Untitled by Robyn Bromfield
When I gave her the flower I hadn't thought about it. My eyes wandered, I saw it bent over, nearly level with the brown that peeked through sharp lines of green. Around it others had stood tall and yelled to be plucked but I ignored them and chose the broken flower. I had to pull hard but it came away eventually and I placed it triumphantly in the dip of her skirt between her knees. It lay a while in its hammock until a pale hand lifted it to a freckled nose and crystal eyes drank in its colour.   The eyes I shall remember always. Those eyes mirrored the world. A perpetual sky they showed the light and life granted to us all but accepted wholly by few. I saw my own eyes reflected young and shining, so eager to please. I have grown not to recognize myself since that day. It was then that I lost myself and I have remained lost. Perhaps I am still wandering on that hill in the countryside where I spent my childhood or maybe I have merely forgotten myself, abandoned myself in favour of what I do not yet know.   Out of the corner of my eye a light. I see an unknown light shining. Interest piqued, something new, something, anything, but it's merely the shine from a discarded foil packet. Electric fake light reflected off emptiness. Along the road a car draws near with promise of life. Each burst of fuel injects new hope and excitement but as I hear the car pass I deaden again. The road here is old and now its passengers few.   There had been a hill where that road is now. My hill I called it. My hill with rocks and trees and expanse. My hill where I ran and fell and danced. There is a new road now where I once fell and bled. Tons of fumes are injected into the land where I held a crow as it died and I did cartwheels thinking I had invented them. Millions of people pass through the space where I gave her a bruised daisy and she had smelt it and smiled.   She was brilliant and funny and kind. We fought over who would stand behind her in line or be her partner in games. In secondary school she grew ever more cheery, brighter and light. While my eyes grew darker and my room more occupied than my hill which stood neglected and as the years went on grew more barren and ragged. I had love affairs with kohl, she with rugby players who drove her to the beach and watched her as she swam.   I often wondered was I the abandoned friend, the deserted hill upon which no one played but I wasn't. I chose not to frolic in valleys or on beaches. If out of fright or shyness I did not care, it was my choice not that of bullies or their minions. The world outside, the world reflected in eyes became a place I chose not to go.   To hide and starve and not feel a thing, to be numb yet aware that deep down you are screaming is disconcerting. Are you strong and enduring going through horror surviving? Or are you weak because you need to numb yourself, unable otherwise to handle life? I never knew other people felt as I did. I say felt because they're gone, those people I knew, the one person I knew and she left so long ago I doubt sometimes that she ever existed.   Sometimes from my window I would look out on the hill. One day there might be cows wallowing by the rocks, stumbling over the jagged edges that threatened to slice their flesh and mine. Other days it lay empty except for the sky which would be full of crows that hovered and screeched and swooped above the trees. Venom and rage and revulsion would well up inside and I swear I spat blood which still sticks to the window pane, mottling the view across the landscape. The landscape, a stretch of never ending death. Brown decaying ground and black trees with arms reaching, appealing to a sky dark with sorrow. Crows and falcons circle through the clouds but nothing moves below, nothing dares breathe.   "Old hands" he said, claiming relief that I had them too. "Do you think your face will catch up"? That was the closest thing to a compliment I got the whole time She was alive. I don't blame her, I hadn't even thought about it until now and I saw the light edging into the crevices between my fingers. My face hasn't caught up and it seems my hands are making up for it. My very own picture of Dorian Gray to display to the world. But I don't mind, who looks at hands except that boy I met once, that boy that might have been lost like me and Her.   A sea of trouble grows from a tiny stream of doubt, invariably of the self. A boiling ocean of madness and frustration and in the centre drowning was my friend. I tried to throw her a life belt. I had tried so hard. So hard that I stopped caring about her and began caring only about being heard.  I live in retrospect and I plan ceaselessly for the future. Daydreams and lists never to be checked. How can they be when their essence lies in the future and the future will never come for it is always now? So I live in a time that was real and hope for a time that I can make myself feel.   She said she thought my hill was the best place in the world and that I was lucky to see it and play there every day. The sun had been shining and summer flowers were in our hair. This was years ago, before rugby players and makeup and hand cream and tans. Before ignorance and numbness and death. She died. On that hill years later after the road had sliced its way through my childhood.