Everything inside my old school still looked the same, just dusty. All the places I'd hide my test paper so mom couldn't find them in my bag, all the donation boxes, the hallway where Baart and Cornelia broke up and destroyed our friend group, and the doorway where Floris and I fought and he broke my front teeth... And life just went to hell after that.

Why did I come back here? This is the only place on Earth where everything bad that has ever happened to me, like fragments of life...condensed to form...the body that I am today. I looked at the window, just the way I used to when it was still mended and whole. It made my reflection look like a bad Picasso painting. Daffine sat beside me on those badly painted desks, those community service jerks. They hated repairing this public school. She had clean the desk with her handkerchief before sitting on it.

"I feel like I'm sitting inside an ancient monument" She said as she looked around. 

I looked at her. I wondered what she would think if she could read my mind right now. Would she still want to be here...in the chamber of my memories?

"Tell me, Daffine," I pressed my head on the table, facing the plywood of the old tables carved with names, poetry or just dumb texts from friends who loved scribbling on desks, barely hidden underneath the paint, "You think I am afraid of intimacy, don't you?"

"I don't think you're afraid of intimacy..." I held my breath, wondering what she would say, "I think you're afraid of yourself. But those are just my thoughts, and who I am but a stranger,"

"A stranger yet here you are...breaking into my mind and owning it,"
"Well, I guess I am a bit of a coloniser myself," She smiled at me. I exhaled, thinking about cigarettes, and that reminded me of the last time I smoked around her, I remembered that conversation.

"I want to explain myself...about what I said the other day when I told you that...Love is not that deep..." She was listening, intently, "Thing is...I too sought to fill happiness with love once, but I gave up. Sex is everywhere, but love is tough to find. Tougher to keep.

The night I broke up, Glen and I had drinks on the tables before us, he had some beer while I had a cup of butterfly tea and I remember Glen telling me that it was not my fault. That I deserved someone better than a cheater. It was over. Those sick-twisted games in the name of love that she ventured me into...were finally over. But something about the red lights that shone like a monitor's screen, screaming that it was GAME OVER, something about them was blinding yet awakening. And I was completely sober."

I got up and looked down at the desk, which now looked so small, I wondered how I ever fit into it, but I did. "I was here...And I am here now. And the only thing that has changed inside me is that now I know that I have been unkind to him. Really unkind,"

"It is unkind that...People destroy us," She looked into my eyes, "But pain brings us strength to wander and to come back. Just like you came back here and right here, right now, we are both laying before each other in the ruins of a paradise we both wished to give ourselves"

I looked at her as she talked to me, and it worried me that soon, she would stop talking and then she would tell me it was getting late. And we would have to go back to her stupid friend and my damn ex. When all I want to do...is just be here and soak in this strange happiness I have in my heart, make my mind remember it. Just give me five minutes more. Keep talking. And don't let this moment end.

"Are you even listening to me?" She said as she got up.
"Yes, and adoring it,"
"Oh you...You whose name I don't even know!"

"Maximus" I smiled and got up, "You can call me Max...Daffine"

She looked shocked. Now either I have a really pretty name or a really dumb one.

"That's-That's my dog's name!"

So, the second one.

-To be continued