sorry i asked?

youareanobject:(sanmarin0:Tom on his Macbook in my Room (reprise) by Rory Stewart on Flickr.)

You are doing this new thing, where you go to sleep sober. Like, every day. According to google, four-year-olds do it all the time, and, while you are much bigger than them, and much more accustomed to putting substances into your body—very often legal ones, with a rich history of also getting your ancestors fucked up, and their ancestors, before them—you think you can do it. You spent the entire morning at work thinking about this—relishing the idea, exhilarated by the notion of not putting aside a couple dollars for malt liquor, or cheap wine maybe—pumped up by this beer-gut-less,  able-to-take-a-deep-breath-without-coughing future version of yourself the way suicides get super-geeked when they finally decide they’re just gonna go ahead and off themselves, the weight of their unchosen life suddenly shrugged from their shoulders, peace finally answering their calls. You got your addictive personality from your dad, you’re pretty sure (you got your attraction to abusive power-dynamics wherein you’re the victim, susceptibility to depression, and willingness to destroy yourself for attention from your mother, (based purely on observation)), and it makes it so you can’t like anyone just a little bit—you like them so much that to compromise the feeling often makes it feel like dying, and so you are so often alone, because you know you can’t really handle not being so, can’t handle wanting someone around, and so save people the trouble. Luckily you hate most people, or being alive would be an endurance test not even boozing could drench into a manageable consistency. But you quit cigarettes a few months ago, and your weed connect got pinched a few months before that, and you haven’t taken a party drug in about a year, and so the thing tethering you to your inability to cope with exactly what it means to be exactly who you are is the drink, and tonight is the first night—in about a year—when you will not touch the stuff. God help you, man.

The problem is, you just thought of this recently (like, yesterday), and so you technically still have booze in the house—a half bottle of Pinot Noir you bought during a fancy moment, at the liquor store—a bottle of wine you’ve got sequestered away in your closet, knowing it’s there not really an issue compared to knowing you might accidentally look at it.

So, all this means is you’ve done the easy part—you’ve developed a philosophy in which this is a good idea (because that’s how these things change, right? any things? i mean, people are always changing their ways when something scary happens, but when they’re done being scared, they go right back to being a subpar piece of shit, and that’s not what you want)—so, yeah, you’ve done the easy part, but now you’re stuck inside the hard part—your bedroom. Lying here. The thing that made it okay to be stuck here, gone; your life the same, save now you actually know what it feels like, a feeling different than the one that initially drove you into a 40 oz. hole—that feeling was enormous, and consumed you; that feeling gnashed into you and dragged you around, lived inside of every eye that cast you in its sights, and every voice that muttered your name—it emitted vapors, and these vapors became the clouds in the sky—it had skin, and this skin grew hard, turned into the walls you would come to know as your bedroom, the only place that would have you, much different than the skin it started out with, the softer, more inviting kind…the feeling you’re left with now, though, is a pipsqueak compared to the one that birthed it. It mostly leaves you feeling fuzzy, like you’re nerves are quietly vibrating. You stare at the ceiling, lying on your back, and this feeling asks you what now? You don’t know if it wants an existential answer or a practical one, but you roll over and look for something close enough that it might entertain you, without you having to reach very far. There is nothing. Your TV remote sits next to your ipod/phone sits next to your macbook, all on your desk, all over there, beyond your reach. You kick off your sneakers. Today was your mother’s birthday, and you’re fresh from some sort of dinner thing, at a restaurant your mom remembered liking, back when she actively liked things, and, so, figured, sure, why not? Why not go there, today, her birthday. A dinner where the food was good, and your mother seemed mostly at ease, where your dad pretended he didn’t think your younger sister was a filter-less bitch who only said things that had passed a rigorous is-this-rude? test (if the answer was yes, she said it), pretended he was okay with just having wine with dinner, pretended his rants about underachieving weren’t about you. You and your mom talked about politics and how, no matter how hard you try, you will never find a good thing that isn’t attached to something that really sucks. Now you’re lying here, trying to take your socks off without touching them with your hands, just because you’re too lazy to sit up. Your room smells good, for once. You bought one of those little plastic jars or whatever, that have little gel balls in them, gel balls that make your room smell like a place worth being. Outside, it’s raining, windier than it should be, colder than it ought to be. Your windows rattle in their panes, and you can feel yourself getting hungry again, already—you can hear the living room television from here. Something with an audience that claps more than it laughs. You don’t feel like getting up, but you sigh, feel idleness inviting melancholy, and melancholy asking if the sense of perpetual loss can come too, and you do a sit up, curling your body forward, until your body forms an upper-case L on your bed. Slumped, but up. You don’t know how you’re going to sleep tonight. You’ve mostly let intoxication drag you into a post-jerking-off slumber these last several months/years, and you’re pretty sure it’s not going to be the same. But TV makes you feel empty inside, and like you’ll never amount to anything, and all the games on your phone are shit, and so that leaves the internet. You try to feel around inside yourself for a yawn, test the waters, but there isn’t one, so you just sigh again, drag your ass off the bed and pad on over to your destiny, designed in the US, manufactured in China.

The night rolls on like a lazy boulder, you giving yourself permission to be as unproductive as possible, not wanting to put any pressure on yourself, to think about any issues more complex than “Should I download another episode of Teen Wolf?” and “Can a person get fat from drinking too much water??” Not once do you yawn. Not once does sleep feel like something you’ve earned, might luckily stumble into, the way things just happen for some people. Eventually the wind dies down, and the TV in the living room reduces to a dull murmur, as you hear footsteps pad down the hall, to the master bedroom—your mother, going to bed; your father, staying up. You look at your closet door. You don’t even want a drink, you just don’t get what else you’re supposed to do. There’s a whole world, but it’s like none of the rules apply to you. Not the good ones, and not the bad ones. You’re like a stowaway in the universe, which used to feel like a good thing, but doesn’t anymore. You look away from the closet. The computer shines in your face, but you don’t know what else to do with it. You consider lying down, maybe tricking your body into needing nothing else but sleep. And, finally, you yawn. Jah bless—amen. *raises the roof* But in the sightless squeeze of your yawning features your mind reels back to a phone call you made a few weeks ago, to someone you hadn’t spoken to in almost that many years, someone who used to be the factory where all of your joy was made, whose eyes were the only mirror you felt comfortable looking into, who has the only birthday you ever remember, or care about, despite never getting to be there when they happen. Jamie picked up on the seventh ring, the day you finally gathered up the nerve to call (years worth of nerve, piled upon years worth of desperate outbursts you can never take back; an eagerness to get to know others, and to be known, you might never get back)—your heart racing at the possibility of its ringing endlessly, at the idea of having to call back, or, worse, having to wait, to be called back, having to trust that you’re looked back on half as fondly as he is. “You didn’t hang up! I couldn’t find my phone! I’m in Hawaii!” “That’s…that’s fuckin awesome, man.” His birthday is a few weeks before your mom’s, is the thing. She was born forty years before him. “How are you?” He asked you this. You felt so happy for him. There was happiness and he was letting you know what it felt like, just by talking to you. “I’m…I’m okay.” You said it like he asked you if you learned anything today. “Did you see the meteor shower?” You’re obsessed with astrophysics. “I did.” Or, at least, you used to be. With the idea that everything everywhere is made of the same parts, and anything anywhere likely will be, too. When you were friends, actively, it was one of the things you were afraid to bring up, because how much you were into it…you just felt like no one should ever really be that into anything, and revealing otherwise meant revealing what was worth rejecting about you, but, if anything, it gave you something you could teach him, to balance out all the things he was teaching you. There was always this assumption that you were the smart one; it’s like he was happy to give you a chance to feel that way. You used to get drunk and watch the Aquariids and Leonids meteor showers from the water tower on Parker Boulevard. They were your favorite earthly-celestial observance…it’s the closest you’d ever felt to whatever the hell goes on out there, up there. But you’ve sort of let them go. You only watch them sometimes, these days, from your bedroom window, if you feel like getting up, or Mad Men isn’t on or something. Mostly, now they just remind you of shitty things you’ve said, or done. “There’s so much wild shit this year.” Jamie said this. He said,  ”Like, eclipses and stuff. That thing with Venus! The sky’s doing it big this year. You’re probably lovin it.” And you sort of do, now—did, then, retroactively, like you suddenly got permission to be into this thing that was yours, then the both of yours, but that somehow left you, when he did. Then came the empty bottles. You can stop if you want. You could hear him saying this to you, just by doing this. His saying anything to you was really just him saying this. It would just take you a few weeks, that’s all. ”I am,” you said, staring at the beer you used for the courage to click on his phone number. “Loving it, I mean.” He laughed. 

youareanobject:

“You’re saying I can’t do it?”

“I’m saying you sh…I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m saying there’s gotta be a better way to do it.”

You shrugged. “I’ve only had practice this one way.”

You smiled; not with complete confidence, but you did it. Your brother shrugged. “I don’t know. What do you want me to do?”

“Just drive. You don’t have to get out the car. You don’t even have to drive fast, although you might want to.” You were in your brother’s bedroom. Your grandmother has been staying with you, since your father passed, since your other father is in the hospital. Jamie is your brother’s name. You are twins, but not identical, and not just personality-wise. He is slight where you are sturdy, thoughtful where you are impulsive. Jamie got up from his bed, walked over to his window, looked down to the street. You live in a house, only in the part of town where the houses are close together, with boulevard traffic constantly running down your street, because, well, you live on the four-lane boulevard, not one of the quieter, suburban streets, which are right around the corner. This was nighttime—you could see the orange-tinted glow of the street lamps creeping their way in here, nosing into your conversation. “What if we get caught?”

“You wanna wait till Elliot gets here? He’s better at selling this shit. I just…they were your dads, too, man. Are…well, one of them are, one of them was.”

“I’m not…I haven’t said no to this. But…in real life, people don’t often actually wake up from comas. A month is a really long time for someone to be out. Even if we could afford that surgery…”

“So Dad is dead to you.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t do that manipulative, twisted words bullshit, you always do that. You did that with Shelly.”

“Aw, Jesus. With this again.”

“It’s an actual thing. Somebody says something, you rephrase it using the most dramatic possible interpretation. Dude, I don’t hate you for it, but this is…you could get seriously hurt, or killed, or fucked in prison for this shit, so, like, it’s dramatic enough without you trying to get your way all over it.”

It was getting harder to smile, even fake-wise. Talking to other people about your ideas had that effect, especially the Big Ideas, which this was, in all the ways Jamie was trying to impress upon you. But you knew people were simply like that; they had a way of making what they thought seem like what was right, to make what you were afraid of something valid, and to make your backup plan seem like the only plan worth having. With your brother it was easy to respect what he said while trusting yourself, but this was your first time really talking to him about this, talking to anyone but Elliot about it, and you found yourself wishing Elliot would hurry his ass up, so you didn’t have to do this alone. The panic of having wasted the last month on a plan that might not happen started to creep into you; the panic of having to accept that your life was fucked up by outside forces, and there was nothing you could do about it, or, worse, nothing you would, the fear of that being the future you lived in; the panic of not getting away with it, even if you tried; of, as your brother so diplomatically put it, ‘getting fucked in prison’. You put your face in your hands, scratched your fingertip across your scalp. You were sitting at your brother’s work desk; Jamie draws, for school, and for fun, is trying to design t-shirts with his friend, Perry; he’s got a work desk and a computer desk/definitely-don’t-just-wank-sitting-here desk. Your room is just a lot of used text books (used before you bought them), dirty gym clothes, and miscellaneous things you swear are ‘exactly where you need them to be’. Your brother walked back over to his bed, sat down, looked at you. Your face was still in your hands. He sighed. “Look—what car are we using? I think t—” And there was a knock on his bedroom door. You looked up, called out, “Yeah?” like it was your room. A male voice on the other side: “It’s Elliot.” Thank goodness. To the door, you said, “Come on in,” and, to your brother, you said, “You can light that blunt now.”

Your fathers had been fighting a lot, before…back when they were capable of such things. They adopted you and your brother when they were in their early thirties, when your dad, Robert, got a job with PonopoBillups, one of the 12th largest company in the world, putting his masters in finance to good use, after years of working bullshit jobs to keep a roof over their heads, and help Felipe (your other dad) pay for his own master’s degree, and, effectively, making them the kind of well-off-enough couple that adoption agency’s would be hard-pressed to turn down, even with the gayness they were throwing down. They tried agency’s that specialize in not hating homosexuals who want children, but were beginning to think they either didn’t want any kids or simply wanted all the kids. They found you and your diabetic brother, who were five, and probably already emotionally damaged, but quiet, likely very sad-looking, in a way that looked really good when they went home and looked at pictures. You like to think it was your smile that put you over the top, but it was probably the fact that your brother needed proper healthcare or he’d die or whatever, so, like, there was that. Your temporarily chip-toothed smile dominates most home videos, and you appreciate your dads eventually coming to their senses about which one of you was most worth it. Your dads got a lot of shit for just being themselves, and you got a lot of shit for being raised by them, but within your little unit…you couldn’t imagine a better life. You weren’t rich—some Christmases were better than others—but there was never pressure for you to be some thing that made your father’s feel better about themselves, or something that was socially appropriate, because your dads had already ruined that for you, so you could do whatever wanted, be into whatever wanted, think and believe in whatever you wanted, and people could only ever be surprised that you just another boy, who pronounced things wrong, and laughed when people described things as being ‘hard’, and yelled when millionaires you didn’t know did a good job in the sport they played, on the teevee. The biggest optimist in the house was your dad, Robert, and your brother took after him, and, so, they were the most broken up when they found out PonopoBillups was annually donating to anti-gay organizations, to politicians who were anit-poor, anti-education, anti-environment, and what they called ‘pro-family’. Your dad wanted to make a stink about this, to the company; this is when your parents started to fight.

Elliot sat your brother’s computer desk, but you all faced each other. Jamie said, “Apparently your version of this mission makes sense.” Elliot smiled at you. “You used the word mission?” You put up your hands, innocently, smiled. “I absolutely did not. I said ‘plan’. And maybe dropped an ‘excursion’ bomb or two. I’m not a mission kinda guy. Jaunts maybe.” Elliot exhaled a voluminous puff of smoke, “I won’t lie, this is more than a jaunt.” It’s cold. The window is open now; you wipe your sniffling nose. “He wants to know what car we’re taking.” You’re renting a car. Elliot’s dealer knows a guy who makes fake IDs; that guy’s friend needs a job, and will play the ‘tourist in need of a car’ who will pose for this fake ID, and pick up your rental car. He will have no other involvement. “Where’s he leaving the car?” “At the diner.” You will pick it up an hour before you drive to the Irving Manor. Your brother scratched at his leg. “And what’s happening there?” Elliot nodded, like he was just getting to that. The board members are having an awards dinner. You turned to Jamie. “The company is donating ninety thousand bucks to the Human Legacy Fund, who are bad. That’s not the point, though. They’re doing one of those giant-check deals, those symbolic money deals, where he Fund gets a check in the mail, or the money’s already been wired to their accounts, weeks ago.” You said this. “But instead of a giant check, they’re gonna have ninety thousand dollars rolled out by some out of work model in a tiny dress. Everyone’s gonna go wild, and pat themselves on the back, for being so rich and awesome. Then they’re going to pack that symbolic, real money into a case, and it’s going to go back into the car it came in. Back to fucking Idaho, or wherever the fuck they keep their money. They’re just not going to have their money anymore.” Elliot said this. Your brother looked out the window, now pulled up a bit, looking back at him. He likes the window more than the rest of you right now. Liked. His leg started jutting up and down. His hands were folded in his lap. He licked his lips. “And it’s going to be this easy?” You and Elliot both shook your heads. You rolled your chair closer to your brother, said, “No.”

Your dads started getting threats at the beginning of the summer. It was obviously Robert’s idea to get gun permits. You talked to Felipe about it, and he gave you permission to agree with your other dad, while he and your brother would bite the bullet—so to speak—and disagree, simply because someone had to. It obviously wasn’t the best idea, but it was obviously going to happen. The permit gave you guys the right to have guns in your home; your parents were shot while they were out.

Your brother immediately forgets himself when Elliot is around, and so you knew he’d be on board, simply because Elliot was; it just took Elliot being in the room in order to make him realize this, too. Your brother started wearing wool caps with the fuzzy ball on top because he’d seen Elliot wearing them—it’s a little thing, but your brother usually does the opposite of whatever you do, almost on purpose—his brain sending a clear message: we don’t want to be any more like our brother than we have to be. With Elliot, obviously, there is a pull there; Jamie wants to feel like Elliot is around, even when he isn’t, and so dressing kinda like him is what his body came up with. You know your brother, and you know you aren’t trying to get him to do something he can’t handle, but you also know he’s a pussy when it comes to agreeing to do new things, especially dangerous, illegal things, involving guns, and possible retaliation from one of the largest companies in the world, a company that sent a group of men to follow your dads as they went out for their anniversary dinner. You were going to go, but you had to break up with your girlfriend that night, and then do mushrooms with Elliot while your brother babysat you both, watched the last few Harry Potters with you, which Elliot had never seen, and you had never enjoyed/been terrified by so much. The men who followed your folks parked a block away from the French restaurant in which your parents devoured dishes they’d never tried before, and your one dad apologized to the other for putting their family in danger, by pushing against the company that made up most the household incoming, by putting politics before the people he loved, and getting them the wrong kind of attention; and your other dad apologized to your one dad for being a coward about all this, for thinking it was more important to hold onto whatever it is you managed to scrounge together in this world than to pay too close attention to whatever is being taken away from others, lest you be next. They laughed, and checked in to let you guys know they’d probably be drinking most of the wine in the place, to not wait up, and Jamie told them that was cool, to have a good time, while you and Elliot ran around the house, trying to stop the walls from melting. 

From your position in the abandoned lot down the street from the PonopoBillups awards dinner, overgrown with shrubbery, everyone in attendance looks happy to be there, and why shouldn’t they be? Jamie grips the steering wheel of your rented Acura TL, his leather gloves squeaking against the leather of the wheel. You and Elliot sit in the back seat, you with a gun tucked into the back of your jeans and binoculars held to your face, Elliot with a frown and a rapidly beating heart. It starts in less than five minutes; most of the people showing up now are late. “Is your car here yet?” Jamie asks this. “Our car, I mean? The car we’re, like…hitting up?” You zoom in closer to the left side of the building, where the valets are putting most of the VIP vehicles; the front lot is mostly filled with honorees who aren’t also donors. You spy the Maybach in question. “Yeah, it’s there.” You pull down your specs and look at Elliot, who is dressed in a tuxedo, grew out his scant facial hair for this occasion. “You’re up.” Elliot exhales, nods, looks at you. “Okay. How do I look?” “Like a twat.” He looks at Jamie, who is turned around in his seat. “Yeah?” Jamie shakes his head. “You look good. I mean, fine, or whatever. You look…” “…like a twat, like I said, which means you’ll do fine. Your windows closing, though. You got this.” “Okay—wish me luck.” You and brother: “Good luck.”

Elliot gets out of the car and hustles across the street, to the archway leading to the Irving Manor’s property, dressed like just another yuppie, getting lost in the crowd of other similarly dressed yuppies, many of whom are hanging about the lot, smoking, talking the kinda shit they won’t have a chance to, when they’re inside, and have to be polite. People spare him glances, but that’s about it—it’s a dark night, and most of them are only concerned about getting a crack at the open bar. You watch Elliot stride through the parking lot, up to the front of the building, where the valets linger/do their jobs, watch him stride right past them, into the building, where you can no longer watch him. You know there’s a table in there, for people to sign in—Elliot isn’t going to walk that far; he’s going to make a quick left, go out an emergency exit (it’s not hooked up to an alarm) and he’s going to find the Maybach in question, and he’s going to let the air out of its tires. By the time the night is over, the passengers inside won’t get very far before they realize they’re going to have to pull over and do something about it. That’s when you start waving a gun in their faces, start firing at them, making sure to barely miss any body parts, such is your practiced accuracy, unless, of course, one of passengers has a tattoo of a blue alpine daisy tattooed on his neck; that man you will shoot—you haven’t decided where, but you know you will shoot him, and you will think twice about it, and it will not keep you up tonight with the burn of regret but rather the light of accomplishment, the way Jamie saunters around the house after he’s finished a project its taken him months to wrap his head around. 

A man with a blue alpine daisy tattooed on his neck strode up to your dad’s after they exited La Vie En Rose, downtown, where dozens of people loitered in the streets, hitting up the ice cream shop before it closed for the season, catching one of the movies that don’t get played at the big multiplex, on the highway; grabbing a quick bite to eat, or an emergency feminine product from the pharmacy. The man locked into step behind them, as they had to park blocks away from the restaurant; when they turned down a dark side-street, to retrieve their vehicle, he turned down a dark side street. Then the night exploded, and the man with the tattoo ran back his black luxury car, so fancy that no witness was in the tax bracket capable of describing it. He didn’t even bother wearing a mask. He was simply a man. A man you saw walk into the banquet hall tonight, through a side door. “You think Elliot’s gonna be alright?” Your brother asks you this; there’s genuine worry in his voice. You scoot up on your seat, look at Jamie, who stares at Irving Manor, though all he sees from here is the building itself, and trees. You hand him the binoculars. He takes them. “I do. Look out for him, though. It’s starting to hurt my eyes.” He looks at you, nods, “Alright,” raises them to his face, as you slide back against your seat, feel the gun press against the small of your back, like an excited lover. You want to pull it out, but you don’t want to look at it. Your brother looks at you in the rear-view mirror, “What?” You shake you head, “Nothing. Just let me know if something bad happens. I’m gonna…” “Get ready to make something bad happen?” You snort again, reach over and rustle his hair. “Something like that.”

youareanobject:

“So are you…definitely doing that thing later?”

He yawns and rubs his face. It’s early. Like 8, but it’s Saturday, so it’s really early. 8am, the bad kind. He sniffs, goes, “I don’t know. I…told you. Their supposed to call me… My plan is to go, though. I wouldn’t…expect me to be available, ya know?”

“True.” 

Beautiful people have a way of making you feel like disagreeing with them will give you cancer or something. He has work in an hour. He’s a department manager at the Marketplace, a sort of ‘local Walmart’ the small-business owners around here put together, petitioning the city council to not allow an ‘actual Walmart’ to be built, keeping the local money local, self-generated, instead of generated in Arizona, or Arkansas, or wherever Walmarts come from. It’s a good job to have around here, what he’s got. For now, which is about how long he plans to have it. 

He hasn’t rushed to put his clothes back on, so that’s nice. How out of it he might be notwithstanding, you take this as a sign that it’s not the foremost thing on his mind, his clothes, work in an hour or not. There is the low snarl of thunder outside. It has been raining for a week. You start to think there are maybe worse things, about you, on his mind right now. Things so beyond having ones boxer-briefs on, things that might compel someone to scoot to the edge of the bed, groan, yawn, stay there, as he has. You didn’t say good morning. You panicked. The first thing you did was asking that stupid fucking mood-ruining question. Plus the rain. You know he’s not a morning person. You don’t know know, from experience, but he told you that, a few weeks ago, when you ran into each other outside of class, and you were saying how you schedule all your hard classes before lunch, to get them out of the way, that way everything after lunch is mostly relaxing. “Aw,” he said, his head lying on his forearm, on the cafeteria table, his other hand holding an almost-empty bottle of water. This was during the lull before night classes, or at least before the crowd who goes to them, and there weren’t more than a few other occupied tables. He said, “It takes me like two hours to wake up all the way. Like, I can’t do anything that someone’s gonna judge me on… Well…not really, I guess—I run in the morning. People see me doing that, and they judge me.”

“I have water,” you say now, like it’s his favorite or something. He looks over his shoulder, more at the sheets than at you. He says, “I forgot. Hand it to me?”

You think about old-school Hollywood pictures, how demure the actresses always were, even when they were being seductive. You lick your lips and look at the fridge. You think about exactly what he said. You look to your left, at the nightstand. A half-empty bottle of water stands next to his cell phone, which died last night, you remember that. This is the water he wants you to hand to him. You go, “Oh, right.”

You stretch over and grunt, grab the bottle. You lie there for a second with it, inspect it; the bed suddenly insanely comfortable, but also warm, from a heat you did not generate alone. You exhale and there is another, more brittle crackle of thunder. You close your eyes and then open them, dragging it out like a kiss. You go, “Can I have a sip?” You just want him to say yes to things that involve you. You just want to talk and have him say yes. He shrugs, goes, “Yeah. If you want.” He says it more like ‘I’m not allowed to say no’, not so much like ‘I want to say yes’, and you go, “Nah, it’s alright, I was just…I’m being lazy,” and you scoot up and stretch the bottle forward, so he can see it over his shoulder, and he grabs it and goes, “You can have some, dude. I’m not…I’m not used to talking as soon as I wake up.” You nod your head, but his back is turned, and you go, “No, it’s…alright.” You pull the bottle back and unscrew the cap, lick your lips again, knock back a single gulp, then reach it out to him again. This time he takes it. “You drank like all of it!” he says, and you make a defeated sound and go, “I told you I didn’t need any!” and he chuckles and says, “I’m fucking with you,” holds the bottle in both hands like he’s not ready for it yet. You push yourself back to the head of the bed, try to think of something to say that will make you seem smart, and, if not, then at least funny. You look around the room for something you can make a joke about. You want to go, ‘Pass me a mirror,’ but then that would only be funny to you.

He goes, “I wish it would stop raining.” You listen to the tapping fingers of the storm and go, “Yeah,” and he unscrews the bottle and loudly sucks back the last of the water. He looks over his shoulder, this time at you, and you blink at him, and he smiles, like you told a joke, then he looks back down at the sheets. He says, “If, um…if I don’t go, to that thing tonight…” You usually let people spike sentences they don’t think are working, but you pick this one back up, hand it to him—“Yeah?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Check, later. See if I’m available.” “Alright.” You say it quickly, so he can’t take it back. You go, “Charge your phone, though, huh?” You snorts. You just wanted to say something to keep him tethered to you. He looks over his shoulder one more time, but this time brings his leg up onto the bed, faces you, sideways, but still sorta facing. He opens his mouth, his expression like he’s going to say something really important…but then he just closes it again, looks down at your foot. ‘How gross am I’ you think, but don’t say. His hand, almost like a creature with a set of instincts of its own, reaches out, and you inhale very slowly as his fingers find the hairs at the end of your leg. You blink at him, and a handful of seconds pass, as plays with them like thread coming from a sweater on the verge of unraveling itself, how worn-out it’s become. “I have to go, though,” he says, looks at you like he needs your permission, and you nod and go, “Okay,” and he looks at his hand like, ‘what is it doing?’, and he pulls it away, smiling at himself, looks at you meekly, says, “I’m not really a morning person,” an explanation and an apology.

You try to think of something that sums your behavior up as well, shows proper remorse for it and tempers future expectations, but all you come up with is, ‘I’m not really any kind of person’, and so you just don’t say anything.

youareanobject:

(sanmarin0: sin título by ramona flume on Flickr.)

You got a text from Bower while you were still at work, having succumbed to the pressure of your boss’s casual reference to there being overtime available, if you were interested/implicit command that you’d be working the available overtime, enjoy. You felt special because your phone vibrated, which is what special phones do, phones owned by special people, and you looked around the bullpen of your office, to see if anyone was being nosy, any rats on the loose, who might casually suggest to a superior that you maybe use your phone instead of working, but you were safe, and you slid your thumb across the screen, and it was a text, yes, from Bower, like we said, and it was dramatic, because that’s how Bower distinguishes himself, how he makes himself come across as someone with Important Information Worth Hearing. ‘Cara is in a really bad place right now, I don’t know what to do??’ You were pretty sure this wasn’t a question, despite the question marks, and you typed ‘wut u mean?’, because it was quick, and you didn’t want to be seen holding your phone. You wrote some correspondence to a client (let’s see if we can make your job sound important by describing it but never actually saying what it is?). You forgot you even had a phone and then it was vibrating again. Look at you! You almost wished someone would catch you so they could see how important you looked. Bower: ‘Can you just meet up later? For drinks? It’s the kinda story that’s long.’

‘My favorite. Where?’

‘Eppy’s good?’

‘Sure, when?’

‘7?’

‘Work till 7.. 8 ok?’

‘Word. Thanks bro.’ There is nothing bro about Bower, and you write, ‘Ha,’ and, ‘No problem,’ and get back to work, suddenly unable to concentrate.

Eppy’s is a bar-restaurant you and Bower used to go to a lot on Thursday nights—back before you worked as much as you do, developed a fear of hangovers and oversleeping; back before he got into a relationship—because the pitchers were cheap (on Thursdays, anyway), and they made a grilled chicken sandwich on toasted/usually-just-stale whole wheat that agreed with your diet at the time. Bower is single again, but you still constantly work, and so you don’t go to Eppy’s anymore, mostly spending your weeknights drinking at home, alone, until now. It’s busy, DIIV blasting appropriately from blown-out speakers, the bar itself lined with people who already have their drinks, but who can’t imagine a world in which someone else might want one, might need to be standing where they are, in order to fulfill this dream—your anti-people tingles are kicking in, is the thing (the vestiges of some undiagnosed mental illness you’ve since learned to more or less cope with), and you imagine punching every patron in the back of his or her head, but this simply manifests as a smile, and you politely shove your way through the grip of loudly pontificating vice-collectors—of artists and post-graduates—in hopes of drinking yourself into some sort of comfort zone. Bower and Cara are already here, by the dartboard, way back there. You see them before they see you. Neither of them looks particularly depressed. You try to determine if they are on anything other than what’s behind the bar, but you are too far to tell, are not proud of the hope this inspires within your neglected little heart, nestle yourself at the end of the bar, where barbacks and servers pick up, drop things off, hoping to be a cumbersome enough presence that you’re not ignored as long as tend to be, by bartenders. Will get a timely drink instead of simply being asked to move. 

You’re cute when you’re being ignored, but you get your drink. You’re nodding your head to the music, trying to look like someone who might’ve ever been cool, instead of someone who needs to know what’s cool, in order to stay in character, and it gets you the attention you might’ve gotten anyway, and, so, yeah, you get your drink. You knock back about half of it before you even get to Bower and Cara, to the dartboard/pool-tables section of the bar, beyond the tables at which people eat and drink, beyond the swath of flatland in which people stand, and shout-talk, verbally rephrase their earlier tweets so that they sound like new things to their drunk friends. You walk by Cara, brush your shoulder against hers, getting her attention, keep walking until you stand in Bower’s field of dart vision, yet not in his way; he smiles at you—you nod back, smirking at life, how this is it—and tosses a wobbling, plastic dart somewhere in the vicinity of the dartboard. 

You quit smoking most recently about three months ago, which is a pretty big deal (*mouths thank-you to the adoring crowd, blows kisses*), you just haven’t figured out how not to find cigarettes attractive after you’ve gotten some sort of buzz from sort of thing designed to fuck you up. What happens is, Carla gives you a mellow, hey-man hug after she and Bower are done playing darts (they’re stoned, you discover), with the latter offering an “I’m glad you made it,” in your ear, during his hug. You don’t get to see these people much—most people, really—having found yourself agreeing so much with the idea of doing nothing but work, spending your free time posting your comics on the internet, in the hopes that…what? In hopes that they’ll someday provide some job you’ll be proud of saying you have. You don’t know. You were drinking, but you were still thinking about who you were, and what you would be doing if you weren’t in this bar right now. Again, whatever. Cara suggested shots, and you mentally adjusted your projected spending for the evening to include Cuervo and Jameson, found a sense of belonging slowly coating your liver, slowly draping over you, as the night went on, found talking super loud to be your preferred form of communication; found your friends were living entire lives without you, all in the same city, the same borough, talking to you on a fairly consistent basis, just not really about what’s been going on with them. The stuff that matters; giving you the versions of their lives they reserve for people who probably aren’t going to stick around either way. You’ve known your life had been in this particularly setting, it’s just having to actually deal with it, socially, that’s weird for you—this is why you don’t leave the house, is what we’re saying. But, again, whoever was donating to the jukebox had good taste, and you’d already come to terms with getting about four or five hours of sleep tonight, at best, and so the fifth round of shots were on you, did not go down smoothly, inspiring your puke-or-smoke instinct; you grabbed a lime from behind the bar, sucked on it, too late, felt your stomach chug, like a shotgun, ready to burst—you must’ve made the face that meant all this, because Bower put a hand on your shoulder, said, “You alright?” and you held back an untrustworthy burp, looked at them both, said, “You guys still smoke?” They both nodded, apologetically, and you said, “Can we do that now?” and Cara grabbed your hand, and they led you outside, to make your puking go away.

You are at drunk’s door, and smoking only makes you feel more alive, right after it makes you feel lightheaded—it feels appropriate, either way. You’re on the sidewalk, to the side of the bar. You smile at everything around you as Cara goes on about how shit her Mother’s Day was (she is so not a mom; she just has one), and you see a discarded visor on the ground, stare at it, try to figure out what role it served, in whose life, before becoming sidewalk decoration. Your heart spies a kindred soul in this wayward visor, to be honest. “You start your own shit,” Bower is saying to her, and she is going, “That’s so easy to say, to someone who is themselves to the point of being not worth…I dunno. The point of not being of any use, otherwise. But I’ve got what I’m good at, so why do I gotta be good at people? I’m bad at people, and I don’t wanna be good.” Bower snorts, and you bend down, pick up the visor, take the last puff of your cigarette, put it out on the sidewalk, stand back up, as Bower is going, “That’s the thing, you’re not bad at people. You’re bad at yourself. You just take it out on people. Not on me, but on most people, you do. I feel like that’s part of what’s fucking you up, about Jon—not all of it, but part of it.” You put on the visor, backwards, and like a tiara. You smile at yourself. Your rude self, smiling, while these two toss serious truths at one another. Cara’s a singer. She and Jon have a synth-y, folk-y, loud-noises band that’s been popping off for the last year or so, though they’ve been dating for the last two or so. You realize they are letting you in on their lives here—well, her life. You realize this is the part they wanted you here for, wanted you to hear—well, Bower wanted you here for, Bower wanted you to hear. “What happened to Jon?” you say, realizing you are having a good moment—that you might leave here, and go home to nothing, and wake up to even less; that there might not be anything good coming to you this week, or even the week after, but that this moment is good, and you are in it, and this makes you lucky, for now. You adjust your tiara. Cara tells you that Jon will begin living his life as a woman, starting in the fall. You open your mouth, and she nods. “Tell him the rest,” Bower says, and you close your mouth, put your arm around Bower, who goes, “go ahead—” “I’m going ahead! Jesus. I told him everything would be okay, and, like, I guess it will, right? Everything is always okay, even when it’s shitty. That’s the worst part, right? Anybody with a right to complain’s long since learned there’s no point in even doing it. And so he asked me if this changed anything, and…” Bower sips some of his backwash-y beer, and you, softly, go, “What did you say?” Cara shrugs, pulls her cigarettes out of her pocket. “I told him I didn’t know. Which was a lie. I mean, I think. Shit. I’m going with him to see his therapist, in the morning.” “With a hangover,” you say, and she nods, grimly. “With a hangover, yes.” “Did you…is this…” “The gender dysphoria is something we’ve discussed, yes. I just…I thought it worked. The way we were. I was wrong.” “Is he doing the whole bit?” You do gimme hands at her cigarettes and she gives you one. You release Bower from your side-hug grip, and she says, yes, “Crucial parts of him will not look the way I’ve grown accustomed to seeing them, will function differently, yes. Parts I’ve spent all of my life wanting, and he’s spent it wanting to get rid of.” Cara is saying these things like she is explaining to you how her cancer works; accepting, resigned…ultimately doomed. Your body wants another drink. You ignore it. Your body doesn’t just get what it wants, when it wants it. You look at Bower’s drink—he’ll want one soon, too. “It’s kinda badass, though, huh? Man. He’s gonna get so much shit for this. The world treats transgendered people like shit, you know? He’s probably scared as fuck. It’s some brave stuff.” You say this. Bower eyes her—you can practically feel his anticipating how she responds to this. The air around him quivers with it. You feel like you were called here to make her comfortable with telling the truth, and also so he didn’t subsequently rip her head off for it. You put your arm back around his shoulder. “You can’t do it,” you say, not a question, and she shakes her head, looking down at the spot where the tiara had been, the visor. Where a blotch of burnt-out ember now lies, your dead cigarette, shriveled next to it. She looks up at you, still shaking her head. Her voice is smaller now, the city much louder, around you, in comparison. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t want to be able to do it.”

The next morning, there is traffic, and there is your hangover—there is the gravel driveway of your throat, the result of you bumming cigarettes all night, from strangers, after Cara’d run out. You have coffee, but whenever you remember to sip it, traffic decides to lurch forward, just a bit, thwarting you. The morning is overcast, people in the city suddenly not knowing how to drive their cars, unless the sky is clear, the clouds giving them permission to fender bend, to break down in crucial lanes, solar-powered competency, you suppose. Your face is settled into a grimace, the sense of failure that comes with a traffic jam adding itself to your list of reasons to shut down, emotionally, until lunch, where you can get in a quick nap in, in your car, in public. Your phone vibrates in the center console, rattling the coins there, and you grab it, see that it is Bower. You look at the time—it is 7am. You open his message. ‘She broke up with him.’ You put the phone back where you found it, look up at the road. You can see silently spinning sirens in the distance, imagine the traffic will clear up beyond that point, once everybody’s gotten their peek at whoever’s shitty day. You pick up your phone and type ‘Yeah. I figured,’ because it’s true, and you don’t ever know what else to say. You put the phone back down and sigh. You should really start taking the train. 

youareanobject:

(sanmarin0: greig / ben by EWAN MITCHELL. on Flickr.)

“Once.” 

He brings the joint over to you, past your reaching hands, which you lower, as it reaches your face, and you press your lips against it, and suck in, his fingers resting on your skin, as the joint rests in your mouth, impressed, you are, at your body, or at his, at how easy it is, to feel cared for, when your body isn’t the only one telling your brain that it’s there, when how warm you are isn’t the only warmth there is to talk about. His hand pulls away from your face, and this lets you know that your lungs are full, and so you exhale, because you don’t know what else to do, holding onto it for as long as you can not even crossing your mind, as drunk as you are. He takes a couple of pacing steps away, smoking all the hits you won’t take, as you both wait, and you grab your hoodie’s zipper, and you lower it, a couple inches, feeling this is where the zipper should be, this is how you will look your best.

Tonight you had to sit through an engagement party, and laugh at various jokes, make your staring into space look like listening, make your wishing you were someplace else look like being in the right place. At least not look undermining of whatever everyone felt was worth it about being there, which you feel like you pulled off, eating all of your food, drinking all your booze, as it was free, provided by Joana’s dad, who ran the place; lifting your glass for toasts, nodding your head when words were cast in your direction, no matter what their shape—you weren’t so much concerned with pulling this off as getting through it. A thing you noticed about your friends—about fifteen of you, in all, around this corner table, in this shit little bar/restaurant, that got more packed, as the night rolled along—is that all they ever wanna talk about is the past, and every story about that past is squeezed into a shape foreign to what you envision when you think of it, that they’re okay with not really remembering things the way they happened, but in a flattering way, a way that makes their subsequent decisions seem like the only logical step into the maturity, into the future, and not the coward’s way out, not the easiest way to reset the clock and tumble toward some later version of the same problem, a present they can paint into a rose-colored past, and choose the easiest way out of, over and over. 

You can hear the group before you can see them, laughing, hard, about nothing in particular, not really. You’ve been a part of that laughter, and you know it’s just there. Casper turns to you with an here-it-comes face, and you laugh, not even realizing a laugh is what’d been sitting on your chest, all night, feeling lighter, now that it’s gone. Likely flying off to join its friends. Casper shakes his head, saying no more. His girlfriend gets drunk and says mean things to people; him, usually, if he’s around to receive it, and he could feel that happening, that part of her coming out, sneering at his good cheer, and talking louder than anyone else, and you weren’t being as good of silent-sufferer as you maybe thought, and so there was this walk, ostensibly to get cigarettes, but, ultimately, to do this—to be one thing while the rest of them are another. Casper looks at you, holding out what’s left of the Joint of Altered Perspective. “Once more?” You smirk, and wave the offer away, feel your old feelings being replaced by hazy stand-ins, already. You don’t remember being in a bad mood before getting here—though you didn’t interact with enough people to get a proper gauge on this, you will freely admit, and you don’t remember what your thoughts were like before you were suddenly thrust into a social situation—usually, if your thoughts are overtly shitting on things—if they are basically insecurities stomping around in a pride costume—then you know you’re in a bad mood. All you know is you aren’t right now. 

Outside the gate of the parking lot, the first of the group rounds the corner. The silhouette of a couple, the guy walking behind the girl with his hands around her waist, her body pulled close, which couple, you can’t make out just by the shape of them. One of the mutually-thin ones, you guess. “She’s calling me.” Casper says this, a murmured lament. You hear no voices—none shaped like his name—and you realize he means on his phone, can even hear the buzz of it, as the silhouettes at the lot’s entrance get some company, grow an army of shadows, and you shrug, as the shapes slowly make their way toward you, and Casper. “She probably didn’t know where you were.” He shakes his head, looks at you. His phone isn’t vibrating anymore. The group murmurs to each other more than they yell-talk. You’re self-centered, and this helps you assume they are talking about you. How alone you are. You always come to things alone, and always leave that way. “The show just isn’t over,” he says. “She’s wondering where her costar is, so, yeah, I guess, in that way, you’re right.” People have a tendency to say things around you they wouldn’t dare in front of the subject of their ire and it never ceases to make you uncomfortable. You never know what to say, and so you just put your hood up, but that makes you feel dangerous, like the sight will remind people how out of place you are, everywhere you go, and so you pull the hood back down, turn and walk further into the lot, the darkness of it, the stench of it, toward Casper’s car, the one you came in, turn around to make sure that getting into the cars is what comes next, but you just see Casper standing where you just were, and, beyond him, the group, standing together, gabbing loudly, the rabble of them all-consuming, your chemically-altered brain wanting to shout out to Casper, to get away from them, before it’s too late, and he was one of them again, and no longer had access to the feelings that sent him fleeing in the first place. But out of the group of shadows was sent a messenger, and this messenger floated closer to him, and took his hand. They began to speak, quietly, and, before you could shout (not that you would, not that you’d want to hear your own voice, that loud), the shadow was bringing him back into the mass of itself, Casper tossing a look back at the spot where you should be, you smiling, goofily, as if he can see you this far back, as if you can share it from this far away, as if you aren’t just some other, smaller shadow from way over there. A lonelier shadow, with no one to wait with.