A teenager is captivated by her daydreaming new friend, but will she open her mind or hold her back?
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
I met her in secondary school – the shy girl who sat in the back, her notebook always open but rarely taking notes. For months, I ignored her existence until the day I glimpsed a poem she’d written and left on her desk. Her words unlocked chambers of my mind I didn’t know existed.
When I offered her friendship, she accepted with a quiet grace that belied her true nature. Soon I discovered she wasn’t the wallflower I’d imagined, but a collage of personalities – outspoken, mercurial, lost in reveries, mysterious in every way.
She lived half in our world and half in the realms of fantasy. On Monday, she was a Sailor Soldier, her head crowned with spherical buns, guardian of the precious Silver Crystal. By Wednesday, she’d transformed into the Queen of the Elves, speaking only in Quenya while our classmates stared. During Thursday’s physics class, she sketched an enormous WHY? across her notebook, then conscripted me on Friday after school to help paint that same Socratic query on the fence outside campus – her manifesto against indexed existence.
Being in her orbit was exhilarating and exhausting. Teachers scolded me for our whispered conversations, for arriving breathless and late to class. My grades suffered, but I wouldn’t have traded our conspiratorial laughter for top marks. She embodied everything I wasn’t – everything I secretly wished I could be.
But as we matured, our differences calcified into fault lines. During senior year, while I buried myself in SAT prep books, she wrote songs about mythical creatures and sketched comic panels in her test booklets. Her dreamy sighs and spontaneous humming became percussion instruments of irritation, disrupting my concentration until every mistake felt like a personal assault on my future.
The breaking point came during one late study session. While I struggled to memorize the chronology of World War II battles, she began humming a melody she’d composed – her next chart-topping hit, she declared, sure to catapult her onto billboards across the globe.
“Get your head out of the clouds!” I shouted, my voice sharp enough to slice through her reverie.
She fixed me with an otherworldly stare, as if I’d spoken in tongues.
“Stop it,” I commanded, slamming my textbook down. “Just stop.”
The sound echoed like a gunshot. She studied me for a while, then gathered her things and left, her silence more disturbing than any retort.
Six years passed without a word. I moved to a larger city, earned my degree, and secured an internship at a prestigious consulting firm. Sometimes I wondered where she’d landed, whether she still lived in daydreams. I couldn’t picture her sitting through lectures or wearing formal attire to interviews. Those thoughts came with a pang of nostalgia – memories of us performing impromptu plays in the backyard or using hair dryers as microphones. But I dismissed them as childish things, relics of a past I’d outgrown.
Barcelona reunited us. I’d moved there four months earlier, working at McKinsey & Company, sharing an apartment with a sensible boyfriend in finance. My life had acquired the polish of success. I’d heard rumors she’d also moved to the city of never-ending carnivals, surviving on artistic scraps and minimum wage jobs. It confirmed I had made the right choice to walk away from her.
Our reunion proved cinematically mundane. During a rare afternoon walk through Ciutadella Park – I’d left work early, seduced by the scent of orange blossoms – I found her on a bench, sipping something luridly colored through a straw,watching pigeons fight over bread crumbs.
I approached. She acknowledged me without warmth and made no invitation to sit. I did anyway, bombarding her with questions about her life. She deflected each one until, surprisingly, she extended an invitation:
“Come to Tres Punts Galería tonight. My friend is exhibiting. Maybe… we could talk more.”
The gallery pulsed with artistic chaos – a riot of colors and patterns that made my corporate blazer read like an obituary. I nearly fled, but her touch on my elbow anchored me.
“You made it,” she grinned. “Now lose the executive costume. This is an arthouse party, not a shareholders’ meeting.”
Her laugh, unchanged by time, cracked something open inside me.
That night, I discussed existentialism with Marina Garcés and debated color theory with Yago Hortal. I quoted Latin with wine-loosened confidence: “Ars longa, vita brevis.” For the first time in years, I felt complete.
Our rekindled friendship infected me with forgotten glee. At work, I scribbled song lyrics between spreadsheets. At night, I danced with painters and poets until dawn, returning home barefoot and laughing while my boyfriend waited with lectures about responsibility and maturity. He called her “toxic” and “unstable.” I defended her until our arguments tapered off in our sterile apartment.
Two months later, we parted ways. We hadn’t touched each other in weeks, and truth be told, I’d never loved him – only the security and image he represented.
“Finally,” she said when I told her the news, then casually dropped her own bomb. “I met someone. A writer. His words heighten every frequency of my being. He’s leaving for Peru – says only the Inca ruins can give him the energy he needs. Barcelona’s too tame now. He asked me to go with him, and I said yes. I know you’ll call it irresponsible, but my mind’s made up. We leave on Saturday.”
She smiled that dreamer’s smile, already looking over the horizon of possibilities. My opinion meant nothing; her future had already taken flight.
I looked at my life – the suffocating job, the empty apartment, the dreary tomorrow – and started packing.
On Saturday, I was on my way to Peru, no longer painting questions but living answers.
