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Humans Hate Green
Prologue
Humans hate green. This is something I realized even when I was a little boy. In a world where technology rules, after a war where machines built by men killed men, humans have grown wary of green. It stands for nature, for purity and if there’s one thing the human race is not, it’s natural. They love dark colours, blue, grey, black, but they dislike green.
Women seem to have a fondness for putting on make-up to make them look more ‘natural’. That train of thought sounds stupid to me, to smear that fake stuff on their faces and thus think they are closer to what they really are. But women aside –who ever figures them out should get a Nobel Prize– humans don’t live by the laws of nature; they defy them. Take Holland for example, just a small country in the west of Europe, yet half of it would belong to the ocean if nature had its way. That’s why people dislike green. They fear nature.
Yet there was one boy who always wore green. It suited him and it seemed to calm the animals he worked with. And of course, it brought out the green in his eyes as well. As did it that day he arrived at my apartment.
Where does time go? It seemed like only yesterday. I was working on my new apartment –I had already moved in because I had to leave my old place during the end of the previous month. The apartment wasn’t big or anything, just a small living room, part of which turned into a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. Since I would be living here by myself I didn’t need two bedrooms, but I didn’t have much time to find another apartment. Also it was really inexpensive for an apartment.
My bedroom was already finished.
Since I didn’t have much money left I kept it simple, 1 bucket of coloured
paint –one layer for now– and some cheap carpeting that didn’t really
match the paint. The room held a bed, a closet
and a desk, all second hand and the same I’d used in my previous apartment.
The kitchen and the bathroom were fine the way they were, just a
few small accessories needed to be bought and installed. The only
weird thing was that the previous owners had even taken
the dishwasher with them, so I had to buy and install a new one.
My
last apartment had been for rent so I had to leave it the way it was. That meant
I didn’t have to bother about what colour I wanted the rooms to be. This
apartment was rented as well, but here the rules were much easier. You could
paint it, paper it, decorate it as you wished, however
if you didn’t want to bring it back to its
previous state, you would have to find someone yourself to take the
apartment when you left.
This
was the first time I had to figure out for myself what
I wanted to do with the place, so I decided to go to a paint shop and ask for
advice. I only took advice on the colour as I didn’t have any money to buy the
more expensive stuff she tried to sell. Yellow it was for the walls and a sand
coloured carpet, which I later found matched better than all the stuff in my
bedroom. On my own, I am terrible at matching colours.
Anyway as I was painting the living room, loud music playing in the
background, all of a sudden I thought I heard a knock on the door. Not sure
about it I walked over to the music, paintbrush in one hand, a cloth in the
other and turned it down. The person on the other side of the door had obviously
noticed the volume dropping for only seconds later I heard the knock again. I
put the cloth down and started moving again, this time heading for the door.
I didn’t really expect anyone to stop by yet I wasn’t surprised to
see him standing there on my doorstep, raising an eyebrow as if to ask
‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ Yet he didn’t speak the words, he
never spoke much, not that he needed to, we always understood one another. I
stepped away from the door, inviting him in, giving him an apology for the mess
I only now realised was inside. I felt pretty awkward, not even able to give him
a chair to sit on, so I offered him an old pillow I often used. He took it and
placed it on a section of the floor that wasn’t dirty yet. He took off his
brown coat and placed it behind the pillow before he sat down. Not wanting to
further stain a clean pillow with my dirty pants, I took a dirty pillow and
placed it opposite of him for me to sit on.
A
quick glance at the clock made me realise it was already passed six o’clock
and I felt hungry all of a sudden.
“Have
you had dinner yet?” I asked him. When he answered negative, I grabbed the
phone and ordered us some pizza. Then I went to the fridge
and grabbed two beers. When I came back we quietly drank our beers, listening to
the soft music in the background. I didn’t ask what he was doing here,
figuring he would tell me if he wanted to. However, when dinner arrived I
can’t deny I had gotten a little curious on the matter. So to break the
peaceful silence I asked him how things were going at the circus, knowing that
was the last place Trowa had been staying.
“I left the circus.” Was his simple answer.
“Vacation or quit?”
“Quit.” In his tone I could clearly sense the hint that he
didn’t want to talk any further about it. So I didn’t push.
“Good beer.” He said as he finished his second bottle.
“Yeah,” I answered, “it’s cheap, but you don’t taste
it.”
We were both twenty-one and the war had been over for five years
now. For me the past five years had been pretty hard. I had to get used to both
physical and verbal human contact. I had to learn how to trust others and most
of all, to trust myself around others. I had to get used to being around people
and feeling comfortable when being close to someone. But if there’s one thing
I knew, it was that I hade made progress. I no longer flinched when my fingers
brushed against a total stranger out on the streets and I managed a polite smile
and a descent when asked a question.
With my moving out of my old apartment, I had changed half my life.
Since I didn’t have a car and the apartment was on the other side of the city,
I’d decided to quit my job as well. My last day was just before Trowa came and
my first day as an assistant at physics in a local high school would start next
Monday.
I am sure people who knew me
would have laughed at my decision to find a job at a school. But then again,
those people couldn’t possibly have
really known me. I must have appeared quite anti-social, but then there
was one thing they didn’t understand. I was what I was because of the way I
was brought up, not because I liked it. I actually enjoyed having a good
conversation or working with other people, the trouble was that I had little
experience. That was one good thing that came from my past relationship with
Duo, he taught me how to keep a social life from dying. Unfortunately his
theories didn’t always work out.
I had deliberately planned my new job to start a week after my old
one ended so that I had that week to work on my apartment. I might be more
social now, but I still had my stubborn ‘I work alone’ pride and I wasn’t
one to ask for help, I worked alone.
However, now that Trowa was here, that didn’t mean I couldn’t
use this situation. After dinner, I threw away the empty boxes and came back
with a spare paint roller and offered it to him. He raised an eyebrow at my
gesture.
“If you want a place for tonight, you can earn it.” I simply
told him. He accepted the brush and together we started painting the walls. Soon
enough he offered to start papering. I was really relieved he wanted to do that,
because papering was something I never liked
We called it a day at 10 p.m. The papering and the painting were
done by that time. The next day was Friday and people would come in the
afternoon to place the floor covering so before then there was not much we could
do but little things in the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. I had a whole
weekend ahead of me as well and decided that with hard work –getting up at
eight a.m, latest, and retiring from work at ten p.m., earliest– behind me, I
had earned the right to sleep a little late tomorrow. I informed Trowa of this
and he agreed with me. He said he had his bags stored somewhere in a safe he’d
rented and together we went out to get it, stopping at a local bar to grab
another beer.
Trowa had to sleep in my room since the living room was filled with
the smell of fresh paint and the spare bedroom was stocked with my furniture and
various other stuff. When I showed him to my bedroom he seemed surprised to see
only one bed.
“Duo?” He asked me.
“We broke up.” I quickly explained.
He nodded and left it at that. It was sort of an arrangement we had
together, I wouldn’t push him on the circus subject and he wouldn’t ask
about Duo. We were both satisfied with this, if the other wanted to talk, he
would in his own time.
I got him a spare mattress and some blankets. I was pretty tired
from my long day and I saw by the bags under his eyes that he was as well. By
11.30 that night we crawled in bed to get our much-desired sleep.
The next morning I woke up at eight with the feeling I had
forgotten something. I glanced over at Trowa who was still soundlessly asleep.
At first I mistook him for Duo. It
took me a moment to register it was Trowa and from what I recalled last night I
hadn’t set the alarm clock on purpose because I wanted to sleep late. So I
turned around and closed my eyes and soon enough found myself in the land of
dreams again.
The next time I awoke it was
almost ten to the sound of bathroom noises. I decided it was time for me to get
up as well. Something was not right with the water discharge of the dishwasher
and I wanted to get it fixed before the floor covering came.
Trowa was the one to make breakfast that morning with what little
food I had in the house. He offered me some toast
and sat himself down on the worktop. I leaned against it as I ate my
toast, taking a break from the damned dishwasher.
“What are you going to do from here?” I asked him, more out of
politeness than anything else.
He shrugged. “I’ll get a job first, then an apartment.”
“You can stay here until then.” I didn’t have to think about
it, it was the most sufficient thing to do. This way he wouldn’t spend so much
money on renting a room each night, he’d have enough time to consider his
options concerning a job and a place to live and I had the space to house him.
Trowa agreed. “I’ll get some food for the weekend as well.”
He said as he headed for the door to find a job.
The people who came to place the floor covering just finished when
Trowa returned at 3 p.m. with the announcement that he’d found a job. He had
auditioned to work as a clown again in the clown care unit at the local
hospital, using his flute to entertain the children. His training would start
the next Monday. He would work four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Friday and
Saturday and would be working and training with a professional.
His salary would be big enough to get a little place of his own,
yet I found myself offering the spare bedroom permanent that Sunday. I knew the
choice for apartments were limited; I’d found myself lucky to get this place.
And maybe I was getting a bit lonely too.
And that is how we ended up living together.
~ TBC~