PS: Make friends with your peers at school, and don't be shy, if they know you as I do they will love you, and when they do you'll find me too."
She reread letter, and read it again. Fourteen reads later the words "find me everyday" echoed in her heart, the vast hollow place of emptiness.
Just then Alvin came by with a small treat lying on top of a palm-sized white porcelain plate and handed it to her. She looked up at him without blinking, and the gaze went past Alvin, right through him as if looking past a hologram. He smiled awkwardly, looking over his shoulder at what may have been catching her eye, but seeing nothing in particular he looked back at her and said, "I just baked these from the oven, you look like you could use a treat." Alvin chuckled, but her gaze remained as a world of its own was in existence inside her head.
"Hello?" Alvin ducked his head toward her to get her attention, and she blinked as if snapping back into the cafe.
"Thank you" she said.
"Yea, no problem." Alvin's coworker called him from the counter before he could say anything else and he uneasily turned around back to his post.
That night she couldn't study. She went into her room without making dinner and stared at the space in front of her. Then she closed her eyes as she lay on her bed. Her mind was a train station, every thought came and went in a way that felt scheduled. She needed to work through the words in his message. She was recalling everything again. But she was also getting tired. It was mentally draining, emotional heavy, and so physically affecting her.
Find me everyday.
The words sounded foreign. As if they didn't make sense or were hidden messages waiting to be cracked. They were so simple yet so complex. He was gone and she was lying in her room. The idea of finding someone invisible was crazy. She brushed off the nonsense and got up off her bed. She changed into her house clothes, and went back to the kitchen to have dinner. Her stomach demanded it.
As she went to and fro cutting things and throwing away peels in the kitchen, she thought about the short guy from her class that day. Strangely enough there was something about him that made her very curious.
She put water in a pot and started boiling it. She was decided to make some vegetable soup.
As the food was being tossed into the boiling water, her mind felt like it was riding on the mild scent of spices and everything was warm and familiar. She felt calmer. As the last of the veggies were put into the pot, she closed the lid, lowered to the heat to a simmer, and removed her apron to sit down. She opened her laptop and looked up her class attendance sheet. She had no idea what she would be looking for but time allowed for her to get carried away by her curiosity.
She found his full name and searched for whatever she could find about him on the web. She came across a few photos of him at a worksite where he looked as if to be volunteering to build some sort of house. There was a skeleton of a house behind him and wood beams all strewn across the ground, and he was wearing a construction hat. He was the shortest worker in the photo, and this made her think how undesirable that must have been for him.
She stopped at the thought, undesirable. The train station in her head came to an abrupt halt, everything froze, and the thought before her rested in place instead leaving. The word reminded her of the Prince's campaign. It was everyone's wish and goal to become a Desirable.
The connection rolled around in her head, and she heard the pot bubbling over. She went to open the lid and turned off the heat.
She grabbed a ladle and scooped up a decent amount of green, orange and multicolored veggies from the broth and poured them into a pale blue ceramic bowl. As she sat down with her dinner accompanied by a slice of cornbread that she pulled from the fridge, she waited for the soup to cool down. The scent of roasted tomatoes and oregano filled the room.
The short guy was undesirable, and the look on his face in the photo she found made her consider that he might know it too. Perhaps he wanted to be so, because he was not a fan of the Prince and the campaign. She realized she was jumping to a million assumptions now, but she couldn't quite shake the idea of his disposition and confidence off of her. She looked at her laptop again and found something else. The short guy also appeared in an article about his paintings. Apparently he had won some kind of an award a few years back for a series of paintings he did titled "Incorruptibles" which were beautiful portraits of undesirable people. There was an overweight woman painted with lines across her face and a double chin, but with eyes as bright and smiling as a kite in the sky. Her figure was less than desirable but looking at her, at the painting, she was beautiful. Another painting from the short guys' collection was of a small child who had tubes coming out of his nose. The child's head was wrapped up in a cloth and was holding a book. The colors of the book and the cloth were beautiful and captivating. Looking at the photo moved her to want to reach out and embrace the drawn child. Several other paintings in that collection included a homeless man that seemed to project an audible and insatiable laughter, a girl with disproportionately large teeth which gave her quite the whitest smile, and one of a family sitting on the bed of a truck holding car lard boxed labeled "canned foods". The last one struck her in an odd way, because it wasn't like the others. It was still very captivating, but yet different. Most of the other paintings were a light on the individuals drawn and painted, but this one was capturing because of the boxes and the truck. The people drawn in this photo looked very much like they should have been the spokesmen for the Prince's campaign. They looked Desirable, yet it wasn't the people in the photo that stole her attention. It was the way the short guy had drawn their surroundings. The family in the photo were holding cardboard boxes of canned foods, and it was the irony that fascinated her.
She shut the computer and ate her mildly cold dinner with sheer satisfaction, because she felt determined to ask the short guy what it all meant and why he decided to paint such a series. Satisfied, because he conveniently happened to be in her class the the next day, she cleaned up and washed her face for bed. Getting into the blankets slept with the wheels ready to depart with anticipation.
As she drifted mindlessly she heard the faint whisper of his voice, find me everyday.
And the train of thought departed the station to do just that. Tomorrow she would wake up where it took her.
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