Rocco-s — Pov 17

The world, Rocco had decided, was not built for a boy who felt everything in capital letters. At seventeen, his bones ached with a fatigue that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the performance of being fine. He stood in the doorway of his bedroom, one hand pressed flat against the jamb, watching his mother cry on the phone in the kitchen. She thought he couldn’t hear her. He heard everything.

She looked up, startled.

He walked out into the September dusk, the air sharp with the promise of autumn. Seventeen was not an answer. Seventeen was a bridge, and he was standing in the middle, the past a dim shoreline behind him, the future a fog he couldn’t see through. But the wind on his face felt like something. Like maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t broken. Like maybe he was just becoming. rocco-s pov 17

Rocco grabbed his jacket. He didn’t know who he wanted to be tonight—the angry boy, the sad boy, the boy who kissed girls in closets and then ran. He only knew that staying in this room, with its museum of old selves, was a kind of dying. The world, Rocco had decided, was not built