Paper Hearts, chapter one.

I walk home to the unsteady music of the traffic; squealing tyres on wet tarmac my only accompaniment. My mp3 player sits in my pocket, 512 megabytes of songs left unsung. I don’t want to block out the song playing over in my head. 'Things you’re feeling aren’t normal now…' Too Far Gone, by The All-American Rejects. It’s Tyson’s favourite band, Tyson’s favourite song. I remember three years ago when we went to a concert together, when we were fourteen… we begged our parents forever to let us go, then when we did, it was amazing. They played that song in the encore, and Tyson almost started crying. 'Think you need me; it’s not easy to let you go somehow'.

I guess it’s all too true now. Maybe that was some clue to our destiny. 'Your lips provide a shelter for the things that I don’t know…' God, I’m such an idiot. Why did I have to go and kiss him? He’s never going to talk to me again now, I bet. I’m such a fucking dumbass sometimes.

I don’t know how long I walk for before I get home. I always was pretty crap at gauging time. A quick check on the neon screen of my phone proves it to be one AM. As I stuff my keys back into my pocket and push open the door, our hallway, messy even in the darkness, greets my eyes. Family photos are nestled around Van Gogh prints, scattered on the wall like black keys on a piano.

The lights are all off, meaning my mother’s either home and asleep (unlikely), or with ‘Derek’, her latest fling. He only looks about twenty, and my mother – although she may have the skin of a sixty-year-old – is thirty-two. She was fifteen when she had me with her high school sweetheart. Needless to say, he dropped her like trash soon after.

I ignore the kitchen and the three-day pile up of dirty dishes in the sink. I ignore the underwear strewn across the floor. Instead, I head straight up the stairs to my room. I am oblivious to everything else. I have a journey, and a destination. They are all I’m focussing on. This is how I’ve lived my life so far. This is how I will continue.

I’ve only ever had two boyfriends. That’s proof I’m not relationship material. The first was Ian. I was head-over-heels, arse-over-tits, utterly and entirely, madly in love with him, with his eyes like doors I would never open, my hair twisted round his fingers as he kissed me in the park, rain falling all around us. It was beautiful. He was beautiful.

But, of course, it all ended up in a mess of tears and apologies, torn-up love letters and broken hearts. At fifteen, love always means heartbreak. If only I’d known that at the time.

I was single for a while after that. I was single for roughly twelve months. Then Patrick popped up. Patrick had just moved over from America, dragging in tow his freckled face and the twang in his voice which whispered lies to me that I was only too glad to fall for. He was a pure-breed ‘emo’ kid, black hair swept eyeliner-coated eyes to prove it. He was funny, smart, amazingly cute… too cute for me. We were going out for four, maybe five months before I found out about the others. One boy, two girls. He had been cheating on me. And he hadn’t even had the courage to tell me himself. I heard it from the grapevine. I had never had a chance with him.

I’ve reached my room, kicking my shoes off in the doorway. My room is tiny, virtually a box. But it has everything a desk, paper, pens… It has everything I need to get away.

I stopped sleeping a while ago. I don’t know how, or why, but for some reason, it just seemed easier not to dream. When I was little, a kid, I used to get really bad nightmares, and though it’s not something I would admit, the dark creeps me out. I hate having curtains open at night, it just feels like something’s going to reach out from the darkness and pull me in with it, take me somewhere empty, desolate. Somewhere without hope, without joy… without truth, beauty, freedom, without even… without even love.

I slide open a few drawers until I find the one with paper. I pull out a bleach-white sheet and, opening another drawer, feel about for a pencil. I sit down, and press the tip of the pencil to the paper.

And I draw.

***

I try to keep thoughts out of my head, but I can’t help the few that roll in. I figure I’ll skip school tomorrow. It’s easy enough to do. I’ve done it thousands of times before, and I doubt Tyson will notice anyway. We’d only have two lessons together tomorrow anyway – Art and Spanish – and he has plenty of other people he can sit with. After all, he’s Tyson James, commandeer of our rather (it has to be said) huge lower sixth. One hundred and eighty pupils, and he’s king of them all. Tyson’s always been good at making people move how he wants them to.

I always wanted to be him, even as a six year old kid living in his best friend’s shadow. But then I realised his darker side. The explosive anger bottled inside of him. The volatile energy that would fizz out in tiny bursts at the slightest thing – when he couldn’t do something right, or when someone else couldn’t do something right for him.

I know Tyson has flaws, faults in his carefully constructed being, but they seem only to serve to make him even more perfect.

My hand’s stopped now, refusing to move across the page as fluidly as it had before. The choking thoughts in my brain have formed a dam, refusing to let anything flow out of the river of consciousness. I should have known better than to try and draw with them clouding up my head. A few scratchings of graphite against paper, no shapes to speak of. Apparently that’s all I can make happen right now.

So I give up. I put away the pencil and paper, glancing at my phone. 3:27AM. How do I waste time so easily when I want it to stay forever, yet cling onto it when I’m just wishing it would end? I crawl from the chair onto my bed, pulling my MP3 player from my jeans pocket and setting it up with the speakers.

Music sings out, blurring my thoughts, and I lie back, letting it break down the dams of consciousness, flooding my head with harmony.

This is how I survive. This is how we all survive.