David Kim
August 17, 2011 1:59 PM
[Christmas Eve] Getting away. by David Kim
David hadn't directly planned on sneaking out from the Aladren dorm on Christmas Eve; the escape had occurred far more organically. He'd been laying on his bed in his empty room-- a room typically vacant as he was the only boy in his year in Aladren-- and felt very suddenly that the room was too small, the walls too close, and the ceiling too low. He'd grabbed his backpack, threw on a jacket, and snatched his wand up from its rest on his night stand. He'd only intended to go down to the common room, but found it occupied and there too, the space felt too constricting.The library was no place he could hide, not from people and certainly not from the unpleasant feeling that had been fluttering in his stomach all day. He couldn't quite figure it out, the sensation. He'd received a letter from his parents that morning, along with a heavy package filled with various presents and gifts that surely would flaunt the inflated costs previously attached to them. He'd stared at his box and then watched as other students who stayed behind received similar packages, some too impatient to wait one more morning. He'd watched, a strange feeling stirring beneath his chest, as books, clothes, tokens, and sentiments fell out into the Hall floor, bits of colored paper and ribbons left in the wake.
David had somehow known that despite the money spent on his gifts, not a one of them would give him the easy happiness his classmates seemed to feel.
The library was no place to be with this kind of feeling sitting with him. David made for the Gardens, the air far to chill for comfort and yet, within seconds, loosening his breath and stilling some of that restlessness that forced him from the warmer enclosures. He followed the path, lit dimly by a long since descended sun, until it seemed to end at shallow knoll. He placed his backpack carefully and then stretched out onto the grass, the thick strands of it tickling the back of his neck and chilling his cheeks. Slowly, he exhaled, enjoying the cloud of breath and mist that fell from his lips.
The sky swarmed above him, the stars managing to struggle into awareness despite the lights from the school and early evening. It was, he decided some twenty minutes later, much easier to understand what had chased him out from the Cascade Hall that morning and from his room later that day. It was silly and more than a little pathetic, but David Kim realized he was lonely.
He didn't miss his parents exactly. . . what he missed, he wasn't sure of. But there was something absent all the same, and he longed to know what it was.
0
David Kim
[Christmas Eve] Getting away.
0
David Kim
1
5