Then, suddenly

A love story

It is like this:
You are born small and weak �" a howling red thing surveyed with disgust. You are your father’s namesake but you’ll never mean anything to him. You won’t remember it, but the house you are born in is a nightmarish scape of failed dreams �" the yellowing walls, the dirty flea-bitten carpets and the perpetually ajar windows. The smell of decay will coat your nostrils and the mildew will stick to your bones �" you’ll pledge to never end back here, to never be such a failure but you will lie and forget and cheat until the picket fence means nothing.

Still, even you aren’t the family failure.

It is like this:
You are 13 and all you wanna think about is little Susie Woodrow. She’s blonde, a few years older than you and a total mystery. In those dark years when your puppy fat melted away she had grown slender then bigger then slim once more. You had seen her, the day before last, with her thin polyester dress clinging to the sweat running down her back and within you something had stirred. Your mother had told you that girls were a waste of time but you cannot forget the way the cheap material clung to the curves of her body as if it were hiding a great treasure. 
You awaken early in the morning �" far earlier than what you should �" and head down the darkened path in the cool summer morning. You are growing taller every day but your melancholy eyes don’t quite fit your face just yet. Still, it’s better than being Jack Thomson, the precocious wide-eyed youth, who stopped growing before he could really start. He too stirs something alien in you, a pain in your solar plexus. You push it down, you don’t think about it.

Sean waves a friendly hand over your eyes and gives you a confused look. You push past him, you don’t think about it.

You are 14 when Susie leaves the town, you wonder if you’ll see her again (you won’t).

It is like this:
You are 17 and facing down the barrel of college admissions. You think for a moment about those petty childhood dreams �" wanting to a doctor, a lawyer �" and what they really mean. Lawyers, you’ve learnt, are scum and thieves who hide behind fine coats and doctors, well, they deal with more of the dead than a mortuary. 
Sean, the only constant in your life, cannot be trusted. You think of his calm sweet face, the way he pushes his hair from his forehead when it grows too long. You think of the long winters you pressed your body around his, when the mere pressure of it caused him to awaken with bruises. 
You imagine, for a second, snapping those brittle bones �" breaking him the way he has broken you. 
The future is a shadowed feared thing, but lucky for you a war breaks out.

Author's Note

The first time I've written in a long time - be as brutal as you like please.