickname, "sometimes things go wrong, and in some cases, we can't explain them, and neither can we understand them."

   He takes a deep breath. "We don't know what happened to you, what went wrong. But believe me when I say we are trying to fix it, and we think it's working. Your condition is improving."

   "I think I understand that," I say, "but what caused the problem? Why do I have to stay here if I'm better? Can't I go home?"

   He purses his lips and looks down at his shoes. "I'm sorry, Devon. I truly am. But right now, the best thing you can do is be patient and wait for everything to fall into place. That's the least you can do for your family."

  He lays a photograph on the bed, and after a moment, I reach for it. On it is a colorful shot of four people in front of a cheerful looking house. The couple in the photo is smiling and stands behind two laughing boys, the older with his arm hooked around the other's shoulders. I focus on the younger of the two, who smiles sheepishly compared to his brother's wide grin. 

  "Your parents, your little brother Tanner," Sherman continues, "they're counting on you to be strong for them."

  I meet his eyes. "Will I be able to see them?" I ask hopefully.

    He smiles. "When your condition improves, perhaps. But I don't think it will be long."

  He reaches towards me, and I can't react fast enough to pull away before he gently tussles my hair. "For now, you need to keep your strength. Get some rest, Dev. I'll have a nurse bring up some lunch, and we'll talk a bit after, yes?"

  With that, he stands and waits for me to lie down before walking out. I hear the click of the lock and feel a pit form in my stomach. An odd silence settles in the room. I can feel my heart beating steadily, and I try to focus on that as I shut my eyes tightly. Clutching the photo, I try to fall asleep, with no success. 

  



Author's Note: 
More drabble. At this point, I'm done questioning what pops into my head. I can only hope something more happens with this story. 
~Squiggles

We Can Be Ghosts Now

She felt different.
   Of course, she realized that everyone probably thought themselves different at some point in their life. So she dismissed her thoughts for a while. But each time they came back. She couldn't understand why she felt this way. Isn't that how human beings are meant to be? Are all human beings desperate, and lonely? Desperately lonely. And lost?
  Not lost-in-the-grocery-store lost. No, she was always lost. She could be in the middle of a crowd of people she knew and she would undoubtedly still feel lost.
  Everything made her curious. And her curiosity frightened her. She would find herself wondering strange things, thinking thoughts that she couldn't imagine crossing her mind. When they surfaced, though, oh, how she would wonder. She could just sit and stare at something - the ceiling of her bedroom; the moss-encrusted bricks of her porch; the sky - and not be bothered by anything.
  She loved music. She could get lost in a song as swiftly as taking a breath or blinking. When something unpleasant was happening, such as a fight in between family members or her younger sibling causing a ruckus on a road trip, she would simply turn up the volume of her iPod to drown out the noise. Music was her escape, her inspiration, her muse. She wanted to drown herself in it. She wanted to share her findings with others, but no one ever seemed interested, so she kept to herself. Who cared if no one else heard the music? She listened to it, and she loved it so very much, and that's all that mattered to her.
  Sometimes she thought she saw things. Shapes. Dark figures that appeared for just a moment, just long enough for her to glimpse them. She saw them everywhere, and every time she did, she would stand still and wait for them to appear again, and when they didn't, she moved on. These phantoms intrigued her the most. She wondered if they were real. And if they were real, were they coincidental, or did they mean something?
  She wanted more in her life. She was afraid of living only a mundane, ordinary life. Screw ordinary. She was sick of it. She was already the plainest of the plain. Brown hair that never looked right; it was always too wavy, or too flat, or too frizzly. Her eyes, that could be described as somewhere between light and dark blue. Freckles, braces, boney shoulders. What on earth made her special?
  She had friends, if you could call them that. She cared for them, each one. But she felt like many of them were absent-minded towards her. And who could blame them? She didn't. If they felt like that, it was obviously something to do with her. After all, she was quite strange. The things she enjoyed -anime, various TV shows, books, music- they all affected the way she was presented to people. And some of them chose to stay away because of her interests. Or because of the way she acted, or the people she hung out with. She understood. But that didn't mean she had to like it. They were her choices. And she hated feeling like she chose wrongly.
  She was always afraid. Not of certain things in particular, like the dark, or scary movies, or monsters. She was afraid of being alone. To put it plainly, she was afraid of being abandoned. After all, how easy is it to forget about another high school girl, the one who watched that TV show, who wore the fandom t-shirts, who wrote those weird stories and drew those pictures. She felt like a wallflower. She was at an impasse: she was loud with friends, but dead silent with strangers. She was terrified of being introduced to people. She believed that everyone had walls, and if she crossed them, she would regret it. She was never too forward, because she was afraid of hurting people.
  But sometimes she could be brave. She felt brave with him. She would dare to let her knee touch his, or to lean against him on the couch. She would rest her head on his shoulder for brief moments. She would hold his hand, and she wouldn't move away when he put his arm around her. She talked back to him and teased him, as he did to her. When others would attempt to make a move on her, she would tell him to show where he stood, and this would draw him to do things that made her heart flutter. She would grin when he fought for the seat beside her, and apologize when she failed to save one for him. But even in everything he did, the little things that could pass as hints, she had her doubts. Why? Why would he act like that and do it all for her? Compared to the other people he knew, the other girls he was close to, she felt insignificant.
  She knew that some people cared about her, cared about what would happen to her. At least, she thought that some people did. She hoped so. But even in everything that gave her strength, everything that made her laugh or smile or hope or dream. Despite everything that should show her how much she should mean to the world and the people around her.
Despite everything, she felt small.

"Meet me in the white light as the city slowly lifts away.
We can be a ghost now, 
with the memory of another day."

Song: We Can Be Ghosts Now       Artist: Hiatus (feat. Shura)

Who'd Have Known...?

    WARNING: Contains mixed feelings, confusion, and stuff that might make your kokoro go   doki-doki. Take heed.

 I can't wrap my mind around the idea that school starts back in less than five days. Like anyone else, I love breaks from school. I enjoy having freedom to sleep in and not having to do any homework or worry about the presentation I have to give the next day or week or month. The thing I hate about breaks, though, is the fact that everyone leaves.
    I'm kind of afraid, and selfishly, I'm afraid for myself. I've talk before about the guy I like, that I've liked for ages. To me, it seems so real, like everything can really happen like I've thought it through, and that he is the one person for me. There is no future guy. Just him. And I'm afraid this is simply a facade that I can only dream about. I can't imagine what he possibly sees in a person like me. And it hurts my heart to think this is only happening in my head.
    I'm not sure what I want. I love being friends with him. I love that he's teaching me to play League of Legends and helping me out in Black Ops Zombies, even though I constantly die in both games. I love him being there. I'm constantly in love with the idea that I can walk over to his house if I want to see him. I love that he gives me a hug when I walk in the door and another when I walk out. I love the Doctor Who stocking and the scarf and the Thor poster he gave me for Christmas. I love his smile, his corny jokes, his letting me sit right up against him when we watch TV or play on his laptop.
    But I still want there to be something more for us. And I'm scared of it never happening.
    I realized that I still haven't made a post about the dance. Oh, the dance. I thought about writing one right afterwards, but I was so overwhelmed at the time that I couldn't. Now, though, I might as well try.
    Long story short, it was bloody fantastic. Truth be told, I can't dance at all, but that didn't really matter; nobody really could. Most of the time the crowd was just a series of squirming blobs of teens moving to songs everybody knew. But there were two songs in particular that I remember very, very fondly.
    The first slow song, if I remember correctly, was When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars. If I haven't said before, this guy, let's call him Drew, can sing about as well as I can dance. He knows it, and even so, he insists on singing every chance he gets (another thing I love about him). When the song started, I moved to put a hand on his shoulder and hold his other hand, just as we danced at last years party. I freaked out when he stopped me. Then he wrapped my hands around to the back of his neck and held my waist. I almost died. I remember looking around a few times to see if anyone was watching (and hoping to God they weren't), but most of the time I held his gaze, the two of us singing the song to each other until it ended.
    After a series of other preppy songs, the second slow song came on: 1000 Years. I put my hands around his neck again, and we danced. Throughout both slow songs, he would twirl me under his arm, and I liked how the skirt of my dress would twirl as well. We weren't the most graceful couple on the dance floor, though I didn't watch to compare us to anyone else. At one point in the song, he tried to twirl me with his right arm, but he held it too low, and I hit my head against his arm. I had already put my arms around his neck again, but we were both laughing so hard, and he laid his head on my shoulder for a fraction of a second, but to me, that fraction was like an entire minute. I still can't believe he did that. My Drew putting his head on my shoulder in public. I almost died, hoping nobody had seen, but at the same time hoping some had seen.
    But I'm still scared. I mean, he could just be an affectionate person. He could act like that with all his friends who are girls. What on earth makes me the one he deserves? He's...in short, he's the most amazing guy I've ever known. I can't imagine being with anyone else. I'm just afraid of screwing up. Cuz I really can't afford losing him.
    Sorry for the weird post. I didn't really know what was gonna happen when I opened this window, and I apologize for what occurred.
    I need to start posting stuff again. Even if nobody bothers reading it, it makes me feel good getting my ideas and feelings out.
BTW: not bothering editing this.