Prologue
Irina.
We live in a world full of monsters. I’m talking about people.
There are times when I can’t stop thinking about how cruel this world is and how much I’d like to disappear and come back whenever I feel ready. We are born to suffer, and we die in suffering. Does this life have any meaning? Do we not have any other purpose? Yet I have not died the necessary times to discover it. These thoughts have not left my head for days.
“Irina!” I suddenly heard. “Are you all right?” the same voice is still speaking to me.
“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to bring her with us” this time a boy’s voice.
It took me a few seconds to come back to reality. I’m at White Coffee with Elena and her boyfriend Darius. It was Elena who invited me, at first I did not want to come, but she didn’t stop insisting, putting my absence from reality as an argument to leave the house, besides the fact that it was summer and I couldn’t stay all day locked up. To be honest, I haven’t been myself lately. My thoughts are consuming me, and they are extinguishing the faint light of hope that’s in me. I have never been an immensely happy person. I’ve spent most of my life looking at how others were happy. It’s the events of the past that have made me the person I am today, and my past is something I don’t like to talk about.
They are both looking at me strangely, but at the same time differently. What I see on Elena’s face is concern, yet Darius’ face expresses the opposite. That’s the look I’ve had to get used to all my life, he looks at me like I’m a strange being, an otherworldly being.
“You like my eyes, don’t you?” I ask Darius. Darius stays silent for a few seconds, glancing at his girlfriend.
“Yes, you have beautiful eyes, heterochromia does not occur in everyone. It’s what makes you so special and different from almost everyone else” Elena answers for her boyfriend, though I know he doesn’t think so.
The next few minutes were spent in silence until Darius suggests we leave. Quickly and abruptly I take the glass of soda that I had ordered, and I drink it in seconds. I wasn’t going to get going, leaving more than half of the soda glass, that I’d already paid for, untouched. I look up, and I see both of them standing, waiting for me to get up and go.
White Coffee is located in Hausach, a village that is a few minutes drive from ours. Wolfach, I wish I could leave forever this town full of self-serving, spiteful monsters. The village is located in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. It is a beautiful town, with incredible architecture and culture, however, it is the people who inhabit the town that makes me want to flee this place.
We went to get our bikes, which were in front of the store, to the right of the door. Five minutes later we were already on the outskirts of town. It was night, 10.57 pm, they were with their bikes in front of me, about 3 meters away, side by side. They always leave me behind, they forget about me.
Darius is my cousin, though people always mistake us for brothers because of our resemblance. He has light brown hair, almost blonde, green and almond eyes, and a smooth oval face. But of course, what stands out most about him are his eyes. I don’t talk to him much, despite meeting him very often. He usually comes to my house when there are family dinners, but he hangs out with my older brother, while I have to stay alone. Eating is the only thing that distracts me from family dinners. We have been 4 times in the same class at school since we are the same age. He had his friends and I had Elena, so we didn’t talk. Until this summer, when they started dating.
Elena and I have been friends since we were almost 7. She’s probably the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, everything about her is perfection. Her jet-colored hair, her face without any pimple at all, her deep brown eyes, definitely enviable. She was always there when I needed her. I was always the girl everyone laughed at, and not just because of my heterochromia, from the age of 5 until 2 years ago I was pretty chubby. Apparently, that was a good reason for people at my school to laugh at me. That, added to the rumor that I’m a child of the devil because my eyes’ color is a different one from the other, have been the reasons why people don’t approach me and laugh at me. Elena didn’t, she was the only one who approached me when everyone else didn’t want to see me. Two years ago I lost weight, and now I’m just the “weirdo” in town.
My family has tried to make me feel good, or my mother, rather. I never really got my father’s affection and concern. He still thinks that everything I told them about people laughing at me was a lie to get their attention. Luckily, my mom did believe me and did everything she could to help me. But there’s nothing left to fix, what if there never was? Maybe the only solution would have been to never have existed. As for my brothers, they stayed away from my emotional life. With Danya, my older brother, I barely talk, he’s like the rest of my school, but at least he doesn’t laugh at me. Egor, my little brother, is too young to understand my problems, but he tries to make me smile whenever he sees me sad.
I lose control of my bike for a few seconds after I’ve walked over a stone big enough to throw to the ground, but thanks God I’m still alive. When I take control of the bike again I look to the right, at the edge of the road I can see that there are 3 dogs staring at me seriously. A feeling of fear and shame runs through my skin, fear because the dogs were looking at me creepily and shame because I was sure they had seen how I was about to fall, which made me feel pathetic.
I look ahead and see that Elena and Darius are already far away from me and the first thing I think about is the effort it will take me to get to them. I pedal quickly until I suddenly feel a strange sensation. I feel incredible tiredness and I notice how the lights on the lampposts slowly begin to darken until I am completely in the dark. I can no longer see Elena and Darius. My flashlight starts flashing for a few seconds and turns off too. I keep pedaling without knowing where I’m going. In a split second, I feel the cold road floor hugging me. I fell off my bike, and it’s hard to get up, I can’t even move. The only thing I remember is how the feeling of sleep catches me until I surrender and close my eyes.
