syllables, grammatical.

holy crap!

2009-03-30T13:34:49Z

i am not dead, i am just a horrible, horrible author who hasn't written anything of substance in longer than she can remember. if anyone still reads this or remembers who i am, have some words, because i am bored and full of thoughts. non-fiction, non-bandom, nothing special.

These trees are pulled inside out, all their veins and arteries dark against the sky like the blue lines under the soft skin inside your wrists, carrying blood up from the ground like silent, sentinel vampires. There’s just a flicker of dead leaf here and there; I’d average about a leaf per twenty veins, just barely hanging on through the mid-March freeze, winters last frozen-fingered grasp. The ends of my fingers are numb and hard like icicles, barely squeezing the filter end of a cigarette, spotted with moisture, and the snowflakes are leaving wet spots like tears on my cheeks. Its times like these I wish for hot, dry summer, for all the grass turned golden and the cicadas humming low, hiding in the whispering leaves. For me, hiding in the shade under the broadest tree, skin glowing in the reflected light, grass itching my ankles and up the back of my shirt. For now, though, it’s just one more cup of tea and a few more minutes sleep, hibernating through what’s left of this darkness and coming out alive on the other side.

oops!

2008-05-09T15:29:22Z

i have not updated this journal in almost ten weeks, because i haven't been writing. so,

naked just isn't good enough anymore; wants him stripped bare to the bones with all his muscles and tendons like twine holding whatever makes him real inside. wants to hold it, that insubstantial thing or that twitching heart, in the palm of the hand and read what makes him tick. naked just isn't good enough anymore. wants to know every inch, every nerve ending, every blood vessel, every empty space. every organ blushing pink, exposed to the light. wants to find what makes him alive, breathing, past all the biology -- the soul of being. and skin, skin is just in the way, but it's the closest, the next best thing. settles, settled, settling for naked. not settling at all.

not part of anything, spur of the moment thinking. hopefully something more substantial in the near future. ♥

drabble.

2008-02-28T20:20:48Z

he is stale cigarette smoke and the acrid throb of old coffee, sunshine fields and foreign movies about true, true love and policy. a statue of god ground into dust, a thousand tiny particles of heaven smashed into the grit and imperfection of here-on-earth; just molecules moving through space, displacing the air with the most precious of ripples and tiny breaths, smiles with cracked teeth, the concrete rushing up to meet the sky and shouting at a sun we cannot see. sweet revenge, stolen victory, guilty love, and the taste of every world you've ever spoken left lingering in the back of your throat like the cantankerous shit at the bottom of barrels. carving a niche in the slow walls of time, kicking and screaming, thicker still with each passing day -- only his nails for spades, no diamonds, and one fucked up heart. join the club.

perilous.

2008-01-07T22:12:40Z

i'm makin' my way to a place that breaks love
and leavin' my goodbyes, so i can move on
without orchids in my pockets,
cushions for the soul
in search of somethin', always somethin'
catchin' up to the ghost

and i'm broke, but i look
good with my heart in my throat,
when it pulses i breathe what you don't
so i choke and make moans
what's in this heart in this throat
in a body that shakes when it knows
not which way to go

now i'm livin' in a building
the twenties built with alarm
kids from chicago are livin' next door
livin' proof there's a fire
spreading northward
to make ourselves heard
and pour our blood on the stars
perilously here,
swallowed down i fear
can taste who we are
so good, so far

and i look good with my heart in my throat
when it pulses i breathe what you don't
so i choke and make moans
what's in this heart in this throat
in a body that shakes when it knows
not which way to go

and i'm broke, but i look
good with my heart in my throat,
when it pulses i breathe what you don't
so i choke and make moans
what's in this heart in this throat
in a body that shakes when it knows
not which way to go

scott moffatt – perilously here.

+ + + + +

Running hurts his lungs, feels like drawing in mouthfuls of cold, wet sand, and he can feel the harsh jolt running up through his legs, into his bones, jarring his ribs like singing wind chimes, but he just keeps running. Pushes back against the burn in his legs and forces the air into his chemically treated lungs, listens to the rhythm of his sneakers smacking hard against the concrete, the counter thud of his bag against his hip, the in between stuttering grate of his breathing, a song of escape.

He doesn't have anywhere to go, and certainly no one to go with, only the mostly empty streets, trees, cars, houses flying by in a rush to keep him company, but there’re a million places he could be. A million places that aren’t here.

So he runs.

-

He loses track of blocks, of street signs, of neighbourhoods, and he's never been happier than when he stops, looks around, and says out loud to himself, to the dimming canvas of sky brushed with clouds, "Fuck I'm lost". The words are like breaking the surface of the water, that first breath, and he smiles.

The grass in the clearing past the last houses on the street is crackling and dry under his feet, growing in just sand, baked dry from the summer slowly fading into autumn, but under the lone tree, it thickens and velvets, a little desert oasis created by the shade. It's cold and chill damp under his back, through his sweater, smells sweet and a little warm, like when it rains and steams on hot asphalt in the summer.

Half a bottle of water later and the last quarter of a cigarette edging closer to his fingers, watching the sky turn plum around the edges, he's grinning to himself, hopelessly lost in a neighbourhood hes never seen before, and that he's not likely to ever see again, but that, for now, is the best place in the world to be lost.

When the sky finally tints itself navy, sun risen somewhere east of here, the air nipping at his exposed skin, he stretches his legs, aching and numb, and shoulders his bag.

Home is where you make it.
-

It's too quiet and too dark inside the front door of the house, so he scurries across the floor, up the stairs, into his bedroom before too much of a good thing becomes far in excess of an awful night.

His clothes still smelling like hay and dirt, he falls into bed, and it feels like he's asleep before he closes his eyes, dreaming vague about golden fields and green leaves, the moon outside the window.

-

He leaves in the middle of the night, two bags stuffed with everything he could think to bring and nothing that's of real importance. It's not like any of it, his clothes, his books, his candles, things that mean nothing, are going to make wherever he ends up feel like home. He doesn't leave a note, just an empty bedroom, a bare mattress, a few small things scattered around. His parents will understand, in their own way; he's always said the most with stormy silences, and this, the ultimate quiet, is the most racket he can ever really make.

If they don't listen when you talk, they'll listen when you walk, or ride the bus out of town, he thinks, painting designs in the frost from his breath on the cold glass window, listening to the thick hum of the engine running up through the floor into his shoes.

The bus is crowded and permeated with diesel fumes thick enough to make his head spin, but with the scenery flashing by faster than it ever could when he runs, his physical life stuffed into black plastic, the overhead luggage racks, he can’t help but laugh.

-

The bus is almost empty, a few people in the back going nowhere like him, and when it stops and the doors screech open, he's half expecting no one to walk on, the bus driver stopping for phantoms, swirls of mist. But the surprise, the boy, is about his age, a little shorter and with darker hair, blue duffle bag slung heavy over his back and a slow smile in his eyes. He looks up and down the aisle, seems to consider sitting alone at the front, until he catches his eye over the vinyl upholstered row of seats, smiles, all teeth. He ducks his head below the seat in front of him, presses his pen against the half-filled notebook page, feels the bus lurch and watches the trees start to flash by again outside the murky glass.

He isn't really expecting the guy to push his bag into the luggage rack one seat ahead and sit down, turning around and slinging an arm over the back.

"Hi. What are you writing?" he asks, voice too-loud in the eerie quiet of the bus, and when he looks up through his hair, the flash-flash of headlights shining through the window against the side of the boys face, his lips quirk up without his consent.

"Words," he mutters, raising his eyebrows, eyes flickering back down in disinterest, but his mask cracks off, barely revealing a smile, when the boy widens his eyes comically, leaning a little further over the creaking seat.

"You don’t say," he gasps, and then his voice drops again, smoothing out. “M’Brendon.”

"What?"

"I...am...Brendon," he drawls, word stretched out long, like talking to a child when they colour outside the lines. Ryan bristles.

"Oh," he snaps, edges his fingers into his sleeve and scratches his wrist.

"Yeah."

He draws a long, curving swirl around the corner of the page, filling it in with black ink, starting slightly when Brendon jumps up and steps backwards, sitting beside him, vinyl crackling.

"Uh, so you're supposed to tell me your name now, genius," he teases, poking one index finger into his bony shoulder, sending the pen skittering across the page messily and his arm into the metal wall of the bus. He rolls his eyes and pushes his hair off his face, staring down at the scribble and thinking of a way to make it look intentional, nice.

"M'Ryan," he finally says, and Brendon hums, putting his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him.

"Nice to meet you, Ryan."

"Sure."

"Do you, uh, talk? Since we’re pretty much alone on this bus, you know."

"I could be a douche bag right now and say nothing," he mumbles, tilting his head down to hide the grin infecting his mouth, and Brendon chuckles, low.

"You aren’t a douche bag, though," he says, shrugging, and leans forward to flick dirt off his (purple!) shoes.

"And you know this how?" Ryan retorts, pen shaping out more curls and edges, pressing into the page.

"I have a sense."

"Right."

"I do!"

"Mmhm."

"Yeah."

"...Okay."

"Really."

"Oh, jesus," Ryan groans, "you’re like a five year old."

Brendon grins and settles into the seat.

"Before this ride is over, you’ll love me."

"Mmhm."

"You will."

"Yeah."

"You will, you will, you will, you will," Brendon sings, voice buoyant and satin, and Ryan presses the pen harder into the paper, hard enough it tears a little.

"Bright Eyes does not impress me," he sighs, rolling his eyes again and kicking his legs up over the seat, and Brendon huffs.

"Fine, fine. Go back to your precious journal while I sit here and die slowly of boredom."

"I will, thank you," he mumbles, ignoring it when Brendon laughs again and mutters "Oh, you will," under his breath, pressing the end of his pen between his lips in place of the nicotine craving scraping along his veins, and writes 'you will. you. will you. will. you. will?' on the corner of the page, before boxing it in and scribbling it out with slow, concentric circles.

-

"Where are you going?" Brendon whispers, the world outside the windows pitch black, the otherwise empty bus rocking along some equally deserted highway.

"Nowhere," he whispers back, legs crossed on the seat, facing Brendon, fingers toying with the frayed edges of his jeans. "Anywhere that isn’t where I was, I mean."

"Why?" Brendon says, eyebrows furrowing, and he just shrugs, chin tucked to his chest.

"Why not?" he says, raising his head briefly, flicking his hair out of his eyes. "I mean, what’s to be gained by sitting in my bedroom at my parent’s house for the rest of my life?"

"True enough," Brendon says, tilting his head and working his finger into a tear in the upholstery, revealing the white padding underneath.

"What about you?" he says, leaning back to rest against the seat and the window, blinking slowly, eyes inching closer to closing. "Where’re you going?"

Brendon shrugs, pulling a piece of grey vinyl off and laying it on his knee, starting on another.

"Pretty much the same," he says, and then shifts his gaze to Ryan and suddenly reaches out, fingers making contact with his forehead, sweeping the long strands of hair out of his eyes.
"I fucking hate that I can't see your eyes," he mutters, going back to the vinyl, not seeming to notice the way Ryan's spine snaps rigid and his muscles freeze. "You shouldn't hide them. It's like...wearing a fucking blackout curtain on your whole self, if someone can't see your eyes."

"What if that's the point?" he shoots back, and Brendon's fingers never stop with the vinyl, but his jaw sets and his eyes soften, refocus on his face without ever moving.

"That's fucked," he mutters, flattening another piece onto his knee, and Ryan just shrugs and settles further into the seat, hands settling in the space created by his crossed legs.

"Okay, then I'm fucked," he says, rolling his neck and closing his eyes. "Whatever."

"That's a shitty thing to just...submit to," Brendon says, and Ryan hears another piece of vinyl tearing away from its glue and padding.

"Life is a shitty thing to just submit to," he mumbles, venom draining from his voice, exhaustion crawling stealthy into his muscles, his eyes, "but we all do it."

He hears Brendon hum softly and mutter something, and then the dark haze of sleep washes over him in a wave, no hesitation, just quiet and warmth, the safety of unconsciousness.

"Shit," Brendon says to the window behind Ryan's head, his own reflection of a reflection of a reflection in the silent bus window like the kid on the cereal box, tearing off another piece of vinyl and watching Ryan's face from the corner of his eye, gone soft and unguarded in sleep. "That isn't always a bad thing."

But he's not listening, instead dreaming a memory he'll never quite remember afterwards, and the road keeps singing under the tires.

-

"Dude," Brendon mutters, prodding Ryan harshly until his head wiggles back and forth and his eyes blink, blink, focus. "Wake the fuck up, man, seriously."

"Where the hell are we?" he mumbles, sleep-thick, stretching until his legs disappear under the seat and his arms reach nearly to the ceiling, a long strip of barely tanned skin appearing from under his shirt, sharp hipbones, and then gone.

"I, uhh," Brendon says, up, standing, dizzy, shouldering his duffle bag and tossing Ryan's at his head. "I think he said we're somewhere in California, before, but I'm...I'm not really that sure."

Ryan frowns and pushes the bags off his face, rubbing blearily at his eyes and yawning.

"Well, fuck it, at least it ain't Vegas," he murmurs, and Brendon laughs.

"You aren't from fucking Vegas," he says, shifting down the aisle as Ryan stumbles into it, feet scratching on the corrugated rubber floor.

"And how the fuck would you know where I’m from?"

"'Cause I'm from Vegas?" he says, feet clanging down the steps onto the concrete, blinking in the sun, turning to face Ryan.

"You’re shitting me, right?"

"Hell no, man. Just outside of Summerlin."

Ryan almost drops his bags.

"Fuck you, I live in Summerlin."

"Lived," Brendon corrects, looking around and grinning. "We're in fucking California now. We could go anywhere, we could disappear."

And even without the burn in his legs and the ache in his lungs, Ryan finds himself smiling.

"Well, okay, but when did me running away become we?" he laughs, squinting and shielding his eyes, staring up at the blackened silhouette of a palm tree against the sky, and Brendon laughs.

"Well, if you want to go off on your own in a city you've never been in, be my guest."

Ryan sighs and fidgets with a ragged gash in the plastic bag, pushing his fingers into the clothes inside and tugging.

"Alright, so. What do we do now?"

Brendon grins.

-

The motel room is dinghy, overused, probably crawling with a thousand disgusting things that neither of them want to think about, but just because they're new, something different, the beds are the most comfortable in the world. The pizza is slightly burnt, tastes like cardboard, and it's stone cold by the time it gets there, overpriced and late, but with the taste of freedom lingering heavy in the air, nothing's ever tasted better.

"We know nothing about each other," Ryan muses, plucking at a stray piece of greasy, orange-stained pepperoni and popping it into his mouth, glancing around the dark, floral-patterned room. "How the fuck did this happen?"

Brendon shrugs and throws another piece of meat into the lid of the box, frowning.

"This is disgusting," he murmurs, wiping his hands on the grease-streaked napkin, cringing when Ryan shovels the abandoned pepperoni into his mouth. "And I told you, I just have a sense." He frowns, scooping up the abandoned crusts, and sighs. "Although sometimes, I wish I didn’t."

Ryan rolls his eyes and twists around to reach into his jacket, and Brendon does not, does not, stare at the way his shirt rides up and his pants twist around his thighs. He really isn't staring, either, when Ryan twists back around, lighter and cigarette palmed, smiling.

"Hey, uh, do you mind, or should I go outside?"

Brendon snaps his eyes away, back to the now cheese slice pockmarked with rings of heart attack resting on his knee, and shrugs.

"Don’t give a shit," he says, warily holding up the slice with two fingers. “My mom smokes, so.”

Ryan shrugs and flops backwards onto the bed, cigarette balanced precariously between his lips, and flicks the lighter, inhaling.

"Fuck," he drawls, breathing a cloud at the ceiling and closing his eyes. "Don't ever start smoking," he says, turning his head towards Brendon and laughing. "Such a bad fucking habit." In, exhale. He eyes the piece of pizza in Brendon's hand. "If you aren’t going to eat that shit, put it back in the box and leave it for me."

Brendon's eyes widen.

"You’re a bottomless fucking pit."

Ryan brings the cigarette to his mouth and inhales, shrugging again, and Brendon drops the slice back into the box with a plop.

"Fucking gross," he mutters, shaking his hands and wiping them on his jeans, and Ryan snorts. He looks around, at the two small beds, their entire lives piled in the corner, and sighs. "I'm going to sleep."

"Have at it," Ryan sighs, one arm resting across his stomach and the other hovering perpetually near his mouth, cigarette ready. "Me too, soon."

"Don’t fall asleep with that thing in your hand, you’ll catch us on fire," Brendon mutters, shucking his shirt and pulling back the thin blanket, sliding under it quickly and trying to fluff the lumpy pillow with one hand.

"Yeah, yeah," Ryan sighs, sliding up the bed and squishing out the butt in the shitty glass ashtray on the bedside table before kicking back the blankets and turning off the light. "Sleep."

"'Night," Brendon whispers, rolling over in the dark to stare at the Ryan-sized lump in the next bed, illuminated by the streetlights outside. Ryan hums and rubs his eyes, pushing further into the blankets.

"Yeah, 'night," he sighs, and Brendon can see him falling asleep, even like this, the way his body relaxes and loses its rigidity, boneless and pliant.

He spends the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, wondering how the fuck he ended up here with some boy he doesn't know. But, admittedly, it could be worse. He stares across the room at Ryan's profile, silhouetted in the dim light, and scrubs his face with one hand. Fuck. Way worse.

-

He leans over to tie his shoe, and the little golden cross his mother gave him when he was six falls out of his shirt.

"I never pegged you as a jesus type," Ryan says from the bed, reaching down and across to slide his fingers behind it, the gentle weight of the metal resting on his fingertips, and the heat from his skin radiates.

"I'm not," Brendon says to the carpet, and reaches up, tearing the thin chain from his neck and folding it into his palm, pressing hard enough that the edges leave imprints in his palm, before letting it slide from his hand and fall to the floor.

Ryan just nods and reaches for his jacket, and Brendon doesn't see him, doesn't hear him pause and lean down as he's following him out the door, slipping the broken chain into his back pocket.

-

The newspaper spread out on the bed in front of him, legs crossed into a pretzel, Brendon stares at Ryan's curved back, the constant cloud of smoke swirling up from his lips, the red marker in his hand (stolen from the front desk) squeaking and circling through the pages.

He keeps saying he didn't come out here to fuck up, he came out here to make a life, a life he couldn't find with his parents, and for the last three days he's been all newspaper ink fingertips, early morning phone calls, peppermint and nicotine.

"You're staring," he says, and the marker squeaks around again, the paper rustling as he fights to turn the page, eyes never leaving the black and white print, the coloured advertisements for call girls and casinos. Brendon blinks, darts his eyes away, slips his thumb into his mouth and gnaws.

"Daydreaming," he mumbles, stretching his legs across the bed and cracking his neck back and forth, slow. "Sorry." Ryan just hums, distracted, and the marker chases its tail around another ad, and Brendon really, really tries not to stare at the slow-revealing skin on Ryan's back, the valleys and peaks of his bones stretching his skin, and jesus fuck, he is so, so screwed, and Ryan just keeps circling and humming, circling and smoking, circling and cursing at the tangled pages of the paper.

-

The table lamps are dim, light orange through the peachy-pink crimped fabric shades, gold fixtures chipped and worn down, tacky and seventies like everything else in the room, but...watching the dust filter down like tiny flecks of silver glitter through the beams of light, watching the cigarette smoke dance and swirl and turn gold under the shade, noting the precise shades and shadows it creates on the boy on the bed across from him, that's not so bad.

"So?" Ryan says, lips quirking, shadows morphing, and flicks his ashes. "Is it your turn to be mute or what?"

"Nah," Brendon mutters, staring distracted at the cigarette burning in his hand, an answer to both questions. "You can’t shut me up that easy, no luck for you there." Ryan rolls his eyes and inhales. "And uh, no, no girlfriend."

"Me either." Ryan shrugs. "Girls are, uh, weirdly not into me."

"That wasn’t exactly it," Brendon says, inhales, nerves prickling, and drops the butt in the ashtray. Ryan doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even call him out on how fucking cocky that sounded, just raises one eyebrow and follows suit, exhaling one last time. Brendon listens intently to the ticking of the wall clock, and exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds go by before Ryan clears his throat.

"I take it you're not going to elaborate." Brendon just swallows and drums his fingertips against his stomach, and Ryan shifts, coughs. "Hey, man, if it's...what I think you're going to say, if that's it, it's not...I really don't give a shit."

"Okay," Brendon says to the stucco ceiling, "so, then, I'm definitely a fag." Silence. He closes his eyes and digs his nails into his wrist. "And if that's not what you thought I was going to say, I'm going to go and hang myself in the shower."

Ryan laughs, sudden and bright and musical, and Brendon cracks an eye open.

"No, that was it," he says, still laughing under his breath, and turns his head to look across the valley between the beds. "It’s cool, honestly."

Brendon opens the other eye and smiles, barely, before announcing he's tired and watching Ryan’s long arm reach out to click off the light, a flick of his wrist. Laying in the dark, listening to the rise and fall of their breathing, sleep drifts up like a thief, slow and grey and warm, chloroform darkness, before his eyes snap open, ceiling blurring into focus.

"Hey, fuck, am I that obvious?" he asks, half asleep and half incredulous, and Ryan laughs that laugh again, the hair on the back of Brendon’s neck prickling.

"No, I just have a sense," he teases, and then sighs, sleep-heavy. "Go to sleep, idiot."

He does.

-

The first time, he doesn't know what he's thinking, or if he's thinking at all, really. He can't really blame himself, he thinks, because he was so high, so warm and needy and fucked up, and Ryan was just there, soft skin and body heat, and he didn't even try to stop him, just sat there and let him lean over and press their lips together, a little messy and so, so good. Just, he let him touch, slip his fingers up under his t-shirt, tipped his head back and opened his mouth, let him, and. It just, it wasn't his fault. It was no one's fault. It just...happened.

But, waking up tangled together, still in their clothes, Ryan moves away from him a little too fast, says that it's fine, it was just the drugs, just a little too often and a little too loud, and after that, he gets way too silent about it.

And the fact that Brendon never brings it up again, never asks? That? That is all his fucking fault.

-

"I called my mom today," he says, arms crossed over his stomach, and Ryan shifts against the sheets, turns to face him.

"And?"

"She, uh. Hung up on me."

"Shit," Ryan murmurs, "I’m sorry, man. Really. That’s harsh."

"Yeah," he breathes, counting specks on the ceiling. "You talked to yours?"

"Few days ago."

"And?"

"She cried, and then my dad told me if I ever called again he'd find me and kick my ass." A pause. "Nothing's changed, really."

"Shit, eh?"

"Yeah."

Brendon gets up and crosses the space between the beds, crawling beside Ryan and resting an arm tentatively across his stomach, exhaling when Ryan doesn’t flinch, stays still and soft beside him.

"It's going to be alright, I think," he whispers, and Ryan nods, blinks hard.

"I fucking hope so."

-

The apartment isn't much better than the motel room, mattresses and take-out cartons on the floor, working way too much overtime for way too little money and way too little space, but it's...he thinks ours, and then takes it back, sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking at Brendon across from him, picking deftly through his food with chopsticks. Ours? he thinks again, and then shakes his head, because 'ours' implies there's a 'we', and there...isn’t. Not like that.

He flashes back to blurry vision, floating limbs, warm hands, open mouths, drifting, but he forces himself back into the present, biting hard on the inside of his cheek. There is no 'we'.

-

The second time, it's less of a drug-induced accident and more of a drunken incident, which may or may not equate out to the same thing in the long run, when he thinks about it. But it's just, he trips, and the next thing he really knows Ryan's pressed against the wall and he's pressed against Ryan, kissing like fighting, hands pushing and pulling and everywhere, and oh, oh god, ohgodohgodohgod. He pulls back, eyes vague, lips kiss-red, and Ryan slumps his head against the wall.

"Uhm?" he murmurs, fingers tracing circles over Ryan's hip, brushing the hair from his eyes, thighs dangerously close, and when Ryan opens his mouth, no sound comes out, and he feels himself nodding, yesyesohfuckyes, without his brain giving the signal.

And he wants to say its all downhill from there, but that's the furthest thing from his mind with teeth in his neck and hips against his, and he forgets that he isn't supposed to want this, forgets he isn't supposed to do this, not with Ryan, not like this, but, when Ryan comes, back against the wall and hips pressing forward, he forgets his fucking name and all he is, for one little second, is alive.

-

Ryan's cross-legged on the floor, long fingers knitted together in a vain attempt to keep from biting his nails or picking the skin raw, feet jiggling against his knees, and Brendon sighs, paces, sighs again.

"I’m –- " he tries, and then stops, stands still for a long moment, and resumes pacing.

"Look," Ryan says, reaching off the side of the mattress for his lighter, cigarette shaking between his fingers. "It's, I just. I don’t know what to do, or to say to you, I've never..." he stops, inhales hard and exhales, breath catching in his throat. "It's never happened, I've never even thought about if I...I could be. I don't know, Bren."

Brendon rubs at his eyes, hard enough that it hurts, aches, and sits down on the floor, reaching for the smokes.

"I'm...I know. I'm sorry, it isn't...it wasn't supposed to happen like this, it, it just wasn't.”

Ryan nods and turns his head, staring at the wall, plastered over with posters from shows, movies, covering the grey drywall.

"You shouldn't be sorry, I mean. I just, I shouldn't have let you, I..." he takes a deep breath, voice dropping, and stares at the floor. "But, I wanted to, Brendon, I really...I did." He stops, swallows, inhales. "Fuck, do," he finally whispers, and Brendon holds his breath, counts off the seconds in his head, just makes it to sixty-two before Ryan closes the distance and kisses him, nicotine and peppermint.

Third time's definitely a charm.

-

Brendon finds the broken necklace in a box of Ryan's things, chain knotted, the cross dangling from the clasp end, stuck, when they're packing to move into the new place ("Somewhere that'll be...ours?" Ryan had said, bottom lip held firmly between his teeth, eyes flashing), the two-bedrooms-and-a-giant-bathroom-and-a-tiled-kitchen-and-a-high-ceiling apartment downtown.

It hangs from his fingers, long and sparkling in the dim light, cold and glittering, and he doesn't say anything when he hears Ryan walk into the room, feet shuffling on the floor, just folds it in his hand and smiles, and for the first time in a long time, he flits his eyes towards the ceiling in silent thanks.

-

"Yeah, mom, my...yes, that’s what I said." Ryan hears Brendon's mothers' voice, tinny and squiggly through the receiver, shouting, and Brendon sighs.

"Hey," Ryan whispers, stretching his hand out and wrapping it around the phone. "Let me? Just for a second?" He grins, tugging, and Brendon laughs, almost silently, and swats at his hand before Ryan gets it away, and he hears her: What in god’s name are you laughing for, boy?

"Mrs. Urie?" he says into the phone, and she goes quiet for a long moment, only her breathing on the other end.

"You take care of him, you hear me?" she whispers, breaking on the vowels, and Ryan just nods, looking at Brendon, its okay.

"I promise," he says, voice soft, and he can hear her crying, low, when he hands the phone back.

-

His dad hangs up on him as soon as he says 'roommate' and 'Brendon' in the same sentence, which isn’t even half of what he was calling to say, really, but, he must have got the gist.

"Fucker," Ryan mutters, clunking the phone in the receiver, and turns to face Brendon. "That was..."

And when Brendon steps forward and hugs him, Ryan doesn't even try to pretend that he isn't crying.

-

"Where are we going?" Ryan asks, laughing, twisting around in his seat, trying to get a better view of the road, find a marker.

Brendon smiles and speeds up, just a little, fingers twisting around the steering wheel.

"Nowhere," he murmurs, and leans down to press play on the stereo.

-

Oh you will, you will, you will, you will...

+ + + + +

possible snapshot from something bigger, yet again, and if you understand what i was maybe, possibly, sort of getting at, yay! un-beta'ed, as per usual. feel free to concrit me. posted mostly just so you don't think i'm dead. =]

♥

HOLIDAY FIC EXCHANGE: cosmopolitan blood loss.

2007-12-15T19:02:06Z

RECIPIENT: alexalgebra.

TITLE: Cosmopolitan Blood Loss.
AUTHOR: inamorate via fght_ffyrdmns
RATING: R. Mature themes, yes?
PAIRING: Someone/Brendon. Pick-your-own, 'cause I couldn’t decide.
POV: Third.
SUMMARY: AU. A doctor and his patient.
DISCLAIMER: Hahaha, absolutely not. I own nothing, I know nothing. If you’re here ‘cause you googled your name (or your friends, record label, band mates or co-workers), please go back. You don’t want to know what I write about you. Seriously.
WARNINGS: Err, it’s kind of a fetish-based fic, so. There’s that. Also, if you are squicked by blood-letting/leeches, you probably don’t want to read this, unless you’ve got a thing for being squicked, like my Brendon. xD
A/N: [Title stolen from a glassJAw song.] Around 1300 words of medical fetish fic (with a little bit of feelings, I couldn’t help it!) for alexalgebra. Merry Christmas, Alex! I hope this is to your liking. ~~Don't kick me if it sucks, 'kay?~~ ;) Keep an eye out, too, because there may or may not be a longer AU 'verse with a bit more variety in topic coming out sooner or later, because I started another story for you and it never got finished. Love and other good things also go out to Rit sympathynotlove, Claire rytosis, Sam sam_i_am_not_2, and anyone else who listened to me freak out about writing this. ♥

My prompt was...

42. Pairing: Ryan/Brendon or Jon/Brendon
Scenario/Plot/Idea: PLEASE someone write me a medical fetish fic!! I want someone strapped down and cold metal and lots of big words!
Other Specifications: I would prefer it to take place in the early 1900s. I'm thinking bloodletting, leeches, ether. Talk of the 4 humors is a plus!! Whatever time you write it in, please make sure to include the use of creepy devices.

And out of that, I somehow got this? =P

+ + +

It’s on the mantle of the red brick fireplace, a great topic of conversation for the myriad of guests and patients forever filing in and out, painted blue on glazed white ceramic, curved handles on both sides and a peaked, rounded lid. The scrolling font on the protruding, shining belly of the jar leaves no questions, but it never fails to run a chill up his spine with its sheer force: leeches.

He admits it, to himself and nearly anyone else: he doesn’t like creepy crawlers. He doesn’t like insects, alive or dead...he doesn’t like slime and ooze and dirt. Sometimes he jokes that he should travel to the next town and go to a different doctor, someone who doesn’t keep squelchy blood-suckers in a pretty jar on the carved wood mantle, but he knows (he doesn’t understand why, but he knows) that they’re so common these days, used to treat nearly everything, and so he probably couldn’t escape them if he tried.

And even if he admits it to no one, and doesn’t like the leeches...well, he likes the doctor.

-

When he comes over, he’s always greeted with a smile and a stiff shot of brandy, anaesthetic for his nerves. He doesn't count himself among those with a stomach of steel and a constitution to match, and it doesn't take much to get his stomach churning and inching up his throat, doesn't take much to get him going, and so, brandy.

The alcohol burns at this throat, fierce and sharp, but he asks for another glass, glancing furtively at the leech jar and wincing.

"Are you trying to get my leeches drunk, Mr. Urie?" the doctor laughs, tipping the amber liquid from the crystal tumbler into his glass.

"If that means they’ll fall off of me, doctor, then I absolutely am."

"You could always stop coming here, you know," the doctor says with a wry smile, downing his glass of brandy with one swallow. "But," he amends, wiping his mouth and taking the glass gingerly from his patient, "we wouldn’t want that, would we?"

And maybe, maybe definitely, he agrees to that a little too quickly, shakes his head side to side a little too hard. But, well. He doesn’t want that.

-

"Do you mind my asking, what do you tell people is wrong with you, sir? Oh, deep breaths, remember!"

Inhale, exhale, while the doctor reaches into the jar with his tweezers and grips onto a leech. Inhale, exhale, when it’s wiggly brown body makes an appearance. Inhale, exhale, when it touches the skin of his arm. His fingers are already going numb, the blood trapped above his wrists where they’re bound in front of him, palms together, the edges of the belt buckle frigid and biting into his skin. It’s a step down from the examination table with its steel and cracked leather and...and surrender, but today it’s an issue of time, and very much an issue of trust.

He wouldn’t move, wouldn’t try, even if he had the option.

"A-anything they’ll believe, doctor," he says, swallowing and keeping his eyes trained on the jar, the wall, the fire crackling behind the grate, anywhere but on his arm, and the doctor smiles, reaching down to tap his cheek.

"You’d best hope they do believe you, too." A pause. "Look, please."

"I don’t..."

"Look, please, sir." The doctor’s eyes glint, sharp, commanding, so he looks, watches with morbid fascination like every other time as the little stripe of a leech grows fat and glistening with blood, with his blood. "Very good, sir," the doctor whispers, voice and touch warm, belaying the cold shine in his eyes, and he nods.

"Y-yes," he mumbles, and takes a deep, drowning-man breath when the second leech hits his skin. "Very good."

-

When he moves into town, everyone asks him the whereabouts of his wife, and he just shakes his head no and does his best to dismiss the married life. He says he supposes he'll get married someday, maybe...

His friends say he’s a lone wolf, a bachelor like the good doctor, and pour him another drink, light themselves another cigarette. Gossips whisper something a little more sensational, but really now, the doctor, the most eligible man in town, who could have any woman he'd like? Surely not.

And so no one pays much mind to Mr. Urie’s visits to his house or his slowly revolving chain of illnesses, except, well, Mr. Urie and the doctor. Which is perfect, really, seeing that as far as they’re concerned there’s nothing to see, nothing to know, when the third leech hits home and his head starts to spin, blurring the doctor’s face into a fine hazy silhouette, cobwebs creeping in the corners of his eyes, and the doctor’s hand slides a little higher, a little further past his knee (which, really, has more to do with the spinning than the leeches, if he’s telling the truth) and rustles the fabric of his pants between two fingers, leaning over, tracing the tip of his tweezers up the blue line of the vein of his elbow. And suddenly, suddenly he understands the colour choice on the leech jar.

"Excellent, sir."

"Yes," he says, shifting his back against the velvet of the settee, leather chafing at his wrists, his fingers starting to ache. "It’s...the jar, it’s blue for veins, right?"

The doctor laughs, soft, and leans closer, breath fanning lightly across his cheek. "I suppose that’s one way to look at it, yes," he muses, and then turns his face to press his lips lightly, just so, against Brendon’s.

And if his head was spinning before, then he must be headless, now.

He kisses back.

-

The back room, the room for exams, surgeries, is fascinating, shelves full and glistening with things to stare at and touch, glass jars of chemicals, small animals...but the thing that always draws him to the far wall is the human anatomy, the brain, the eye, floating suspended in yellowed fluid. Simple, fundamental things that make us up, make us who we are, things that we take for granted, that are so complex as to be kept in jars and studied.

There are scalpels and lancets, containers of ether and chloroform, a set of glass cups in a velvet-lined box, a box with swirling, bobbing blades sliding out of thin openings cut in the brass, a thousand intricate things to open, close, touch, fear. Things that stretch and breach the line between fascination and terror, things that linger in his dreams.

The things that scare him – leeches, scalpels, chloroform, needles – are the things that he goes back to over and over again, analyzing his fear and obsession when he studies the glisten of the light on the metal edges, that same fear entwined with his need to let go of his composure, the sickness in his stomach and the lightness in his head that only fuels his desire. Things he never thinks outside these four walls, behind these doors; things he wants to ask about but doesn’t dare, until the doctor finds him staring and in only a few sentences, sparks a fire.

There are always some questions he doesn’t ask, that either of them barely dare to think, but that always linger somewhere below the surface. There is always a different kind of fear, an unexpected visitor, a prying eye through a heavy curtain, but...

What these things are (and what it is, he doesn’t even think, doesn’t spell out in his head for that same fear), hidden behind a safe visit to the doctor, are not questions, but answers.

-

The house is silent, the blood rushing back into his tingling hands a cool wave of relief, the jar a safe distance away on the mantle. The doctor leans down and presses his mouth gently against the forming bruises around the circumference, smiling and warm, fingers caged gently around his elbows, all the sparkle and shine of his edges worn down.

But when the doorbell rings, jolting them into reality, into his one o’clock appointment, they are just a doctor and his patient.

Nothing more, and nothing less.

+ + +

we'll all soon come to an end. [s/a]

2007-12-04T19:37:11Z

TITLE: we'll all soon come to an end.
AUTHOR: inamorate [fght_ffyrdmns].
RATING: light R.
POV: third.
PAIRING: ryan ross/jarrod gorbel.
SUMMARY: two letters apart.
DISCLAIMER: i do not own either of these boys.
A/N: written because, at present time, i am obsessed with the honorary title and wanted some fic. based on 'snow day' by said band, which you can listen to under the cut. title taken from 'bridge and tunnel'. as a side note, this is probably the only fic in the world with jarrod in it. seriously.

The window fogs from my breath,
My face pressed up close, up close against.
Catching the snowfall under a beam of streetlight
And praying for accumulation all through the night.

These confrontations puncture the skin,
Reveal evidence that you’re easily broken,
You’re so easily broken.
Exposed and relentlessly bleeding from the cracks,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.

Please let the snow swallow the streets whole,
Keep the bus from coming,
Let us stay at home
So we can avoid the daily drudgery,
The cruelty fueled from laughter that will echo in our sleep.

Seasons, weakening the hold,
The blades dulled from the frost that hints at snow.
Warming, the engine slowly turns, stuttering;
Awakened from the sounds of the shovels scraping concrete,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.

Adrenaline fuels my fist, grinds my teeth through sleep.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

He has to turn his bedroom lights out to see into the night, erasing the reflection of his bedroom with a careless flick of his hand, and stumbling in the dark to settle into the uncomfortable chair by the window. He presses right up close, so he can see the outline of his face lit up by the orange glow of the street lamp, the clouds reflecting back in the same pastel shade. The snow is flying down with such force through the beam that he imagines it hitting the ground and digging tiny holes, tearing up the concrete and asphalt into a thousand tiny shreds, rocks and sand buried under the snow.

He sits up until he can’t keep his eyes open, because he’s afraid if he goes to sleep, if he isn’t watching the snow fall and bury the road, it will stop falling. It will stop falling, and the bus will come or the little car will be able to plow its way through the drifts, and there will be no snow day. No long day building forts he’s too old to be building, no long day with him, soaked wet through their running shoes and laughing.

The window sill doesn’t make a very comfortable pillow, all coated with flaking paint and dust, but he sleeps, eventually, pressed against the cold, always-shifting glass. The snow keeps falling, even without his watchful eyes to guide it to earth, and the road, the sidewalks, the low bushes and gardens disappear under a down blanket, perfectly white and sparkling when he wakes up. The sun paints it fresh gold, slate shadows curving around the drifts, and today is the best day of his life.

-

Ryan has a blossoming bruise across his neck when they meet up under the tree, but he just shrugs, laughs, pulls up his scarf, mumbles something so low it’s just a rumble, and he doesn’t ask him to repeat it.

He just reaches out to touch the darkening smudge, royal purple and grey, contrasted by the white of his skin, kisses the bruise.

“Everything’s fine,” Ryan whispers, pulling his head away, pulls his sleeves down over his hands.

Jarrod slips his fingers past Ryan’s, past the worn edges of his sleeves, stroking over smooth skin and old scars.

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

-

“I’m moving somewhere that it never snows.”

He flinches, twisting his numb fingers together and digging his heels into the snow.

“Well, what do you mean? I thought you were just moving to the next town, I thought. It snows there, of course it does.” He swallows, crushing a handful between his reddening palms, droplets snaking between his chapped fingers, clinging and shining in the winter sun, drilling wet holes in the snow under him. “The next town, right?”

“We’re moving to Nevada.” He looks over, and Ryan’s voice, it’s so fucking dead right now, and he’s just staring straight out over the snow, feet dangling over the edge of the porch. “Fucking Nevada, Jay.”

“Why the fuck would you move to Nevada? Where the fuck is Nevada?”

“The desert,” Ryan whispers, and a chill crawls up Jarrod’s spine. “I’ll never...I’ll be so far, Jay. So far.”

“You can’t,” he mumbles, watching the water drip off his index finger, drop. drop. drop. He thinks, I need you here, not in the fucking desert.

“I can’t not,” Ryan whispers again, because saying it too loud makes it real, and looks over, teeth sinking hard into his bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”

And he says it’s alright, because that’s what Ryan needs to hear, but it’s not alright, and it won’t be, it won’t ever be, but he says it...and when Ryan smiles like the world maybe isn’t ending, a slow quirk of his lips, and reaches over to twine his cold-blushed fingers between his, well. Maybe a lie isn’t the worst thing in the world.

-

“So, when the winter is over,” Ryan says, peeling his gloves off and throwing them on the vent. “When the winter’s over.”

“You’re going then,” he murmurs, picking clumps of wet snow out of his slicked-down hair, cold drops sliding down his back.

“I’m going then,” Ryan echoes, and slides up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and pressing his mouth against the nape of his neck. “Jesus you’re cold, Jay,” he whispers, kissing warmth around his neck and up into the dark strands of his hair, hands rubbing heat into each others fingers. And when they’re falling into the bed, all hands and eyes and lips and cold fingers, all he can say is ‘please don’t go' and try to take comfort in the familiar planes of Ryan’s skin when what he really means, what he really wants to say, is ‘I love you’.

It isn’t any consolation when Ryan’s eyes go dark, ‘I’m sorry’ planted firmly on his tongue, the taste of defeat bitter between their mouths.

What he really means to say is ‘I love you, too’.

-

New Year’s comes and goes without a hitch; they just get pissed as fuck locked up in Jarrod’s bedroom, his parents out at some tawdry adults-only party, and thank god for that. Their laughter echoes through the house, drowned out by whatever’s coming from the stereo, and later when the only sound left is harsh breathing, the music strains through the particles and swirls around the room, filling the empty spaces between inhale, exhale.

If it weren’t for the red X’s on the calendar counting down ‘til the beginning of March, this would be the best night of his life, lips tasting strongly of beer and cigarettes and fireworks going off again and again in his head, between their bodies, in the night sky.

When he hears his parents come in through the door, keys jangling, hushed intoxicated laughter through the floor, it’s three a.m. and he tightens his arm around Ryan’s waist, pressing deeper into the blankets and counting on blood alcohol levels to keep them across the hallway where they belong. Ryan moves, the satin slide of skin against skin sending chills up his back, and presses a kiss against Jarrod’s jaw.

“They won’t,” he whispers, voice harsh from singing laughing screaming and heavy with sleep. “They won’t know I’m here.”

“And they wouldn’t know if I was gone,” he says to the darkness on the ceiling, and Ryan smoothes a hand across his stomach and props himself up on his elbow.

“You can’t.”

“I could.”

“Where would you stay?”

“With you. We’re almost old enough to be on our own, we could...”

“Jay.”

“We could do it. I can’t fucking lose you.”

“You won’t. Don’t forget, and you’ll have me.”

“That isn’t good enough!” he hisses, voice rising perilously close to too-loud, and Ryan presses a finger to his lips and hushes him.

“Hey, shut the fuck up man,” Ryan hisses back.

“I’m...fuck you, Ryan, that isn’t good enough. I can’t live with letters and e-mails and long distance phone calls after...after this, after being able to...” he stretches his fingers out and catches Ryan’s jaw, pulling him in and kissing him. “Touch and kiss and fuck and feel and...it won’t be good enough, Ryan, you know that.”

He doesn’t expect Ryan to say anything, really, because no matter what, it would be a lie. So when he settles down against his chest without a word, he just stares at the ceiling and matches their breathing together, breathing in the word ‘close’, breathing in ‘here’ and ‘now’ and trying to forget about ‘gone’ and ‘later’.

Sleep comes too fast, like a thief through the window, sliding in on the beam of light painting the floor, and he’s never hated it more.

-

He’s just standing where the driveway meets the road, muddy slush washing around his shoes, watching the car drive away, chasing the U-Haul truck. People are shoveling the last specks of melting accumulation off their driveways and sidewalks, clearing way for the grass shoots and tulip bulbs under weak rays of blurry white sun, as if the world isn’t falling apart. As if he’s not standing here with soaking wet feet and soaking wet eyes, watching Ryan stare back through the wire-striped back window of the car, hand pressed against the glass.

As if, with the way his parents were watching, the way they could barely hug goodbye, the way he couldn’t memorize every last detail of his mouth before he left, that wasn’t enough to send everything spinning into apocalypse.

He stands there until the water soaks through into his skin, chilling his feet all the way down to the marrow, until his tears have crusted cold on his cheeks and the neighbours have stopped staring, have gone inside shaking their heads at him once again. He stands there until the car driving away is just a memory, the tire tracks in the slush melting in the afternoon light, the exhaust fume smell evaporated completely into the atmosphere.

He stands there until his mom comes out and holds his arm, pulling him back inside with offers of cookies and hot chocolate, as if he was twelve years old and he hadn’t just lost everything in one swift fucking moment. She’d never been the one to ask questions or pay attention, and she hadn’t even noticed he’d grown up, grown out, grown apart.

He tells her ‘no, thank you’ and settles for a cigarette and a bottle by the open window of his bedroom, instead.

-

The letter has been folded and re-folded, so it’s creased up, three horizontal and one vertical, dirt smudged around the outside edges. There’s a picture in the bottom of the envelope, printed off the computer, of Ryan standing outside his new school, laughing at something outside the frame. The letter doesn’t say much, really, but the ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ in angular script on the back of the picture, that’s everything.

He can’t stop touching it, as if he could just reach through the veil of the glossy paper into another world, and find Ryan’s face with his fingertips.

He digs through the shoe box under his bed and finds the last picture of the two of them, printed on Kodak paper in black and white, heads together, exaggerated pouts on their faces, drinks in hand. He uncaps the marker and flips it over, ‘DON’T FORGET’, and slips it into an envelope, closing it and stamping it and scrawling Ryan’s new address, somewhere called Summerlin, and he hates having to turn the Y in NY to a V. So close, yet so fucking far.

-

All he hears in his dreams is the abrasive sound of plastic shovels hitting hard against concrete, the soft sound of snow piling into drifts, the sharp echoes of ice cracking under boots, and he wakes up with a sore jaw. It’s winter again, and that means it’s been almost a year. A year of no-one-else and sparse communication, never enough. A year of summer.

A kid at school calls him faggot, and when he laughs in the kids face, he hits him square in the eye. Maybe ‘you wish, asshole’ wasn’t the most appropriate response, but it’s the only one he liked. He’s never been more thankful that this is the last year of the high school circus. He wants out. Out of school, out of the house, out of town.

And thing is, he isn’t a faggot, not in the general sense of the word. There’s just this one boy, and he lives in the desert, two letters and about a million miles away, where it never snows, where there’s a whole year of summer.

-

Three years disappear into the speeding, rushing darkness of time. He gets an apartment by himself, he goes out on Friday night, he works five, sometimes six days a week. He hasn’t forgotten, exactly, but. Sometimes it’s just too much to write a letter, to walk to the post office, to remember the address. And it isn’t like Ryan makes an effort, either. His silence is just as profound, Jarrod’s mailbox just as empty. Ryan, he has a new life there, new friends, new schools, new house. He doesn’t include ‘new boyfriend’ or ‘new girlfriend’ on the list, because that still maybe hurts a little.

Okay, a lot. But. He tries not to think about it. It isn’t like he’s been alone. He hasn’t dated anyone, exactly, but he hasn’t been alone, hasn’t been sleeping alone or drinking alone. That doesn’t stop it from tugging at his chest, though, when he thinks of someone else in Ryan’s bed. Holding his hand. Touching...

It just, doesn’t stop him from thinking about four winters ago on New Years Eve, when a boy he doesn’t know kisses him at midnight, and later when he can’t take him home, can’t fuck him, because all he can see is Ryan’s face rearranged onto everyone else in his silver, drunken haze. When all he can hear is ‘I promise’, and ‘I’m sorry’, instead of ‘I love you’.

Words that meant nothing, so they never said them, never knew they were true, until it was too late.

-

His legs are too long for the car now, and the seat is old and rusty, stuck forward so they’re crunched up under the dash, but at least it’s his now. He sits back and pushes play on the stereo, the CD player sleek and shiny in all the old dirt of the car, and ducks his head to find the ignition, the key in his hand etching lines into the plastic before fitting into the gap, teeth sliding into place.

He lifts his head to check that the road is clear, hands settling into a comfortable position on the wheel, CD whirring to track one, and with the dust filtering down through the weak yellow beams of sunlight, the auburn in his hair picked out by the light, the world hits pause. He’s shaking his head now, trying to clear his eyes, because he must be hallucinating, dreaming, still drunk from the weekend, something, anything. That tall…that man at the end of the driveway, that man in the hat and the blazer with his hands in the pockets of his tiny jeans, that isn’t who he thinks it is, but, he can’t move, pinned by the bright stare, those same fucking eyes.

When he walks to window, Jarrod rolls it down without even really telling his muscles to move, looking out and up at that same face, that same face from every dream he’s had for the past three years, still the same, bending down to peer in the window.

“I remembered,” Ryan whispers, lips curling up at the corners, voice darker under age, but the same, the same, settling at the base of his spine like smoke. He swallows and taps his fingers on the wheel, turning his head to stare out the windshield.

“Get in.”

-

“The tattoos,” Ryan says, reaching across the centre console to run his fingers over the inked lines on Jarrod’s forearm, the back of his hand. “I didn’t know. I like them.”

“Yeah, thanks. My parents want to kill me.”

“Same as always, then,” Ryan says, chuckling and sitting back in his seat, staring out of the windshield at the clouds skirting across the sky, bringing the Styrofoam coffee cup to his lips, narrowly avoiding singeing his hair with the ember of his cigarette.

Jarrod looks over at him, not the clear-eyed boy he remembers, but someone older, someone new. But, all the same, undeniably Ryan.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding his head and pulling his bottom lip into his mouth to keep from smiling. “Same as always.”

inamorate @ 2007-10-24T14:34:00

2007-10-24T18:37:01Z

writer's craft '07 con't.

other.

(more OMC! asdfghj. i love him. =])

Put your coat on, this city trembles. / Keep your chin up, as you untangle God / from cold blood and bruises.

We are X-rays of something broken. / Cursive bloodlines write every forecast: / An orchestration / of dissonance and innocent surrender. / When our color dies, / we will bury the ashes of time, / and we will earn new eyes.

Wrists get tired rewriting futures. / Our bodies beg us to be creatures of habit. / We are creatures of habit.

Only with careful hands / we'll turn their fangs into feathers and cures. / Only with careful hands / we'll divide the prisoner from the pioneer.

Clever beauty, / umbrellas folding. / In architecture, our lines will measure / a map to find us. / Blue ink will guide us home. / Cranes are creeping, lifting metal, / we will find new ways to settle, / tipping scales from the killer to its prey.

I can feel the weight around us, / climbing every rib inside us. / A sanctuary in a lion’s mouth.
Sleeping at Last – Careful Hands

The music bleeds through the steel-and-brick construction of the building in thick, arterial swirls of bass and treble and rhythm. The big guy at the door pulls it open to let in some half naked girl, and the music doubles in volume, and the pink-blue-yellow flashing of lights starburst into the night air, only to be cut off by the heavy thud of the steel door. Everything seems strangely silent after that.

He slips between parked cars and darts across the street, before the next stream of cars comes rushing across the blacktop between traffic lights, and skips onto the curb of the sidewalk. Imposing, dressed in black and sinking into the dirty brick wall, the bouncer suddenly springs forward and yanks the door open, nodding his head curtly.

“Evening, Erin with an E,” he drawls, flashing a wide, toothy grin. “Good to see you again.”
A nod and a slight smile, a mumbled ‘hello’, they’re the currency that gets him through the door, slipping through the crevice and sliding into the chaos of the bar. It’s dark, the air coloured slate with cigarette smoke, and the floor is sticky with spilt beer, gluing rubber-soled shoes to painted concrete floor. Steel beams run back and forth across the ceiling, catching and holding the sounds of billiard balls, dart boards, beer mugs. The bass is ear splitting, chattering and shouting roars overhead, and the noises form a rhythm, a pattern in his head. For all their dissonance, these are the warm, familiar comforts of a Saturday night. Everything resonates and vibrates with routine.

He sits on a cracked-leather upholstered bar stool, third from the end, hooking his heels on the faded rungs and pushing his coat sleeves up to the elbow. The bartender smiles and puts a glass down on the scarred wood of the bar, half full of ice, ready and waiting. He doesn’t even need to ask what Erin wants, just pours amber liquid from a black-labeled bottle, taking the soft thanks and hand gesture offered with a smile, and going back to wiping moisture away with a dirty cloth.

The ice clinks metallic against the thin walls of the glass and the melt water would make patterns in the whiskey, shimmering and dissolving, if he let it sit for long enough. As it is, it’s burning down his throat and into his chest before it rises half a degree, warming his insides and shocking his lungs into action. Breathe in, breathe out.

Pale fingers too long for his hands wrap tightly around the glass, and he remembers why he loves this bar, loves this bar, when Jeff Mangum’s voice comes cracking and static over the speakers, ‘the music and medicine you needed for comforting’, and never were truer words spoken, he thinks. Never.

He can smell her before she’s really there, a wave of perfume, anise, and peppermint, and then her cinnamon hair is falling in a curtain over his shoulder and her breath is sliding silky over his skin. He doesn’t acknowledge her warmth pressed to his hip, just drags hard on his cigarette and downs half the glass in front of him, pushing a hand through the front of his hair.

“Oh, come on,” she coos. “Quit ignoring me, Erin.” She slips her hand into the crook of his elbow, resting her chin on his shoulder and pressing her lips softly to his neck. “I want you to come home with me,” she purrs, and he presses his fingertips harder into the wood of the bar and closes his eyes, letting a few soft notes of laughter play in the air.

“Straight to the point,” he sighs, opening his eyes and turning to her, wet glass still clenched in his right hand. Over the speakers, ‘doors lean towards leaving, you know somebody's looking’, and the toe of his shoe taps idly against the paneled wood of the bar, one-two, one-two. “Jay,” he continues, “Jay, I can’t.” She flips her hair and puts a hand on one hip, bones in stark relief through the fabric of her t-shirt, fingers tapping skin pulled tight, threatening to split.

“No,” she sighs. “No, you can. You just won’t. I don’t understand you sometimes, Erin. When you’re alone you want someone, and when you can have someone, you want to be alone. Always what you don’t have or need, boy, and you can’t have it both ways.”

She’s right, and it stings a little in the back of his eyes, because he knows she’s right, feels it in his bones and the itch on his wrist. Always, always selfish. He turns back to the bar, feet bouncing on the rungs, and she touches the side of his face, gentle and sudden.
“Some other night,” she offers, voice light, disappointment masked by smiles with a question mark hanging unspoken: his life. “Some other night.” A statement this time.

“Some other night,” he agrees, swirling the ice around in his glass, and he feels the lie thick in his throat, he prays it isn’t audible. The speakers crackle, ‘I’ve been waiting for the silence all night long, it’s just a matter of time’, and his cigarette’s burnt down to the filter, a stub in the ashtray.

She’s gone before he can light another one, sashaying across the floor to drape herself over some boy with blond bangs falling in his eyes, black polished nails, and a ring in his lip. See, he thinks, it’s not me she wants. It’s him. It’s anyone. It’s anyone, so it doesn’t need to be me.

The whiskey is making his head float off, has suitably unraveled the threads of tension in his shoulders, and is starting to work on his sense of direction. He heads home, trip-stumbling along the pitted concrete with the echoed melody of some song he didn’t know playing over and over in his head, coat pulled tight with fingers crushing the life out of the cigarette filter. Headlights come from both directions, blinding and disorientating, helping him find his way beside dark red brick, coloured like coagulated blood. Streetlights cast garish shadows in their orange glows, elongating and twisting mailboxes into monsters, fire hydrants to felons. His shadow just looks like a bigger version of himself.

He makes it home, pushes up the dirty stairs, holding onto the purple-brown railing; pushes through his front door, with the paint-smeared doorknobs and the peeling Nirvana sticker; pushes through a pile of clothes on the floor and lands face first on his mattress. He holds his breath. He twists the sheets. He stares at the dirty, unfinished wall inches from his face. He flips, staring across the room, into corners darkened and shadowed, filled with secrets. If these walls could talk, he thinks, I’d rather be deaf.

The clean white surface of a prepped canvas is propped up against the wall across from him, sitting pure and perfect and primed on the mottled easel, waiting for an outpouring of anything tangible and oil-based. It taunts, mocks, ridicules with its bone white, gleaming perfection. He wants to cover it wholly in black paint, and then to break it, smash it, make it ugly, vein it through with reds and browns and glue on shattered glass and twisted metal. He turns on the radio, a mix CD that Jordan left last weekend spinning over the laser, ‘So long live the car-crash hearts. Cry on the couch, all the poets come to life. Fix me in 45.’

Radio bullshit, the kind Jordan secretly adores, but the words hit a chord. He must be tired.
He drags himself out of the bed, limbs sluggish and begging for sleep. He saunters into the bathroom, light bulb skittering when he flicks the switch, flashing into life. He avoids his reflection, not for the first time today, and bends his head to splash cold water on his face as it comes spurting and spluttering out of the tap. He twists the tap off again, tapping the pads of his fingers on the wall to the piano melody drifting through, one-two-three, one-two-three, ‘you would kill for this, just a little bit’, scrubbing his face with a towel.

He catches himself in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and he’s caught between the metal and glass, has to look. His hair hangs damp and dark in his eyes, the colour of finally oiled wood, mahogany or cherry. His eyes stare dimly out at him, cerulean and veined with gold, offset by the purple bags forming under his eyes. He guesses he might have been good looking once, defined cheekbones, strong jaw, but he can’t be sure anymore. He’s gray under the fluorescent bulb, corpse-like, cheeks patchy with stubble and his eyes may as well be blanks, hollow.

He goes back into the ‘great room’, insufficiently named, and picks up a paint brush, spills black and gray and white and blue onto a palette, ruins the perfection of the canvas with the first thick stroke of ebony pigment. A warm sense of satisfaction blossoms inside and out of his chest at having massacred the stark beauty of the pre-paint canvas. To ruin something other than himself, that’s always been beautiful, just as beautiful as ruining himself is, has always been. ‘All that is beautiful will not be beautiful to me, unless it’s perfect.’

Good foresight, Jordan. You plan this mix for me? You’re a beautiful kid. I mean it.

He remembers everything, staring at the canvas, the image blossoming out of nothing. That’s what he loves about art. It comes from nothing.

He remembers everything from then until now, with a few black spaces in between, a few washes and fades for good measure, a few jump cuts, a few erratic scene changes, some grain and skip in the film. But he remembers. The gears click, shutter noise in his head.

He remembers the time his dad punched him in the mouth when he lays down vermillion, he remembers the way the blood ran down his barely pubescent chin, words echoing off the pitted walls. It tasted like copper, it tasted like salt, and it tasted like shame. Faggot, whore, wuss; no son of mine, no son of mine. When he splashes violet into navy, he remembers black eyes, the way they gradient into white skin and merge with copper fingerprints. It was just a kiss, twelve year old naivety and best friends. It was just a kiss.

He remembers the way the bite looked on his shoulder a day after Elliott’s party, a mark like a ring of roses around a grave, sharp red on white and dark bruises scattered on his hips. Something to hide from everyone, things to explain away, to cover with t-shirt sleeves so even Jordan couldn’t see; roses to mark the death of innocence, the beginning of nothing and the end of everything, the beginning of his father being right. Faggot, whore, wuss. Except the difference, he thinks, is that I was your son. I am your son. The lines blur, and he paints rain on the windows and alarm clock numbers, fingers shaking at three a.m.

He falls asleep on top of the blankets, curled on the hard mattress, still in his clothes. The memories play thick behind his mind, colouring dreamscapes and nightmares, and he forgot to shut off the stereo, it plays on into the night, flowing out the open window. ‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.’

When he wakes up, the sun is already burning rays through the dust and the faded curtain, splashes of light across the hardwood floor, stars falling through the beams. His head hurts and blanket creases scar his cheek, hair stuck to his forehead. His fingers itch for addiction and creation, to dream his way out of here. He goes through the motions of making a pot of coffee, keeping his eyes averted from the disaster of a canvas on the easel in the corner. He drinks it black, bitter and strong, a burnt taste lingering somewhere near the bottom of the cup. He sits by the open window and smokes, staring at the clouds boiling on the horizon, even though he really should go outside. Inhale, hold, hold, exhale. Breathe in, breathe out.

Finally, some impulse gets the better of him, some morbid portion of his soul, and he lets his eyes wander along the poster-pasted walls to the painted canvas, last night’s explosion of feeling and failure. The sun slices a perfect third of the painting off, a shining diagonal band through the middle, and he circles warily, afraid to get close, to really see.
Finally, he moves into the path of the sun, casting a thick shadow over the painted canvas, and in the gloom he makes out hard lines and heavy shapes, barely noticeable changes in tone and texture, things he wouldn’t usually do, things he shouldn’t do. Streaks and smudges, globs and bits of primed canvas peering through. Not perfect. Not perfect, not beautiful. Nothing.

He moves closer, turns on the lamp overhead on the wall, and it all comes into glaring, frightening focus. His life, painted in angled lines and rough edges, reds and blacks and blues, bruises and abrasions, long nights awake. And then somewhere, somewhere in the top left hand corner, a white shape, graceful and bent, surrounded by curls and tendrils of white-gold light, spreading wispy into the darkness. A beacon, something he thought was missing, denying, that he thought he might find anywhere but here.

Everything tips and rights itself, and he pushes a hand through his hair, inching a finger through his belt loop. ‘Like blades sharpening, you've become aware of what's real…crashing comes the light into your eyes’. He makes a mental note to thank Jordan next time he sees him, to buy him drinks or something, and to make a copy of that mix before he gives it back, to add ‘Oh Comely’ and ‘Emblems’ and ‘Lazy Eye’ if he can get at the computer for long enough.
He grabs his coat off the bed and slips it around his shoulders, stomping his feet into his shoes, cigarettes and keys stuffed in his pockets.

Why wait?
[ending one]

[ending two.]
The door echoes his mind, creaking out a syllable sounding eerily close to ‘go’, wood and brass hinges with words. It shuts behind him, key grating in the lock, tumblers falling into place, securing what little he happens to own.

When he turns around, CD case in hand, Jordan’s staring up at him from fourteen steps down, wet from the rain he didn’t know had started, dyed black hair stuck to his face, khaki coat turned to chocolate by moisture.

“I was coming to give this back,” he says, bouncing it in his hand. “But I guess you beat me to it.” Jordan just hums in acknowledgement, and Erin bounces down the stairs, keys jingling in his pocket. “Been thinking,” he says, handing the CD over. “By the way, I want a copy of that.” Jordan laughs, slipping it into his coat.

“I heard about what happened with Jay,” Jordan says, voice punctuated by footfalls as they clunk down the stairs. “Thought you liked her, man. What happened?”

“I didn’t,” he says, flat, examining the pattern in the floor tile, hands shoved in his pockets.

“Oh,” Jordan mumbles, lifting his shoulders in a brief shrug. “Been thinking, too.”

“Yeah.” He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, and then another, handing it to Jordan. “Outside?” He pulls open the door without waiting for an answer, stepping outside and pulling his hood up. “Wet,” he sighs, flicking his lighter, holding the dancing flame to the end of the cigarette, igniting it bright orange against the overcast day. “Thinking about what?” he mumbles through an outpouring of smoke, picking up where they left off.

“Oh, you know. Shit. After I heard about what happened with Jay, I was wondering if you were telling people.” Jordan scuffs his shoe against the concrete, dragging too hard and filling his lungs too fast, coughing.

“No, no. Well, one night I told her about my dad, y’know, because she saw that one painting.” He laughs softly, exhaling forcefully, rubbing his face. “But we were like, twelve, so I don’t know. And then I guess she assumed we were...but we’re not, never have been, so I told her about the other guys. Had to.”

“Hm,” Jordan sighs, flicking a strand of black hair out of his eyes. “You didn’t deserve that shit, you know, what he did. It’s not…it’s not wrong.” He stares at the ground, rubbing at his elbow. “I mean, it’s…it’s beautiful, no matter what.” He looks up, catches Erin’s eye, cigarette dangling limply out of his hand, and Erin sees that beacon from his painting, fleeting. “You told me that when we were younger, before, that it’s always beautiful, love, that it didn’t matter.”

And he doesn’t have the energy to argue, to explain how that applies to everyone but him, not with the throbbing behind his eyes, just throws his stub of a smoke on the ground and grinds it out with the toe of his Converse, shrugging his shoulders and pushing his hair off his face.

“Y’know, you,” he starts, fidgeting. “Sometimes I wonder, if it weren’t for my dad, if this would be different.” He coughs. “I fucking hate him for that.”

“Different,” Jordan muses, staring into the wet street, silhouetted by the weak light. “I…yeah, different.”

“I think I painted you last night, this white light in a fucking abyss, you know, and…” all in a rush, blurring, before he even knows he’s saying it, thinking it.

“E,” Jordan sighs. “Erin, what are you…”

“No, fuck, Jord, I did. You’re there; this gorgeous thing in all this wreckage. Always have been. And I guess…”

And oh, it was just a kiss then, and here in the rain, it’s just a kiss, still just lips and shyness colliding. It’s just a kiss, but it makes the pavement tilt out from under his feet, and he thinks he understands the hope in his painting, thinks he finds it here in the street in front of everyone, graceful and sweet. And even though nothing explodes, nothing lights up, lightning doesn’t come streaking out of the sky, it all kind of makes sense. The blood, the sex, the bar, the paintings. It all kind of makes sense.

“It’s been too long,” Jordan says, close, warm, familiar. “Like, eight years too long.” Suddenly fearless, Erin grabs his pianist hand in his own artists hand and twines their fingers into place.

“Too fucking long,” he agrees, and he kisses him again, there in front of everyone. “Fuck my father,” he says. “This is beautiful.”

&&&

(dudes...if you don't get this/how lame it makes me, i will be sad. =P)

The moon bred new Atlantic life tonight. The salt burned you right out of my eyes and secrets we're not proud of were taken with the tide. We were all newborns with blurred vision and no sense of direction. Today I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with the jellyfish. I may never get this chance again. This is why if you want to kiss you should kiss. If you want to cry you should cry, and if you want to live you should live. You don't have to love me. You already did.
At least enough to keep me smiling from South Carolina to Virginia.
It's for lovers (orjustfriends). This is why I do it.
Sunday, 25 June, 2006.

In less than a year, I will be famous.

I will be millions-of-records-sold famous in an era where a hundred thousand units is a good haul, and I will have friends just because I moved those units.

I will be MTV famous, billboard in Times Square famous, endorsed-by-MAC-cosmetics famous. People will wait in line and pay money to watch us, theatrical and on a grand stage, costumes and acrobats, moonlight and Liberace. People will drive for hours to listen to my words booming through amplifiers, to scream those words back even if they don’t understand what they mean, even if they think Aubergine Dreams is a reference to yesterdays’ eyeliner.

I will be loved, and hated by ten times as many; I will be judged and pigeonholed, and I will write songs about it, and the kids that beat me up in high school will sing them back to me and ask for an autograph. I will have a private jet, a first class tour bus, and I will have lost both a best friend and a father, to the pressures of fame and alcoholism, respectively. I will see cigarettes, cancer, and shortness of breath.

I will hear everyone sing my words, my words, about late night hospital visits, lying high school sweethearts, and the perils of the scene. I will be signed to a label by one of the few people I look up to, and he will become both friend and mentor.

I will be a god to some, a devil to others, and yet nothing to more than those combined. I will become the subject of theories and conspiracies, stories and rumours, and who knows what else.

I am nineteen years old, and I will handle this with all the grace, nerves, video games and Victorian literature that I can process and repeat. I will suddenly be a rock star, with three best friends on stage beside me, and a hundred more waiting in the wings, fingers green from counting dollars.

Already, the stage is set, the words are scrawled on notebook paper, and it’s time to meet the press, to become ‘it’, the next big thing you love to hate, or vice versa.

In less than a year, I will be famous, even if you, or I, don’t know it yet.

So come on already, strike up the band.

&&&

(this is completely and totally stolen from matthew gilbert. seriously. only two lines belong to me.

"lay in the grass until you're itchy.
smell the flowers until you sneeze.
daydream until you sleepwalk.
and, fucking read something.
your mind is capable of more grandiose,
vibrant images than any television set.
people speak of imagination
as if it were actually different from reality.
i find that funny.

sleep pretty; dream big; laugh loud; make art; smile a lot."
i have ink for blood, paint for skin, lens for eyes, music for thoughts.
your fucking bullets can't kill me.

chi dara fine al gran dalore?

&&&

started yesterday, never to be completed.
a tape played on repeat until it's shredded to ribbons.
a train of thought running in circles.
this blank box-page-sky is my canvas,
words are the paint.

read, take, interpret, twist;
fit, mold, rewrite, rethink;
denounce, accept.
take your pick.
make a piece of me a piece of you.
i expect nothing in return.
take what you want and leave what you don't.
i wrote this for me, and for you, and for you, and for everyone.
take what you need and leave what you don't.

it doesn't matter what it all means.
all you have is your own reality,
and what is right here, right now,
forever.

love is blood pain glass stone life loss hope healing death beauty.

take it or leave it.

&&&

love is a verb.
we mimic feeling,
turn it into a noun.

&&&

move like you know what to do,
and we’ll pretend we’re still in love,
just for tonight.

&&&

flashing lights and exit signs.
what happens, stays.
we need an end to this
desert heat.
give me a break.

&&&

“we got everybody singing”
songs of hope and
l u l l a b i e s
battery voltage shakes the floor.
and we are the ringleaders tonight.
dance until you blister,
scream until you bleed.

inamorate @ 2007-10-24T14:28:00

2007-10-24T18:35:00Z

writer's craft '07, con't.

final summative evaluation/manuscript.

streetlights, headlights, brake lights.
a sky that fades from washed out orange
to yellow to violet and blue, turning black.
a tangle of trees, silhouetted and like charred bones,
the colour of night coming from all sides.
power lines; straight, solid lines through the
twisted fragments of the tree branches.

the top of the bridge, red words glowing,
strings of white lights coming down on each side,
both ways, like stars in a line.
windows covered with thin white curtains,
a bench with snow on the seat.
a pile of kindling wood,
mixed with bricks and scrap pieces of junk.

i see suburbia and metropolis,
a bridge to another land.
i see progress,
i see death.
i see electricity and nature comingled in tangles.
i see a rainbow that covers the whole sky.

i see everything as i've seen it a thousand times before,
and as if i've never seen it.
my backyard, the city i live in,
the way it moves forward
and the way it stays in the past.
the way it glows,
the lights that guide so many people home.

&&&

love will keep me alive,
even when i’d rather be dead.
i don’t have faith,
but i believe;
broken, shadowed,
in love.
in its abilities to build a person up
and to tear them down in a single motion,
to slice clean through the skin of
a heart or a wrist,
to heal or to hurt,
to bleed, for better or worse.
if i could say anything,
it would be not to give up,
because failing isn’t falling down,
it’s staying down.

thank you.

&&&

even in the fight to end the silence
without using our voices,
we are covered by it,
swallowed by it.
fear is the silence.
belonging is the silence.
doubt is the silence.
we scream with our mouths closed.
we see colours through shut eyes.
shaking hands tell the truth
while i write lies in ink the colour
of my veins.
i am crossed out.

&&&

(this poem was originally formatted to make a shape, but i'm not html-ing it to do the same, it would take forever!)

let’s p o u n d the pavement and count the stars.
i want to remember what it's really like to live
without letting go of the reality of death.
you’re the only one who’s ever been more
than a ghost of reality to me.
i’m a c r a c k e d mirror;
step to your left,
and see only what you want to see.

&&&

( 05. remember the stars. )

(this boy has become my OMC/imaginary boyfriend, minus the girl, because now there's another OMC. there's a lot more backstory to him and everything that hasn't been written yet...the few pieces i have are kind of snapshots that don't necessarily contain an explanation/beginning and ending within themselves. expect more of him later.)

There’s a boy outside the plate glass window of the coffee shop, smoking cigarettes. His hair, the colour of dark-stained wood, auburn and something darker, hangs in his eyes. I think they’re blue, I imagine they’re blue. He smokes, he drinks coffee, he reads and buys records. I see him, when I’m here inside the coffee shop, or the record store, or the art gallery, or the used book store. I see him, never really talking to anyone, just walking and looking and smoking and drinking coffee.

His jeans are always torn at the knees and everywhere else, worn out and stringy, frayed and flapping lightly against his legs. The cuffs of his sweater hang loosely from the inside of his black jacket, tattered and down to his fingertips. He doesn’t seem to mind much. His clothes don’t cover his obtuse angles, his bones. Sometimes when he reaches for something, a book on a shelf, I see skin the colour of cream from underneath his jacket, a sharp hipbone, a narrow waist.

He seems to flit, to flutter from place to place, eyes always roaming, long hands always reaching to touch the smooth spine of a book or the warm porcelain of a mug. I hear him speak once, in a low, smooth voice that makes me think of caramel, honey-hued and rich, or velvet draping over my skin. I think he’s an artist, from the paint around his nails and the way he always smells like cigarettes and oils and varnish, the way he studies everything as if it were the most beautiful of God’s creations; the way he studies the patterns of the sun coming through the window, and the way I catch him studying the angles of my face.

He always, almost always, buys the same records as me, and once we reach into the bin at the same time. Calloused fingertips brush the top of my wrist, feather light. Neither of us says anything, he just smiles, a sideways flash of teeth that illuminates his face, beautiful, and clutches the record in his hand, keeps walking, searching, touching.

I sometimes go looking for him when I’m lonely, when I want some company apart from my cat and black and white re-runs of Lucy on television; when I want some company apart from my books, apart from Salinger and Wilde and Poe. He always smiles at me, nods his head when he sees me come in, stomping the snow from my boots and shaking my cold limbs.

One Tuesday, while he sips coffee and reads Nine Stories, I sit across from him with my chai tea in the warm café that smells like cinnamon rolls and winter. He doesn’t look surprised, just raises his eyebrows and flashes that sideways smile at me over his book before sipping delicate at his coffee.

“I see you a lot,” he says, a simple statement, honey-drenched voice, soft and clear, so low it resonates in my skull. I nod and smile, cradle the warm cup in my hands, nursing it, holding it. He looks at me, and yes, his eyes are blue, cornflower blue veined with gold and spring green, captivating. “I’d like to paint you,” he drawls slowly, staring at me over his book, rubbing the beginnings of stubble on his cheeks. I smile, because he is a painter, just like I thought, but I shake my head.

“No, I don’t...I don’t like pictures of me,” I say, apologetic, maybe. His eyes flash, lips twisting into a grin.

“You’d like the one I’d paint of you,” he shifts in his chair, leans forward, book pressed into the table. “I don’t paint ugly pictures, because I don’t paint ugly subjects.” A heart beat. “There’s no such thing as ugly.”

And then he sits back just as suddenly as he leaned in, without waiting for my response; re-opens his book, and takes another drink of coffee. I turn my cup on its plate, a harsh grating on my ears, fighting a smile, fighting the gravity defying flicker at the corners of my mouth.

“Charming,” I say, and he rubs his fingerless-glove clad hand on the back of his neck and smiles, soft and genuine.

“Glad you think so,” he deadpans. “I try.” He sips his coffee yet again, glancing down at his book, turning pages. Time passes, comfortable silence, fingers drumming on the table, sipping hot drinks and studying each other over the tops of our books. He sets his empty cup down, clanking on the plate, and puts his book into his worn messenger bag, slow and leisurely, with cat-like grace.

“So,” he says, steepling his long, thin fingers and resting his elbows on the table, leaning forward. “Are you going to let me paint you?”

And even though I know I’m going to say yes, I make a show of considering, biting my lip and picking at my cuticles. He smiles, “Well? Come on, I need a smoke.” His smile widens, and he shakes his hair free of his scarf. “Just say yes. You’ll love the picture, and if you don’t…” he shrugs, “I’ll keep it for myself.”

I hesitate a moment longer, before finally letting the smile flicker across my face, nodding.
“Excellent,” he says, tapping his fingers together, like the old guy from the Simpsons. Cute. I stifle a laugh, biting my cheek.

He stands, chair scraping on the floor, gathering his coat and bag. We walk to the door, and when he holds it open for me, I grin, childish. Maybe chivalry isn’t dead.

We walk out, wind chimes tinkling above the door, side by side; down the sidewalk, laughing and talking, hands in our pockets except for when we’re sharing his cigarette.

Later, he paints me in fluid lines and soft colours, standing beside a record bin, eyes flashing a thousand colours, looking out like the world is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

It’s beautiful. I wonder if he knows I was really looking at him.

&&&

( 07. on my own. )

She has a thing for bones. She wants to see them poking out from under her veined skin. She wants to count her ribs. She wants her collar bones to frame her neck, to create perfect angles under her chin. She wants skinny legs and a tiny waist. She wants to be like the girls she sees on TV, the internet. She thinks if she could just be smaller, just be smaller...

She envies him, the way he can eat so much and it just disappears. The way his hipbones poke out over his jeans from under a flat expanse of white skin. The way he can wear a size zero pair of girl’s jeans and still need a belt. They way he can buy his t-shirts from the little boys section of Wal-Mart and still have room to breathe. She envies the way she can count his ribs when he stretches out, and she worships the shelf of his collar bones and the daintiness of his wrists.

She stares hard into the mirror, examining every square inch of her self, from every conceivable angle. She studies the way her body curves, and she hates it, wants to iron it out and make it smooth. She wishes it were easier, that she could just will it away, instead of having to work so hard on so little energy.

And she lies there, tracing her fingers over his bones, up and down his sides and across his neck, across the planes of his skin. He can feel her angles pressing into him, all softness gone from her body, reduced to a skeleton with a translucent paper skin.

She has a thing for bones, and they’re all she has left.

&&&

( 09. happy apple poison. )

(more OMC/imaginary boyfriend goodness! also, his BFF.)

What he wants is pretty basic. It’s what most people want. The normal stuff. A roof over his head, preferably somewhere with hot water, unlike this dump. Clothes, and he doesn’t care if they’re second hand, as long as they’re soft and warm and they fit nice. Food every once in a while, enough to keep him out of the hospital, and enough water to keep him from shriveling up like a desert mummy. If we’re talking real wants, though, he’d throw in a few other things, maybe. CD’s, oil paints, soft-bristled vegan brushes and canvas and turpentine, a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes. A few friends here and there, too, and maybe a book of matches, some paper and a pencil, and a couple bucks in the bottom of the pockets of his hand-me-down, ripped-up-worn-out jeans. He’d like a letter in his rusty black mailbox once in a blue moon, daisies to grow in the empty lot beside his apartment building, and maybe someone to talk to, just occasionally.

He doesn’t think this is really too much to ask, not given the state of things. A bunch of assholes have all the wealth in the world, and they spread it around on whores and Cristal champagne and yacht parties. He thinks he might like to give some, if he had it, mind you, to some people who actually need it. And really, he doesn’t. Need it, money, that is. He survives just fine, scraping and scrounging and stealing sometimes, but he prefers not to think about it, because he’s really okay. Things could be worse.

But it would still be nice to have something to drink.

He’s too young to be living on his own, that’s what his mother says when she calls, her voice softer than he remembers through the wires and receivers. He guesses maybe she’s right, eighteen and just barely out of school, and really, he’s got no idea what he’s doing with his life. Everyone tells him that he can’t just paint and smoke for the rest of his life, he needs to do something. He tells them that he’s too young to be worrying about it, careers and cancer, and he goes back to sketching. He tells them that he’s got tonnes, no, heaps of time left, and that he’ll figure it out as he goes. His mother always said that he got by on the skin of his teeth. His father always said he was going to hang him upside down by his toenails. He curls his feet deeper inside his shoes and shoves his hands in his pockets.

It’s probably going to be a long night.

He has a fake ID. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. He’s clearly too fresh-faced and naïve to be twenty-one, or even nineteen. He thanks God he isn’t American, that he’s only got five months to go until he can cut up the shitty piece of laminated paper and burn it, let it shrivel and die in a candle flame or the flick of a lighter, the dance of a match head. The bouncer knows him, by name now, and he doesn’t even ask to see his ID, and he’s got this feeling in his chest like the guy knows it isn’t his, not really. Maybe he’s got sympathy for him, the poor kid living on his own in a run-down place on the bad side of town, hugging his arms around his waist, cold in the street, eyes dark.

The music is too loud, Keith Murray saying that his body is Erin’s body, and if he wants to use the aforementioned body, go for it. Well, thanks, man. He presses himself flat between two swarms of people, navigating expertly to where he needs to go, a table in the back, the only face he knows sitting in shadow with two sweating glasses making rings on the table.

“Man, you are so late.”

“Man, I so know that,” he mocks, and then cringes. “It’s too loud in here,” sliding into the chair opposite Jordan. “I mean, don’t all these people still have yesterday’s hangover? Like they need loud music.”

And Jordan just laughs and pushes the glass across the table, sticky with condensation, leaving slug-trails of water on the wood.

“For you.”

“I love you,” Erin sighs, gulping back half the glass, ice clicking against his teeth. Jordan laughs.

“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” and grins.

This guy, this guy is really pretty, even in the flickering fluorescent light and the harsh glare of the bathroom. Also, the fact that he’s a little drunk? Big, huge plus. He’s still hoping the guy wouldn’t be horrific, though, if he were stone cold sober.

He’s warm, and kind of clumsy, which is a nice change from like, professional excellence, knowing bodies like a map. It makes him feel a little safer in this kind of situation, like unless the guy knows every button to push, maybe he hasn’t pushed that many, and hopefully none of them were dirty. And so maybe that analogy is a little bit drunken and blurry, but he gets what he means, maybe.

Clumsy, but he has a really nice mouth.

And he hears the sound of the bathroom door thudding against painted brick, and hears Jordan make a startled, strangled noise, and this is…awkward. He stares at Jordan, glances up and down, and steadies himself on the wall of the bathroom stall, fights to keep his eyes open, bites his lip even though it doesn’t really matter, Jordan isn’t blind, and Jordan just closes the door a little harder than maybe he should.

Fuck.

His head is buzzing, and Jordan’s holding him by the arm, and they’re walking along the sidewalk beside a building, somewhere that two eighteen year olds probably shouldn’t walk at night, but they still have that invincibility complex built in, and amplified by alcohol, it echoes in their heads, loud like caverns. Jordan is walking too fast, pulling on him too hard, and it hits him to tell him to slow down, but he can’t form the words, his tongue is too-big and too-heavy with who-knows-what. But what he does know, because they’ve been best friends for going on most of their lives, is that Jordan is angry. He can’t quite figure out why, so he counts the streetlights flying by to his right; one, two, three, twenty-two until they’re in front of his apartment building, and before he knows it Jordan is all the way across the sidewalk, staring at him.

“I just wanted to make sure you made it home.”

So he nods and turns around, pulling the handle on the door, and he doesn’t look back, doesn’t think to say ‘thank you’, and doesn’t notice the way Jordan looks like someone just maybe kicked his puppy or something. He’s not sure what he would have done if he had turned, saw him standing there, anyways.

Probably would have sped things up a little, though.

He wakes up, panicking, the imprint of his father’s fist made all too real and present by the throbbing in his head. When he looks in the mirror, he won’t find bruises that faded months ago, he knows this. Still, he lifts his fingers to his eye, touches feather-light, relaxes when it only makes his headache worse, but his fingers don’t come away bloody and he doesn’t wince from under-skin contusions. Everything’s okay.

Two black coffees, four Advil’s, and three and a half cigarettes later, he’s sitting on the front steps to the building, staring into the street, head on his hand, elbow on his knee. He thinks it’s funny, that people probably think he’s some homeless kid sitting on the stoop, but he doesn’t have the energy to laugh, or to throw dirty glances at the self-righteousness of their pity, the emptiness of it, they way it’s all to make themselves feel better. No one actually cares.

Some pitiful old lady, wrinkled and disheveled, wrapped in a flowered shawl, shuffling along the concrete...she stops, and she presses a quarter into his palm, folds his fingers down, and pats his hand. He tries to smile, but it comes out like more of a grimace. He turns his head and swallows, feeling the cold pressure of the coin and the warm, dry ghost of her hand.
He puts the quarter in his pocket, and he goes back inside.

It would be really nice to have something to drink.

inamorate @ 2007-10-24T14:25:00

2007-10-24T18:28:48Z

writer's craft '07

memoir.

I remember the days you were a hero in my eyes, / but those are just a long lost memory of mine. / I've spent so many years learning how to survive, / now I'm writing just to let you know I'm still alive.

I look at myself through a fun house mirror tonight while I’m heading off to bed; distorted and grotesque, stretched and bloated like a water logged corpse. Eleven, maybe twelve years old, and already I’m twisted, veined through with contempt, distaste and hate. For you, and for me. To you, this is just a night that you put band practice ahead of picking me up on time, a night when you chose yourself over me yet again. For me, this is just another piece of the puzzle that says that I’m unimportant, worthless. Another piece of the puzzle that stabs needles in my back, leaves me scratching and crawling for your attention, for a wave of your hand.

The mirror doesn’t show me, it shows you. It doesn’t show my pale expanse of skin, my freckles, my body that’s too big here, too small here, mouse brown hair that curls in all the wrong ways. It shows me something else, something far worse, something black with soot and gangrene.

No matter how many times I tell myself it isn’t true, a part of you lives in me, even if it’s only chromosomes and DNA. I let it grow. This will be the final time you put me in last place, but it won’t be the last time I feel like a loser. This will be the last time I even run, the last time I even start, and last night was the last time that I will ever look in the mirror and smile.

I sleep, and I don’t dream, there’s just the inside of my eyelids turned black from pulsating red by the lack of light. I get up in the morning a little less of myself, and you’re blaming my mother just like you always do, screaming through telephone wires like that could save your dirty soul.

This is the beginning of the end, the first day of the apocalypse, father and daughter divided for the last time. A thick black line, drawn across my life in permanent ink, a gory slash; twelve years old: a new chapter, and another chamber in the fun house, with shifting floors and spinning walls, things that morph and twist into things they aren’t. Illusions on a grand scale, mirages and vanity that change with the wind and a lift of a finger, something you never gave me.

It’s sick, how you’re atrophied and dead, and yet you spent fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years destroying me, piece by piece; tearing me down without so much as uttering a word in my direction. You became the sun in my universe, or maybe the black hole, holding everything together with your gravity, pulling all my energy into one place. I became the distant planet, cold and isolated, black and blue.

I could count the days that I’ve wasted on you, but that would just take more time, time that I am not willing to waste. When I look into the mirror tonight, I want clear vision. I want the mirror to stop bending and the floor to stop titling. I want gravity and stability.
You are not big enough to take that away from me.

Tonight I will be my own sun, and pick myself up off the tilt-spin-shifting floor and clear my head, shake the demons and steady myself.

Tonight, you’re as good as dead.

&&&

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability...to be alive is to be vulnerable.

We are most alive when we're in love.

She bought me a dress, steel blue velvet that shimmers crimson-violet-pewter in the light, twenty dollars on sale from the mall.

My fourteen year old body isn’t feminine enough or thin enough as I stare in the mirror, and there’s always you behind me with an unreadable face, in your canary yellow sweatshirt and trademark half-assed smirk. You tell me in your guarded way that I am beautiful, nice, from a guy’s perspective, and I roll my eyes in mock teenage indifference.

I never believe anything you say about me, not because I don’t trust you, but because I have no reason to believe you. You always skip around the truth, play hopscotch with it, jumping expertly over the squares and never missing a beat. You don’t lie, but you stick to the safe, healed edges of the wound that is truth. You’re obviously blind or stupid, as much as I love you. Yeah, you’re obviously blind, when you smile at me like that and try not to stare at the ghosts of what I will be.

It’s sick, diseased, the way I am, and you are salve on burning skin. It’s too bad we don’t speak up at times like these, it’s too bad, really, that our words haven’t caught up to our feelings. It’s unfortunate that our fourteen year old vocabularies don’t yet contain the lexicon of words to express the feelings that we don’t yet begin to fathom.

You could have stitched the wound shut with your smile; you could have disinfected me with something less tangible than peroxide, but something just as potent. Something that stings less and burns more, something that hurts even as the anesthetic flows from our lips, something that cleanses the tissues that bandages and platonic kisses on the cheek in the kitchen can’t reach.

So I wear this dress in the living room, sock feet sliding on the hardwood floor, regarding myself in the gilt-framed mirror with critical hazel eyes, and you sit on the dining room chair in your black jeans and that damned canary sweater, black hair standing up like porcupine quills, brown eyes half staring, half ashamed.

We were never the thing we were supposed to be, not then or now, in the blue dress and the yellow sweater with our festering wounds and cherry blossom scars. You look at me like there’s something you can see that I can’t, some mirage that follows me around, a one way mirror of façade that I wish I could see. I want to see out of your eyes for one day, to see what you see when you look at me.

I change out of the silver-blue-bloody sunset of a dress, back into whatever dark and dirty jeans I wore today, whatever thrift store t-shirt and whatever hard metallic jewelry. And then we’re back to us, sitting on the couch or my best friends’ bed, two kids with no idea that what has just happened to them will change them forever. Two kids who don’t understand the way they’ll hurt when their vocabulary catches up to their brains, two kids who haven’t quite grasped the way they’ve been molding and twisting each other, dressed in liquid mercury and sunshine.

At least, this is how I see it from where I stand, with that dress in a ball of molten metal on my bedroom floor and a thousand words scribbled in notebooks. I don’t know the mystery of what flowed between us on nights like this, because I was, I am, too young to know the difference. I don’t know if you remember the way the velvet shimmered in the light or the way I tried to hide my eyes when you smiled at me. I don’t know if you remember a word we spoke.

But I will never forget, every time I slip into that dress, the way it felt to be alive.

&&&

Oh, come on. If you can't laugh at the walking dead, who can you laugh at?

March 2005. East London, England. 10 PM.

We walk along the cobblestone-paved paths, in dark, narrow alleys between taverns, hands in our pockets. The buildings are so close together that looking up affords you only a sliver-sized glimpse of the stars. We come to our first destination, a square surrounded by flower boxes and tall buildings. It doesn’t seem too foreboding, maybe just dark and damp and a bit chilly. But right here, right where I’m standing, someone was murdered. Right on the very stones under my feet, in a matter of seconds her life was snuffed out by an enigma, a mystery.

The tour guide speaks up, tells us that this is where Jack the Ripper’s first victim was found, by a police officer making his rounds. She was killed silently in a matter of minutes. Someone to our right laughs as they watch us, tourists!, they’re probably thinking. We stand fascinated, staring at the space on the ground he points to. Someone’s blood once covered those stones! A corpse of someone’s daughter, sister, or mother was laid there with her guts ripped out!

Humans are morbid creatures, indeed.

Our tour continues through a stone tunnel, orange-lit with lamps, to the next location. It goes this way and that, winding through streets that none of us had ever seen or were likely to ever see again, passing by tiny pubs spilling over with people. The people in their apartments look down at us curiously, a noisy group of tourist kids walking in the dark.

When we get to the last location, an alley between two Victorian apartment buildings, everyone gets deathly quiet while the tour guide starts explaining the manner of the last girls’ death. We stand so still we almost blend into the rust coloured stones, stock still and attentive while he tells us the gory details. Her intestines ripped out, strung along the walls, hanging from the ceiling. Blood covering her apartment, her body torn open, several organs missing. Everything is silent while we stare up at the four-paned window encased in dark red brick, while we form the grisly picture in our minds, considering the gravity of what happened to this girl, and how gross and totally awesome it is.

And to my right, my best friend bursts into peals of raucous laughter.

&&&

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.
We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

We stand restless, grouped together like a pack of hungry wolves. We wait. The room is already hot, humid, and the show hasn’t even started. Electricity crackles and flares down my spine, pooling in my lower back as a chill – goose bumps, even in the tight press of bodies. Anticipation is palpable, tension thick enough to taste.

When the lights dim, we roar, a sound loud enough to wake the dead. Everything starts with the sudden emergence of bodies from the shadows. We rush towards the stage, a tidal wave, shuffling and shoving. Everything disappears, and all we are is energy, bouncing and rippling over the concrete floor. There’s just heat and sound and light.

See all these people on the ground, wasting time. Try to hold it all inside, just for tonight.

And then there’s a moment where I stop being me. There’s a moment where I become a part of something bigger. There’s that split second when his voice stops floating over the ocean of people, a moment where we aren’t just kids anymore, where we’re part of something bigger.

On top of the world, sitting here wishing.

There’s a moment when the heat of a thousand bodies evaporates on the breeze of voices. There’s a moment when it doesn’t matter that I can’t see the band, that I’m caught behind a gaggle of six-foot giants. There’s a moment where it doesn’t matter that I’m stepping in spilled Coke and that my feet are throbbing, that my hair is plastered to my forehead, that I can barely breathe, that my clothes are soaked with sweat that probably isn’t mine. There’s a moment where it all disappears.

The things I’ve become, but something is missing. Maybe I...what do I know?

There’s a moment where all that matters is the chorus of voices, high above the concrete echo of the building, over the static of the speakers, filling every square inch with something tangible, something more than just words. There’s the blue-white glow of cell phones, a thousand little squares that must look like stars from where they stand. There’s a moment where every kid in that room, every freak, geek and jock, is family. Fucking family.

And now it seems that I have found nothing at all, wanna hear your voice out loud.

And for three and a half minutes, no one in that cavernous, concrete building is alone. There’s not a single soul who doesn’t leave with a piece of that moment lodged in their soul. I hope there isn’t a kid in the place who doesn’t leave feeling like they were a part of something massive and magical.

Slow it down, slow it down. Without it all, I’m choking on nothing.

For three and a half minutes, everyone belongs. No matter where you’re from, what you’d been through, or where you’d go at the end of the night, you were home. You and every other kid in that room were brothers, sisters, and friends.

It’s clear in my head, I’m screaming for something. Knowing nothing is better than knowing it all.

For three and a half minutes, everything was blindingly clear. Everything was laid out, love and friendship and belonging and music and hope.

On my own.

For three and a half minutes, no one was alone. And this is the church of sound, where you are the least and most important person in the room, and we bow to the beat of the drum. When your voice rises up with everyone else, screaming the words you know like the back of your hand, there is nothing else. A community of love, even as a kid stumbles between the barrier and the stage with a broken nose. We are the choir.

&&&

Jesus Christ, I’m not scared to die, / but I’m a little bit scared of what comes after. Do I get the gold chariot, / do I float through the ceiling? Or do I divide and pull apart? / ‘Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark.

I sit here, still and silent, staring at the statue of Jesus hanging from the cross, blank-eyed and bloody, shiny with glaze; staring, eyes roaming, at the paintings of people, naked and dying. At the bloody red heart wrapped in golden thorns. I should be paying attention to the priest at the front, standing behind the pulpit and speaking so highly of my Meme. Focus, focus, please.

But I can’t, I’m here, I’m lost. I am absorbed by the artificial shine coming off the Christ, and the patterned light coming in through the leaded stained glass windows, bejeweling the floor. I feel pinned to the hard, dark, polished wood of the pew, pinned by the downward gaze of the statue. The smell of incense and prayers swirls around, dust particles through the coloured beams of light, and the air presses close.

Flash, and I’m five years old, lying in bed. The air is thick and dusty, and there are people, thousands, pressed close in the dusty streets. The sun is scorching. There’s a man, strung up, blood dripping into his downcast eyes. He’s hanging on a cross by his wrists and his ankles, cut and punctured like a pincushion. I’m not a Christian girl, I don’t go to Catholic school, and I’ve never read the Bible. I don’t know about the crucifixion, about Jesus and his Apostles or God his father. But I know that this, this dream I am having, should frighten me, send me running to my mother screaming about the bloody man, oh mommy, the bloody man. Why then, am I not afraid, staring into His eyes from my five year old body? I’m just lying there, standing barefoot in the dust, three steps away from the Saviour. The air thickens.

Flash, and I’m back in the church, listening to the drone of the priest and staring blankly at the ceiling, lost. It occurs to me that maybe, remembering this, sitting under the sad eyes of Jesus, I should be having a revelation, something that leads me to God and turns me into an ecclesiast, a devotee.

No. I sit here, staring at the fiberglass Jesus, his thorn encrusted heart and the frescoes on the church walls, and I feel nothing.

I leave the same as I entered - not an atheist, and not a believer, but some agnostic in-between who hangs herself on threads of paganism – and with the same old sins tucked up into my coat sleeves.

I leave the same as I entered. I don’t feel purer, cleansed, like I want to turn to God and blindly believe. Instead, I leave with painted porcelain eyes burning into the back of my skull, and a heavy weight somewhere behind my sternum.

I feel guilty, disgusted, because it hasn’t hit me yet, the devotion that so many people carry. I’m left out here alone, looking for something tangible to take its place, something that words and music and late nights have not yet afforded me.

I leave the same as I entered, only maybe a little more lost, with the face of Jesus burned into my retinas like that optical illusion, and with a little bigger gap between me and faith.

I know you're coming in the night like a thief, / but I’ve had some time, O Lord, to hone my lying technique. / I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / but I’m scared I’ll get scared / and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up. / So do you think that we could work out a sign / so I’ll know it's you and that it's over so I won't even try? / I know you're coming for the people like me / but we all got wood and nails / and we turn, turn out hate in factories.

&&&

“She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known,
like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star.”

“The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds.
We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope.”

She belongs in a twisted, static world of chemicals and slow death. She is like a television, flashing and blinking, but not listening, never listening. She hides behind the wall of substances and scars, trying to escape from the pain and the hate and the loss. Tries anything and everything to numb herself and silence her demons, to quiet the voices wailing in her head. She calls me late at night from payphones and her bedroom, broken and crying, when even the drugs can’t numb her. We don’t talk much, because after a while I run out of ways to tell her she can live, and she runs out of ways to tell me she wants to die.

If I could have, I would have erased all her memories, of the boy, the suicides, her father, the drugs and the bleeding, the things I don’t understand. If I could have I would have, but I know I would’ve lost her in the process, lost who this experience has made her, a beautiful girl with a broken spirit.

One night I walk to meet her in the snow, late, because she called from Seven Eleven and said she wanted to talk. We sit in my living room, saying nothing much at all and watching music videos on television. She’s high, coked out, fucked up, and I can’t even tell – I’ve never seen her any other way. I don’t realize until later that every day at school she’s using, she’s high on chemicals, too many lines of blow a day; heroin other days, deadly and numbing in her veins. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her that I’ve never done drugs. Months later, I tell her that she is why I never will.

In the spring, she tears her arm apart with a razorblade and wears gauze to school like an accessory, unconcealed by her sleeves. I don’t know if she even thinks to hide it, if she even cares if someone sees. She draws stars on her eyes where tears should be. She belongs to the darkness.

Fast forward. A few months ago, she wrote in her online journal that she had been clean for two weeks. She hadn’t told me she was quitting, and I never dreamed that it was any more than an idea she entertained when she didn’t think she could go on, an idle fantasy she liked to play in her head when she hit rock bottom again. I prayed, but I never dreamed. But slowly and surely and all of a sudden, she began to emerge, to unravel. A slow transformation that is still taking place, months later, a breaking down of walls and an unfurling of her insides that will take time, and love, and hope.

It has been a long time, months, since she’s gone off into her chemical reality, since she’s painted another red slash on the canvas of her skin. I think, I hope at least, that this is the truth. I like to think that maybe I helped her, on the phone and in words, with television and awkward silence. Sometimes she thanks me, for not giving up on her, for not walking out when everyone else was running away.

And for now, she falls into the arms of her girlfriend, who knows what it’s like to belong to the darkness and the pain, and talks to me when she needs to. She has finally found someone who knows where she’s been better than I ever could without walking straight down the path she has taken, dangerously close to destroying myself. Still, my door and ears are always open.

Today, she no longer belongs to the pain and the drugs. She belongs to hope and love and truth, and a better tomorrow.

Today, she belongs to herself.

&&&

So let's drink to forgiveness, / let's drink for regret, let's drink to the ones we've loved and lost, / let us never forget.

Jesse stumbles in around one AM, soaked from the rain and the tears streaming down his face. There’s mud smeared up the legs of his skin tight blue jeans, on his skeletal hands. His hair is plastered to his forehead in the vibrant shade of blue – teal, aquamarine, sky, electric - that he prefers, dripping and wet. He chokes on his words, he pleads,

“Where’s Kayla? I need...”

And I don’t even hear the rest of his sentence before I’m out of my chair, leaping across the few feet to the stairs where Kearyn meets me with wide eyes, already worried. He’s hysterical, drunk, barely able to tell me the problem through his sobs and cold, shaking hands. We head unsteadily down the wood stairs, arms on shoulders and wet feet slipping, and he falls into a blue satin upholstered dining chair, unable to make it to the couch beyond.

“I don’t need you to take care of me,” he whispers while I’m sending off armies, troops to gather dry clothes and put his wet, muddy ones in the dryer, his soaked shoes over a vent. I don’t listen to him. He may not need me, but I am here, and I am cleaning up the mess and not going anywhere. He tells me in garbled words, drunken syllables, about vomit and harsh words, crying and fear. He ran home in icy rain, slipping on the wet grass, only stopping to puke, afraid of someone. I only half understand his strings of vowels and emotion, and when he’s calm, dry, loved enough I send him to bed, Jen’s bed, telling him not to sleep on his back, just in case. He tells me he’s sure he threw it all up on the way home. Unfortunate, but reassuring.

And then just before he heads upstairs, clean and dry, he turns on his heel and tells me something else in a low voice, thick with something, maybe vodka or unshed tears. I don’t know.

“He pushed me against the wall, and said ‘We don’t need your faggot ass at this party.’”

And something snaps inside me, breaks in half and lets out a torrent of black, red and rage. He trudges off to bed while I hide shaking hands, pale and drawn, and I walk into the kitchen, trying to swallow the bitter taste in my mouth.

“What’s up?” Aaron says, always concerned, because he knows how I am, the way I take care of people and the way I kill myself when I can’t fix, heal, stitch, love. He sat and watched me, changing Jesse’s clothes, talking in soft words and melody. I’m sure him and Jeff can read the anger in my eyes, the way my fists are clenched and the way my whole body is screaming, pouring out black and red.

“They called him a fag and pushed him into the wall!” I spit, not at him, but at anyone, everyone, the walls, the floor. I am seething, boiling, almost unable to function with a head full of venom. I almost expect him and Jeff to laugh, to crack a joke, well, he is one, isn’t he?

Because, well, they’re boys, they’re straight, and I know they’re uncomfortable, sometimes, with James and Jesse, the way things are. So I wait, I pace, for some joke to slip out, some other piece of glass to lodge in my brain.

But his face just blanks, and then rearranges into a flash of anger while I pace on the ceramic tiles, doorway to sink, almost twitching with anger.

And suddenly, they’re there with me, back and forth and trying to calm me, trying to cool me down. It’s unanimous, words and actions, that if it weren’t for the rain, the three of us would walk over and teach the kid a lesson, pound his drunken face in, anything to make him listen. But really, really, we know it’s just talk, angry words without meaning. We know it’d be no use.

You can’t fight violence with violence, ignorance with ignorance.

And eventually, Jesse saunters back out of the bedroom, tired but considerably more sober and considerably more sane, considerably more steady. I’ve heard someone else’s drunken variation of the story, someone else soaked in rain and vodka, which is maybe better, maybe just drunk talk, maybe not as bad as I thought. I’m not sure who I believe, and I don’t care who’s right, I am still clenched fists and white knuckles behind a smile. I am still angry at everything, at the injustice the world possesses and the way nothing is right, everything is wrong, and there is nothing I can do about it.

And yet I’m glad, joyous, that I was there when he came home. That I was sitting on the couch with my legs crossed, wishing for sleep, watching the rain run down the window. That even though it was his own fault, drinking too much too young, I was there to clean him up and love him. Maybe, maybe that’s unhealthy, pouring so much of myself into everyone and leaving none for myself.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t wish for anything less. I am who I am, and I do what I do, and the only thing I really understand is how to love. I am the girl held together by glue and stitches, music and friendship, and he is part of my seams, no exception. He is a piece of me, and when someone hurts him, calls him names they don’t understand, a piece of me breaks off and embeds myself in him, to heal.

He could come home drunk every night that I’m there, soaking wet and muddy, and I wouldn’t love him any less.

Maybe, maybe I’d love him more.

&&&

old.

2007-10-23T21:45:06Z

pre-inamorate giant fic page of doom!

links to fic on therecordskipsx, from oldest to newest.

sometimes, a circle is just what you need.
ryan/brendon. PG13. 1/1.

no matter how far we go.
ryan/brendon. PG13. 1/1.

truth or dare 01, 02.
ryan/brendon; spencer/jon. R/NC17. 2/2.

brightly wound.
ryan/brendon. PG. 1/1.

secret love and the fastest way to loneliness.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
ryan/brendon. R. 13/13.

we are.
ryan/brendon. PG. 1/1.

fascinate 01, 02.
ryan/brendon; others? R/NC17. to be continued.
warnings: blood.

atlantic. two endings: 01, 02.
unnamed. R. 1/1.
warnings: character death.

shoot down the stars.
ryan/brendon. PG. 1/1.

spiders.
unnamed. PG. 1/1.

let's call this the quiet city.
ryan/brendon. PG13. 1/1.

casino clouds.
ryan/brendon. PG13. 1/1.

the stage is set.
01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11.
girl!ryan/brendon; brendon/OMC; brief ryan/OMC. R. 11/11.
warnings: het, transgendered character.

the fourth, the fifth.
unnamed. PG. drabble. 1/1.

let the music fade.
hayley williams/ryan kirkland (paramore/between the trees). PG. 1/1.

land me down softly.
ryan/brendon. PG. 1/1.

autumn drabble.
unnamed. PG. 1/1.

untitled WIP.
ryan/brendon. R. to be continued.

spelunking?.
gen. PG/PG13. 1/1.