The Boy Who Looks At The Sky

She once told me the difference between Lonely and Alone. I never thought there was much difference until she told me. Her explanation didn’t make me feel any better but it made it clear to me that this feeling that haunting me is loneliness. Now that she is gone, I don’t know what to do. Yes, she is gone. I always thought I was a selfish jerk. Turns out she is more selfish than me. I really thought I knew her. I should’ve realized sooner that we would never truly know anyone. The other person's thoughts, feelings, we could never truly find out about them. That’s what makes us different.

My life has been filled with loneliness until I met her. I was an outcast since I was a child. I grew up watching my parents fighting with each other every day. A family of three, where mom and dad won’t talk to each other unless there is something to fight about, a kid who wouldn’t talk and always stares at the sky. That’s us, my family. Every morning, by the time I woke up Mom would finish preparing breakfast and leaves for work. Dad and I will have breakfast in silence and leave. I will to go school and he will go to work. By the time, I came back no one will be home. I would go upstairs and stare at the sky all the time seeing clouds. Around 7’O clock, Mom will come back from work and start preparing supper. I will have my supper and fall asleep. Dad will come back late at night, drunk and Mom will fight with him thinking I was asleep. But I never was. This is how it’s always been since my childhood. I once said to my mom that ‘Why are you still living in this house? Just leave Dad and go somewhere else?’

‘I always wanted to hear you talk. No, it’s better when you won’t talk at all. Because you don’t know what to say!’, she said with teary eyes and walked away.

I never spoke with her much from that day. Not just her, with everyone. I would just do my own thing, minding my own business. Until one day she suddenly came into my life, ‘What you lookin’ at?’, she asked me.

I looked at her and said, ‘Do I know you?’

‘We’re in the same class, you’re the boy who always looks at the sky. Everyone says so. I just transferred here’

‘Whatever’, I said walking away.

That’s when I first met her, she was unusually cheerful and a bit nosy, the things I hate most. No one in school would talk to me except her. She would greet me every day and ask if I had my lunch. Everyone would just think I am a weird kid and ignore me. Not her. As an introvert, I never talked back to her much.

When school is finished and summer vacation started, I thought I would never see her again. But suddenly one day she found me at my secret spot. Where I would go hide, whenever I don’t want to talk to anybody.

‘What you lookin’ at?’, she asked me sitting beside me.

‘Sky’, I replied.

‘Why? Is something there?’

I stared at her without answering her.

‘What?’, she asked me.

‘No one ever asked me that. You’re the first one'

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know'

She scoffed and laughed.

‘Funny, isn’t? I wanted anyone to ask that question and now that you did. I don’t have an answer’

‘I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to escape somewhere and sky was the only thing I could think of’

‘Escape? And here I thought you were a dreamer just like me’, she said looking at the sky.