anonymous, Featured Image: entwined Rucha Grade 12
Part One
When I was six years old, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. We were outside that day, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the damp grass. There wasn’t a huge variety in the answers. People had said princess, knight, or dragon. Others said spaceman or police officer. I was one of maybe five people that answered ‘firefighter’, my inspiration coming from the LEGO set my parents had given me for Christmas. Ava wrote down dragon. I don’t think anyone in that class became what they wanted. Except maybe Jackie, I’d heard in passing that he was in Australia fighting the bushfires. Although, the rumours aren’t specific on whether he had volunteered or been drafted. Ava didn’t become a dragon, because of course she didn’t. Dragons aren’t real. I didn’t become a firefighter. I managed to avoid getting drafted. The others I’d only heard rumours about, like Jackie. If the rumours are true, then they didn’t become what they wanted to be either. As far as I can remember no one wrote down dead.
Anyway, I’m getting off-topic. I wanted to write about Ava, to try and remember everything about her before I follow her to wherever she’s gone. Ava and I had become friends a week after that day on the grass. I was sitting on the SeeSaw, bouncing up and down, even though I knew that there was no one on the other side to balance my weight. Until Ava. She didn’t say anything as she walked up to the SeeSaw, but I knew what to do. I stood up so that the other side of the SeeSaw came closer to the ground. Ava jumped up on the seat and suddenly we were going up and down. I remember the sound of her laughter and mine, mixing together as I tried to glimpse her face through the afternoon sunlight shining into my eyes. From that moment on we were inseparable.
A memory that I’ve been looking back on more and more was a sleepover we had when we were 11. We’d recently heard about weddings and of course, we only understood the concept in the way that 11-year-olds do. Which is probably why Ava made her suggestion.
“Let’s get married”
“Can we?”
“Of course, all we have to do is hold hands and promise to be friends forever.” She didn’t let me ask any questions after that, just dragged me off the bed and led me outside. She said something about getting married on a balcony, like Rapunzel and Eugene. I vividly remember the way her dark hair shone with sunlight when she took me by the hand.
“Alex-ander?” She’d only recently learned how to pronounce my full name.
“Yes?”
“Do you take me to be your best friend forever and always, even when we’re wrinkly and old?” her last comment made me chuckle.
“Of course Ava, if you’ll take me too?”
“Always,” she said,
“What now?” Ava bit her lip, considered it for a second.
“Now we pinky promise.”
——
By the time Ava and I started dating, at around 16, our friendship had been rocky for a while. She’d started spending time with seniors who’d take her out drinking. It annoyed me so much, not because I was jealous of Ava going to senior parties, but because I was jealous of the seniors that got to spend time with her. We’d been arguing a lot. It came as such a shock to me when she asked me out. Recently Ava told me that she only asked me out to seem cool; fit in with her senior friends. I think I already knew that, on a subconscious level. After all, even at 16, I was smart enough to know that the person who Ava had become would never actually be interested in someone like me. I wasn’t just jealous and irritable, I was quiet. I spent most of my time reading or streaming whatever TV show had caught my interest. I wasn’t the type of person anyone would date. Nonetheless, when Ava asked me out I said yes.
I don’t know why the addition of romance rekindled our relationship, but we started spending a lot more time together. Don’t get me wrong, Ava still went to her fair share of senior parties, but now I got to hear about them as we had dinner. I got to sit with her during lunchtime and to fall asleep next to her. Suddenly, she was back in my life. The other day, Ava said something that basically summed up the time we spent dating in secondary school. She said that it took a bit of romance to put the light back into our relationship, remind us why we had become friends in the first place, why we loved each other.
At that time I loved Ava in a different way than I do now. I loved her in the way that teenagers do. I loved her with a complete obliviousness to reality. I loved her like we would have centuries together, as though I would never lose her.
——
I did lose her though. Twice. The first time was senior year, so we’d have been dating for maybe 10 months. We were sitting inside that day, it was raining out. I was sitting away from our classmates, a book flipped open on the table in front of me. I could hear Ava’s voice as she was chatting away with the group of girls she’d attached herself to that month.
“Alexander.” It was an inside joke between us, the way she called me by my full name.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I was just coming to ask whether you would be interested in, you know, closing the book and coming to chat with us.”
“I mean, I’m not sure that I have anything to add,” I joked, already closing the book and getting ready to stand up.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I froze. I knew Ava well enough to recognize that tone.
“Just that, you know,” I shrugged, “It’s not the crowd that I tend to spend time with.”
“And who do you spend time with, Alexander?” She crossed her arms over her chest, “because as far as I’ve seen, your only friends are me and that stupid book.” Her voice was raised, drawing the eyes of our classmates, pinning us in place.
“Why are you so angry at me?” I asked, starting to get angry myself.
“Because we’re dating but you never want to be with me when it’s not just us. Look at Jackie and Kate, they’re sitting together. Jackie doesn’t seem to be taking any issue with publicly being with his girlfriend. Rachel and Agatha are together. So why can’t you just be with me?”
“I-” She interrupted me before I could even get a word out,
“God you’re such a- I can’t believe I’ve been your friend since we were six. I can’t believe that I’ve spent a year dating you,” she said the word the same way she’d say ‘tomatoes’. Ava hates tomatoes.
“Ava, I just, being social and stuff isn’t important to me.” That was the wrong thing to say. When Ava gets really angry, and I mean really angry, she goes quiet. She didn’t say a word as she slung her backpack over her shoulder and threw open the door, walking into the storm that had been raging outside.
Part Two
I didn’t see Ava again until years later. I won’t bore you with the details of the first years after my graduation, they’re not particularly interesting. So, I’m just going to give you a very brief summary.
By the time we graduated, we were back at school. I think the school realized that this particular pandemic was not going away and that the decrease in mortality and life expectancy was permanent. So they figured they’d make the most of our years as children before the pandemic inevitably killed us. I admire them for their optimism, my outlook was the opposite.
I didn’t bother to do much after graduation, knowing that I was going to die within a few years anyway. I did get drafted though. I spent two years in the navy, fighting the Americans. Of course, they don’t draft people for the military anymore because they realized that WWIII could just as well be fought via the internet. Nowadays they draft people for other things: healthcare, firefighting, policing, that kind of stuff. Ava ended up drafted for education, spent her early twenties teaching. We were talking about our drafted years recently, she was under the impression that I’d had it easier.
“I mean, I get that you were in the military and stuff but at least you didn’t have to worry about the pandemic, because you’re all isolated and stuff.”
“Yes, we don’t have to worry about the pandemic but there’s all the, you know, radiation, guns, bioweapons, and stuff. Which would kill anyone just as fast as the pandemic.”
“You don’t understand Alex,” She rolled around in her bed to face me, shadows dancing across her face, making her expression even more grave, “I saw children die. They just kept dying and dying. I don’t- I spent so much time thinking about why we still draft for education. What’s the point of teaching Shakespeare and making kids write essays if they’re all going to die anyway. Why don’t we just- let them live their lives. You know?” She was crying, I could just see the tears rolling down her face before she rolled around again, leaving me looking at her back and the hospital gown that covered it.
——
You might’ve already guessed how it was that Ava and I met again after those years apart. It’s not a particularly happy story, most true stories aren’t. Ava and I were reunited in one of the pandemic wards. I had just been tested and was being wheeled in toward the bed where I was going to spend my last weeks alive. It was then that I saw a familiar mop of dark curls peeking out from under the duvet of the bed next to mine.
Ava’s face had become unrecognizable, her cheekbones hollow, eyes rimmed with red. The expression in them was the same though, the same fire. Needless to say, it wasn’t hard to fall back into our former rhythm. We spent hours talking to each other about our past, about our fight.
Eventually, Ava became too sick to talk so I would tell her stories. Stories about knights and princesses and dragons. She’d always liked those, ever since we were little. I was in the middle of telling her about how the knight was on his way to save a dragon that had gotten stuck on top of the tower when Ava interrupted:
“Marry me?” She croaked. I looked over at her, at the way the sunlight across her face made it look like some life had been returned to her.
“I thought we were already married?” She let out a laugh.
“I mean properly Alexander. Let’s ask one of the nurses or something.”
“Ok, Ava. Let’s get married.”
——
We managed to get rings from one of the nurses, and we were married by a statesman in a hazmat suit. Ava died the following night. In her sleep.
There is a part of me that wishes I could’ve changed everything, that wishes for me and Ava to have lived till 80. I wish for a life where we would’ve had an apartment together, where we’d dance around the kitchen illuminated by refrigerator light. The scene plays through my head now and I fall asleep hearing guitar music and soft lyrics echoing through my head.
"Her fight and fury is fiery Oh but she loves Like sleep to the freezing Sweet and right and merciful I'm all but washed In the tide of her breathing. And it's worth it, it's divine I have this some of the time. The way she shows me I'm hers and she is mine Open hand or closed fist would be fine The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine” - Andrew Hozier-Bryne
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