rainbowfic | Baby Pink 25

Name:

starphotographs
Story: Universe B
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-everything-happen-you)
Characters: Kelsey (POV), Barclay a little
Colors: Baby Pink 25 (Let's call him up and rub the happiness in his face.)
Word Count: 1,086
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: What Kelsey learned instead of what they tried to teach her.
Note: I swear up and down this was the right poem when I wrote this! I’ve just been sitting on a few things from before Dead Time. And I actually wrote this completely spur-of-the-moment because that poem was so perfect for her.

Open Your Heart and Dig in Your Heels

I remember how it felt being little. The good and the bad of it.

Mostly, I remember the sheer grandness of the world, and how easy it was to get wrapped up in it all. How there were so many colors and textures to everything that it was hard to keep track of anything else. So I didn’t. I moved to what drew me, following my heart, the way they always tell you to, but no one told me that yet. And when I got to the age where they might, I got a different lesson.

But, that wasn’t for a while. And, before that lesson, if that’s what you want to call it, I learned the important things on my own. The grass under my bare feet told me all I needed to know. I put rocks in my mouth and understood them. I touched the bark of a tree, and it taught me all about self-preservation. After enough time smelling the old books, I found out that I’d figured out to read them by accident. Light and prisms showed me that art is where you find it.

And even though I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, my friend Barry taught me how to be a friend right back to him. That people can get closer than you ever thought possible without saying a word, a secret that might just fix this busted world. We communicated even though I couldn’t talk, and we played even though he needed to lie down a lot, and there was no “trying to make it work” for either of us. It worked, period. Things between people don’t work when you try.

They only work when you let them.

I wish I’d figured out how to articulate this twenty-five years earlier.

Because people started trying with everything in them to make things work with me, and it didn’t make things work at all. It just messed them up. I felt like I was being ripped away from everything I understood and thrown into some cold, dead world I didn’t know how to navigate. A world that felt made of ink and paper, something that couldn’t be mapped out with your hands or held in your mind and turned over and over until you could see the whole thing.

It felt like being on a bad movie set, full of props and lines and scripted actions, and god help you if you forget or don’t follow them.

And if you did things in the way that always made sense, you failed, and they weren’t shy about letting you know.

That you’d failed to be human.

Even if nothing about what they were trying to instill in you felt human at all.

“Human,” to me, felt like running your hands over a complicated texture, or staring at something beautiful until you lost yourself, or wordlessly laughing with your best friend, warm inside on a rainy day.

But now I had to sit with my hands in my lap, still as stones, adventurers in chains. To look people in the face and nowhere else, until the room turned into a painting with no background. And Barry moved away.

It seemed I had set off on my Hero’s Journey.

And like a Hero’s Journey always does, it nearly ruined me.

But made me resolve to come back better.

*****

Well, now I’m not so little anymore, but like most people, the base elements of who I am remain unchanged.

Unlike most people, this is in spite of everyone’s best efforts.

And as proud as I am of what I’ve learned, I’m just as proud of the parts of me that I’d fought to keep the same. Which basically means that I’m most proud of the things I figured out myself.

Really, I guess the bad stuff had to happen, because it taught me more about telling people to fuck off than most people learn in their entire lives. I learned young, and I learned well.

It’s why they only nearly ruined me.

I decided I didn’t want to be ruined, so I wasn’t. And I guess I make it sound easy, but I don’t really think it was. Actually, I don’t think it was exactly hard, either. Easy and hard are relative, and don’t quite apply when there’s just one viable path. You just plow through. You wrest yourself away from anyone who might try to drag you down any sinister forks in the road.

It was all I could do, so that’s what I did. The hard part was that I had to do everything myself. But, maybe people in general should do more things by themselves. At very least, it teaches you how to… Well, do things by yourself. No matter how strong you think your foundation is, that’ll probably come in handy eventually.

As will knowing how to follow one’s heart.

That was another thing I had to tell myself, because no one dared to say it to someone like me. So I said it when they wouldn‘t. I kept to the parts of the world that made sense to me. I left the ones that didn’t for other people to figure it out.

I mean, if you ask me, that’s the whole point of having different people in the first place.

I even learned to speak on my own terms, and this time, I had help. From people who didn’t believe that anyone should have to turn away from what they most cherish in this world, just so strangers could look at them and see someone they can relate to. They shared my unpopular opinion, that maybe, just maybe, everyone should try to relate to everyone, as-is. That this might just be easier. Easy as getting your words out with the flick of the wrist.

And as for Barry? He came back. Or maybe I came to him. We both traveled many roads on our own. He’d gotten tall, and he’d hardly been sick a day in his adult life. He could play outside whenever he wanted, and went swimming at the indoor pool in his apartment complex every day. And he hadn’t outgrown the knack for having fun without saying a word.

We found each other grown-up and happy, doing everything they said we never could, and some things no one had he imagination to anticipate. In our own way. As the people we became.

And everything is different now, because we could stay the same.