Writing Prompt: It was more emotion than I ever saw from him before.

Morning all, ready for the morning prompt? Excellent. Lets set those timers and jump right in. Fifteen minutes please.

Not where I though this was going but I do like the set up. And I think I know where to use it. I love when that happens.

Wednesday, August 5^th: It was more emotion than I ever saw from him before.

It was more emotion than I ever saw from him before.  The emotion was anger, so I wasn’t entirely certain it was an improvement.  It was strange to watch, however.  His demeanor was always placid, languid even.  He seemed to breeze through life without really letting any of it affect him. 

He kept his earphones on most of the time, music blocking out anything anyone had to say about anything.  He ate alone, worked alone and only interacted with others when absolutely necessary.  Once he figured out he could order groceries online and have them delivered, he stopped having to interact with the people at the grocery store.  I was fairly certain the first day he got a grocery delivery I saw him crack a soft smile.

One more group of people eliminated from the list of those he had to deal with. 

To be fair, like the rest of us, he was just marking time.  Time until he could leave this place.  None of us wanted to be here and we each had our own ways of dealing with it.  I had been called antisocial until he joined our ranks.  Then I was praised for at least attempting to interact. 

I never told anyone the reason that I didn’t walk around with music or podcasts or something playing in my ears all day was because of my paranoia.  If I couldn’t hear people I began to wonder what they were saying and started interpreting their actions in the worst possible ways.  It was part of the damage I brought with me and I often envied him his ability to completely disappear into his own little world.

Others liked to believe they weren’t damaged in some way.  It was a lie.  The fact that they went out of their way to show they weren’t damaged and were just like everyone else more or less proved the damage was there.

It didn’t matter the reasoning.  We were all here for the same length of time whether we showed our damage or tried to blend in with the others.  We were here because our families defied the emperor. The defiance varied.  For some it was political, others intellectual, but all of them offered up some defiance and got caught.  We were too young to participate so we were here, to be properly educated and cleansed of any contaminating ideas and thinking that our families might have bestowed upon us. 

We took the classes, attended whatever we were slated to attend and then pronounced clean and blameless we were graduated and sent back to everyday society to live as productive members of society.  We would continue to be watched of course, in case we harbored some secret ill against the emperor. 

I knew some of those who tried to pretend to be just like the others at the school, those whose families were in good standing, thought that if they were just like the others then they wouldn’t be as watched as the rest of us.  I knew it didn’t matter.  I saw the lists and knew that once we left someone would be assigned to watch us.  We wouldn’t know who.  They would be a neighbor possibly even a friend we met when we left. 

We would be right to be suspicious of anyone we met in the first few months after leaving.  As I was always suspicious I thought I would have an okay time of it.  After all, my family had to be turned in by someone we knew and our circle of friends wasn’t large. It was the source of my paranoia.  I knew it, identified it and found ways to deal with it. 

Whatever ways he found to deal with his issues involved the headphones. 

The cord of which Justin just cut, deliberately.