It’s hard to think of one life being more important than another’s, no one ever wants to think these things but sometimes they do. Clara kept thinking these things while Noah was talking about how this man has struggled. The story that Noah told Clara that day is life changing:
A man born into the planet with M.S, and he struggled with it his entire life. His mother died when he was 15 and he was trying to learn who he was and what he was supposed to do in his life. With a part of you as big your mother missing, he was trying to find where he needed to turn in life. His family was exceptionally poor but still tried to help everyone. When he was 17 he became addicted to Heroin, with the side effects of the deadly drugs, and also his MS syndrome, he was in for a rude awakening in life. His father died when this man was 19 years old, leaving him, the oldest of 8, to tend to the needs of all the younger siblings, while he was dealing with a heroin addiction and MS syndrome. His siblings all grew up and moved away or are now dead and he is left on his own to deal with his newly discovered cancer.
“I’ve talked to him a few times over lunch, I feel like I have the most in common with him than with anyone else at that God forsaken place. We’re both alone, and battling more than anyone else understands.” Clara felt the need to listen, she was almost unable to stop, and she needed to hear more about what was going through Noah’s mind.
“I was into bad things before my parents moved me out here, I was one of those kids you would see in the hallways at school and move as far from them as possible. You would have been scared of me, and my black hair.” Clara tried to picture what he meant when he said he had black hair, how is that possible, he has blonde, curly, shaggy hair now.
“How could you be scary? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more easy to talk to than you.”
“Well you’d be the first,” their conversation started to take on a lighter mood. “Where are you from,” Clara asked even though she promised herself she wouldn’t, just yet, “I mean, like, what state?” She hoped her question didn’t make her seem like she was trying too hard to get to know him, she had so many things she wanted to learn about him, her thoughts were interrupted by his laughter, and “you like to know a lot about people, don’t you?” Embarrassed, she smiled over the steering wheel, “Well I don’t usually drive complete strangers around for hours, but if you don’t want to tell me, I can pull over now and leave you at this bus stop…”
Noah rolled his eyes and offered some sarcasm of his own, “Yeah and from what I’ve learned about you today is that without me copiloting over here, you’d be in some corn field with mud up to your knees. “
“Oh funny, I’m not used to this part of town. I don’t just go out and drive for hours at a time.” Noah seemed to become lost I the scenery that fell in front of him, Clara watched his eyes, they changed almost as often as the road changed ahead.
“You still want to know about where I come from, I’ll tell you what I know. First of all I am adopted and don’t know where I was born, who my parents are, my real sibling, or why no one wanted me. I’m assuming that you’ve seen the movie Annie, the all girls orphanage, imagine that but with all boys and instead of an alcoholic as a leader, if you can even call it that, imagine a man that had so much anger held within himself that he beat whatever child crossed his path and never got caught. I lived with that for, maybe, three years, until the people who I now know as my parents saved me. But then me, being as smart as I am, got involved in some...not so great things, and they sent me here, a safer place, where I can’t make the cancer any worse. This is the first time I’ve left that hospital in almost 4 months, I have nowhere to go, so I just don’t leave. But you came along today, and changed everything and made me feel like someone in the world actually cared about me.” I became lost inside what he was saying, I didn’t even realize he stopped talking, I just kept imagining what he would say next.
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