Autumn never felt so good. The whispering leaves and the whispers we leave die in a galaxy of colors on a cooling ground. Feeling good was a sin for Jack, because after all, his best friend had died a month prior, and his creeping addictions were nothing to feel good about. Everything was a conflict for him. When he was feeling down, he convinced himself of all the reasons that he should look up, and when he does, only glimpses the days sky before watching the peices of his life fall back to the ground. Was there a salvation to be had? His life rolled on hope, something he wouldn't admit to having anymore, but it fueled him inevitably. A string of thoughts had come to form in his mind as a place for safe hiding, and the images were haunting. Brooke in autumn. Her dusky hair fluent against a sky orange with laughter, a sun white with lingering fire, and a voice that lived to speak of her untold beauty. Brooke in autumn. The girl he knew better than anyone, including himself, was the mystery his life strived to unfold. She strived to withhold emotion. She strived to love.
Jack's notebooks were a portfolio of his feelings for Brooke, scribbled lines and unhooked phrases lined the margins, and were accented by the penciled portraits of his favorite girl. Chemistry notes and last weeks homework intruded on a few that he got carried away with, but he used his pen and steady hand to box them off in romantic isolation. He teetered on the line of love and obsession, playing with both ideas, but disposed the suggestion that his feelings may be unhealthy. He just couldn't get her off his mind.
In the next room Brooke stared at the words coming out of her teachers mouth and heard none of them in her state of daydreaming. She was lost in the fields of flowers, by herself, wrapped in the silent music of nature. If she couldn't live in a place she loved, she could still pretend. It felt so desperate, and it was, when you don't know how to grow up being you and being right at the same time. She questioned who and what was right to begin with. This paper, this desk, this work...it didn't feel right. Life and love didn't always feel right, but always the way it should. She hated wasting her time in class learning about life, when she could be out experiencing it the way it was meant to be. Intuition set in, and Brooke raised the eyes of the class with a classic walk-out. Her teacher spoke at her.
"Excuse me, Miss Keith, where exactly are you going?"
The man was tightly-knit from head to toe, clean cut, and reeked of musky aftershave. Brooke decided he was not one to answer to. She told him just what he wasn't expecting to hear.
"I'm going home."
"You can't--"
The clap of the classroom door in the frame rebounded his last couple words, and Brooke made a hasty escape down the hall.
Jack's face was scrunched against his fist, which supported nearly his whole upper body with a stiff wrist and red elbow, and his face was painted with the days forgotten words. His luck intended him to wake just barely, with two half open eyes suddenly blazed by Brooke's auroral brillance passing the doorway. His body, somehow empowered by the sight, swelled to a standing position and cruised across the classroom with a total disregaurd for obedience.
The sneakers he wore scuffed and squeaked as he did his best to catch up, but she had a lead on him. He didn't particularly want his presence to be known just yet, as he was a bit curious to where it was she was going in the middle of class. He followed her elegance, felt the music she left trailing behind her, the dismal beauties she posessed were locked inside and he wanted to finally see them for himself. Her subtle tracks would lead Jack out of the school, around and behind the tennis courts, down an overgrown school path, and to the bottom of a grassy hillside, where he would stop to see her kneeling at a headstone.
It was an eerie place at night, not so much ghoulish and grizzly, but embraced a peaceful taste and celestial fog on the cooler autumn nights. It was day, however, and the sight of a gorgeous green hill pegged with graves and marked by an ancient oak at the peak was a profound environment in Jack's mind, and he could feel the thick importance of something that was going to happen. Jack gathered himself, and walked with quiet feet through the residential resting place, and stopped behind Brooke, who knealt over one grave in particular. Etched in a two-hundred pound limestone block was the memory of Brooke's mother, Erica Keith. Jack decided to step out of the dark.
"Is everything okay?"
Brooke turned, breathing frightened air and meeting eyes with the dark boy standing at her side.
"What the hell are you doing here? Did you follow me?"
Jack is taken back, and can only manage to again be glued to her gaze. It was cold, and it scared him.
"Please just leave! You can't be here right now! Go!"
Brooke's face filled with tears and her words became jumbled with heavy pain. Jack felt a sickening desperation hit his stomach as spats of blood began to fill in on her mothers name. Jack quickly knealt next to her and threw his arms around her, realizing his shirt was stained with the blood falling from her wrists. Jack can do nothing but rock back and forth, draped in her sadness in the majestic shade of the oak. He wanted to get help, but he couldn't let go, and through her tears she was starting to give. He could feel her get weaker...her shirt soaked with her own life and Jack felt her leaving him behind.
"Don't go...don't go without me..."
Jack's words drowned in his own tears. He had experienced her dismal beauties first hand, and was overwhelmed. Life and love didn't always feel right, but always the way it should. His arms wrapped tightly, one consoling hand wanders onto the point she made, and Jack curses God as he throws his own blood and her razorblade to the ground.
Time stopped that day, but nothing could have stopped her from passing. Her lifeless body lie still warm with love, a display of young life in its final moments projected relentlessly at the world.
Jack spent the rest of the night looking for reasons to live. The cops had come and gone, Brooke's body had been taken for funeral preparations, her father had been given the news and arrangements were being made to bury her with her mother, under the very spot she fell. For as long as he'd known her, it had always been her request to be burned rather than buried, a more natural death as she called it. Unfortunately he hadn't the authority or any power to make a decision like that...especially when the police are calling him in for questioning on her untimely death, he received no consolations, only questions.
"Nights are long anymore, lonely even moreso. The sun shines for you girl but the cloud's over my head. I miss her smiles, though they were few and far between, she never lost that shine. I miss her. I wonder what other people would do in my position. That's how I've figured out how to deal...what you would do. I can tell you what most would have done by now, and don't doubt it's crossed my mind more than once. Something just doesn't feel right about romantic suicide. Something tells me it wouldn't bring us together. It's not that easy. I'm not that lucky."

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