His family had moved again.
New country, new home, new school.
It was September.
He walked the hallways, headphones blasting, towards the first class of his first day.
As he walked, he crashed into a girl, and they both flew to the ground.
His mind went blank.
As he regained his senses, he looked towards the girl.
Her eyes were green, and her hair was auburn.
Her glasses rested upon her nose, and her clothes were horribly, yet somehow perfectly, mismatched.
He saw a spark of something, perhaps a spirit close to his.
He quickly picked up her books and her papers and started to apologize again and again.
She, too, apologized several times and told him that she was fine.
Their stumbling about on the floor attracted the laughter of the students around them.
He could tell he would not be popular here, though it seemed the girl was not either.
As it turns out, the girl was headed to the very same class as he was.
They sat next to each other during class in awkward silence.
Later that day, he snuck outside to eat his sandwich beneath a tree.
And so, he found out, had she.
Not wanting to make this more awkward than it already was, he decided it best to speak.
And so, he spoke, but only a name.
She replied to him with a name, but she added a “please do sit.”
So, he sat and he shared a bit about his life, though not of his own desire, but hers.
She, too, shared about her life.
After a few minutes of questions, she realized she would not get anywhere quickly with him.
She decided to ask him to meet her down by the lake later in the evening.
A lake he knew nothing about.
In the back of his mind he knew that they would be friends.
He thus agreed, and so it was that they met later that day to talk.
They did not talk about their stories, but about their experiences.
When came October, the two sat by each other on a cliffside, looking out unto the horizon.
She said she liked the sunset.
He said he liked the sunrise.
The two met somewhere in between.
On one snowy January night, she ran away into the woods.
He followed her closely behind.
She danced there in the moonlight, the snow cascading down her fiery hair.
He, too, danced, though he knew he danced poorly.
She grabbed his hand and they danced together through the night.
When April came, he picked a daisy from the ground and presented it to her.
She put it in her auburn hair, a symbol of the connection they now shared.
June arrived, and his mother and father sat him down.
They had promised this move was final, but they had lied to him that August morning.
He ran to her house where they wept for hours, as she held his head close to her heart.
His spirit was fractured in late July, as he boarded an airplane going nowhere.
His mind went blank.
As he regained his senses, he looked towards the girl.
Her eyes were green, and her hair was auburn.
Her glasses rested upon her nose, and her clothes were horribly, yet somehow perfectly, mismatched.
He saw a spark of something, perhaps a spirit close to his.
And so, as quickly as he could, he stood and walked away.
That year he would have no friends.
That year he would have no soul.
In October, he sat on a cliffside alone.
He had liked the sunrise once, but he always knew it would set no matter what he did.
January was cold, and as he sat in wooded land under the moonlight he tried to cry.
Not because he felt sad, but because he knew he could never truly feel sadness again.
There was a flower one April morning near the school’s entrance.
It was a daisy.
He did not see it, nor did he care to.
When July came around, his empty spirit remained empty, and his pain changed not one bit.
He made a terrible sacrifice that year.
But it was his alone to bear.