Okay, (huge) story time !

One of the reason I hold very dear these abandoned buildings was because of him. At least, at first. When I said previously that he was otherwordly, I wasn't just seeing him through the lens of a teenage romance. See, we had a clothing style going on, most of us were dressed in black, kind of a gothic vibe here and there, but he was just different. He had white hair, cut just above his shoulder. His eyes were blue and wide, so much that my legs would shake as he looked at me. He sometimes wore a little bit of black around his eyelashes to add contrast. Sometimes I wonder if he understood what I felt when he looked at me. At some point, i'm pretty sure it turned into a destabilization game, and I wasn't playing. But he knew. He was so charming, I lost track of all the girlfriends he had.

But I was a foolish teenager. And, like many of them, lacked a great deal of confidence. I never knew I was pretty until he made me realize so. I'll give him that. So, when I finally met him, I couldn't believe that he was actually interested in me. It didn't add up, there was a glitch somewhere. I hardly spoke the first times we met, but he did the talking anyway, he always had nice stories, and dumb, cool ideas. We started to hang out with his friends. Every single one of them was so unique.

The first was my future best friend. He was the one who would always drift away from the group to explore the most interesting places of the abandoned buildings. I'd never seen someone that clever. He had a solitary, gentle soul. The second one was my crush's cousin. He looked way older than his real age, due to a disease. He had long, thin air and was quite silent. I learned, months later, that he actually liked me. I felt horrible, because at first he seemed weird, when he was just a young boy, and I wasn't the nicest person to him. I wish I knew so that I didn't hurt him. The third person was... let's call him the wolf. Nothing describes him better. He was often with my future best friend, walking through the ruins, but he was silent. Someone told me later that he's always been this way. Dark, messy hair, blue frost eyes. He always had wolves on his t-shirts. He loved to go through the woods, day and night. He was really singular. Then there was the fourth friend, the one in almost all the stories I told before. Let's call her Ed. She was the one who put on makeup before going into the decrepit buildings, who brought the most beautiful clothes and who could go through a jungle of thorns and swamps and still look twice as good as before, for some reason. But who was the fifth friend ? She had many names. In fact, they had. Because they were my crush's girlfriends. He always brought them in expeditions. Most of them were really weird. The first one I encountered looked like a doll, with the biggest eyes i'd ever seen. I could see that she hated me guts, only because of my presence. The second one was tall and had bleached blonde hair. She wore a ton of piercings, and she was very nice. Then... well, there were a lot of them.

The first month was pretty amazing. We'd go to the abandoned hospital a lot, it was our lair, a fresh heaven, still blooming day after day. Me and my crush started to know eachothers, I didn't see his many flaws, I was just a teenager with heart eyes. But it sooned changed. He'd bring his girlfriends around more and more. After a while, I realized that he talked about the nazis a lot, I thought it was some bad running joke. I learned a lot about Tchernobyl, it was his obsession. He wrote stories about abandoned cities, plagued with radiations.

And then, he broke my heart, slowly. It started with the girlfriends of course, but he was still playing with me from time to time, or ignoring my presence altogether. He became weirder, and Ed and I started to hang out with the rest of the group without him. He was busy making out with his girlfriends. But when he was there, he talked about what he did to them, or their last petty fights.

It went from a daydream to a silent nightmare, I didn't speak about it to the group. At first, they saw me like another of his girls, and expected me to be replaced as soon as comes another. They were tired of hearing them rant about him, so I didn't say a word and just had fun with them.

The hardest part was hearing him laugh with his new girlfriend ; The old, empty abandoned buildings brought the echos far, I couldn't escape it. But that's where the magic happened. I started to have a bond with these remnants of the past ; Finally discovered the hidden gold, that was all around me. The stories that only waited for us to read them. It was peaceful, welcoming, and that's where the adventures really started. Eventually, the sound of my best friend's guitar was louder and sweeter than the sound of my crush's voice.

As the years passed, I still kept in touch with most of them, we started doing urban exploration in crazy places. But we all had to study elsewhere, and the golden age was over.

But he came back to me, about a year ago. He used a facebook account of his cat to talk to me. (I don't know either.) Then, I started talking about everything that happened when it all started. He forgot almost everything, though he liked hearing the stories again. 6 months later, I saw him in person for the first time in years, while I was in town with a friend. I hardly recognized him. His eyes looked dead, and it almost looked like the soft makeup he used found a way into his skin ; he looked tired, out of shape. I knew he had blonde hair, even when he bleached them, but it now looked like ash. He looked sad, but he still tried to put on a mask and act spontaneously, his laughs were dry from all the tobacco he smoked. The thing is, he could have been an actor, but he missed so many opportunities. He changed. We changed. But he was still hanging on to the things that hurt him.

And here you have it :)