Beggars (Part I)

And it was the best I ever had.

I never knew the touch of another. I never knew that butterfly feeling they talk about on the movies. I never knew that one person could ever honestly miss another. I never knew the lasting desire to have and to know and to want and to need. I never understood the trust between two people. Maybe ignorance is bliss.
I don’t think I ever really saw the cup as either half full or empty. I saw it as it was, and as probability would have, the cup is rarely actually half anything. This is my life. I’ve never really thought of my life as overly challenging or easy. I was at a point of decent fluctuation.

I think this all started with her.

Raven mop was pulled into a loose artistic bun, held in place with tiny shoots of pale bamboo. Ocean blue sauce plates were topped with thin dark eyebrows. Tender, porcelain skin spread across pale rosy cheeks and the slightly puckered upper lip stood in contrast to the lower. With lips slightly stretched, and corners raised to the sky, her smile could stop traffic and commerce alike. A fair stature accentuated her attention grabbing physique.

This didn’t start with her.

I was a pretty popular kid at my school. I wasn’t entirely athletic and though I was beyond “academically equipped,” I didn’t care much for my schoolwork or for staying on task. While I had an anchor in a smaller cluster of friends, I very much enjoyed the freedom to drift and see all the people I knew, and laugh and have fun with them. While I didn’t date very many girls, I definitely flirted with and teased many more than my fair share.

I happened upon a girl somehow, one time. I don’t entirely remember how we met, but I’m sure it was unimportant. We hit it off right from the get-go. She was short, a bit tan, died black hair that managed to creep its way down to the base of her neck. She was amazing, I thought, a real looker and I’m sure she’s got a great personality to match. After just a few days of excessive flirting and pinch and tickle, we were technically, officially, a couple.

This was amazing, I thought. I love being with a girl who seems to understand me and care about me and like me and want me. Nothing could be better, she understands that I like to diversify my company and that I want and need to seemingly imitate insomniacs for my love of Xbox and its greasy, sweaty, trash talking online community. Knowing that I’m better than twelve year old kids and forty year old pedophiles who keep Pringles and Mountain Dew and an empty bottle to piss in so they never have to leave their three thousand dollar gaming chairs with the top of the line speakers and subwoofers and Italian leather somehow kept a smile plastered about my face. This only further pressured me to make it well known that I was best in the lobby and that they would be calling their moms and crying by the end of the match.

I woke up and showered and dressed and walked to school every morning. And every morning I would include myself in all the conversations around me, though I wasn’t half-interested in any of it. Eventually the girl that I soon came to claim to love would show her face and brighten my morning and light the torch that would shine greatly and immaculately throughout the rest of my day. We would skip into any of each other’s classes we could, anything we could do to be with one another that much longer. Love or lust or both was working its slippery, slimy way into the mechanical gears that drove us together, making sure that nothing we heard and said and did would affect us too harshly and drive us too close or far from one another, keeping us in just the same, perfect balance and distance apart. At the end of the day, I would lean against the rough brick wall of the school and let the girl fall against me and I would wrap my arms around her and we were safe and we were protected and no one would bother us. I would wait for her bus to arrive and once she was gone, I would walk home, all the while thinking of the girl that just happened to be in my life because I just happened upon her somehow. And this was my life, day by day, night by night — until it changed, because we all know that all good things are either really a curse in disguise or entirely, disappointingly, temporary. And this was my life.