Fiction Friday

You are an expert weaver, even though you don't know it. You take these fragments of information, bits and bytes of you, and you spin them into something more, and you take all of those something mores and you tie them on your loom, taut, taut, and then you get going, shuttle flying back and forth. Faster, faster and you create something from it, you build a life for yourself. I stare at you like I'm amazed, because I am. You're creating fictions, whole universes that never existed before you, and I'm amazed. You're not. You're used to it, this is the norm for you.

How very strange.

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Fiction Friday!

Hey!  If you're here from Mr. Stonebender's blog, welcome.  If you're not here from Mr. Stonebender's blog, welcome!  Remember this?  It's revised!  It's been all prettied up, and this! Is! It!  Yay!  Other fiction by me is all right here, if you'd like to check that out as well.  Enjoy!

Legs in a Tangle

These words are best read out loud, starting slowly and quietly and gradually getting faster and louder and a little scary. A lot scary. The kind of scary that most of us keep buried, deep down where no one can see us ever and we can all act normal on the outside. Smile for the picture, honey. Smile and look pretty.
We've known each other for a long time, haven't we? Was it you who I met years ago, on that night turned morning, don't you remember that? I think I remember it. I thought it happened, but maybe it was all in my head. A lot of stuff was all in my head, back then. But you said that I could conquer it all.
A lot of stuff is all in my head now.
We are holding hands and then I walk away because it's cold rainy I want to go inside inside inside, but you're here and I want to stay with you. You make it okay, you make me stronger. You should come inside, why not stay a while, but you have to go someplace else, someplace important, someplace without me.
I go inside anyway, go home, open the door and close it, sit with my back against it, legs in a tangle of smooth black on the floor, shoes have disappeared somehow and I can't look anyone in the eye, not that there's anyone to look at but you know what I mean? I stare at me and I worry about what's going to happen and I worry about what's already happened and I worry about the things that are happening right this very instant and bam! There's no getting out now, we're in this for the long run, we're in it together. You are stuck, my friend.
That's a lie. I'm all alone. It's okay. I keep telling myself that - I'm okay with it, I'm alone and I like it that way, I'm alone and I don't have to care what anyone else thinks because I am me, and I am good with that, right? Everything about me says something else, everything about me says no it hurts you, doesn't it? It has to hurt you too!
It doesn't.
(I tell myself that lie too.)
I grab onto my hip bone, I love having bones that stick out like that, protrude, and I tug and tug at it, until I can pull it out. I hear a crack at the back, and it's a little bloody, but I don't mind, I've seen blood before, enough to stop caring.
I can't stand up now, but who has to know, I throw my bones across the room, and look back down, down at me. I can conquer it all, I can conquer the world. I want to go away, I want to melt right now. You see, it's not that I want to die, it's that I just want to stop existing. I want to not be awake. Can we make that happen, you and me, together? Just stop being?
Oh wait. It's just me, now.
I pull my tights down a little bit, then trace the scars, up and down my other hip, graceful, beautiful curves, stretching to touch my ribcage and down to my thigh. I did them one by one, each marks a different occasion of hatred pain regret. Ribcage. I need to tear that apart too. Fingernails to sternum, tear at it until it cracks in half and pull it apart too, now there's lungs squishy and exposed and still, somehow, doing their thing.
I stopped doing my thing a long time ago. It must've been something, right? Right? I did something, I was someone. I must've been.
I remember numbers though, before, numbers that I took to heart, numbers that I used build a body for me to live in. Who wants to be a person when you can be data? When we went off into your world, my binary body felt just like home. I want to be row after row of zeros and ones, take the feelings right out of it.
I hate feelings. They're messy and bloody and I wanted to be bone rather than flesh. I don't need to be that human.
Palm to forehead, I claw an eye or two out, and now I can't see, but what was there to see, what was there in the first place? Nothing worth the effort, I think. Nothing worth getting out of bed in the morning. I'm going to sleep now, there's no more reason to be awake. I'm going to dead now, there's no more reason to be alive.
I stand up. We can't be so pathetic now, can we? We keep on going, because we are strong, just as strong as we can pretend to be. It's harder to pretend on your own. I picked up my pieces and put them back where they belong, stretching the skin to fit over them and sewing it back into place.

 Conquering it all, just like you said.

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Odd Fiction Saturday. It's a thing. I promise.

These words are best read out loud, starting slowly and quietly and gradually getting faster and louder and a little scary. A lot scary.
We are holding hands and then I walk away because it's cold rainy I want to go inside inside inside, but you're here and I want to stay with you. I go inside anyway, go home, open the door and close it, sit with my back against it with my legs in a tangle of black on the floor, shoes have disappeared somehow and I can't look anyone in the eye, not that there's anyone to look at but you know what I mean? I stare at me and I worry about what's going to happen and I worry about what's already happened and I worry about the things that are happening right this very instant and bam! Now we're down the rabbit hole. There's no getting out now, we're in this for the long run, and we're in this together.
That's a lie. I'm all alone. It's okay. I'm okay with that. I keep telling myself that, I'm okay with it, I'm alone and I like it that way, I'm alone and I don't have to care what anyone else thinks because I am me, and I am good with that, right? Everything about me says something else, everything about me says no it hurts you, doesn't it?
It doesn't.
I tell myself that lie too.
I grab onto my hip bone, I love having bones that stick out like that, protrude, and I tug and tug at it, until I can pull it out. It's a little bloody, but I don't mind, I've seen blood before, enough to stop caring. I can't stand up now, but who cares, I throw my bones across the room, and look back down, down at me. I want to go away, I want to melt right now. You see, it's not that I want to die, it's that I just want to stop existing. I want to not be awake. Can we make that happen, you and me, together? Oh wait. You're not here anymore. Asshole. It's just me, now. Dammit.
I pull my tights down a little bit, then trace the little scars, up and down my other hip, graceful, beautiful curves, stretching to touch my ribcage and falling like feathers onto my thighs. Ribcage. I need to tear that apart too. Fingernails to sternum, crack it half and pull it apart too, now there's lungs squishy and exposed and still, somehow, doing their thing.
I stopped doing my thing a long time ago. I can't even remember what it was now.
I remember numbers though. There were a lot of numbers, before, numbers that I took to heart, numbers that I used to make myself into a person, a person I never could be. Who wants to be a person when you can be data? I want to be binary, I want to be row after row of zeros and ones, take the feelings right out of it.
Palm to forehead, I claw an eye or two out, and now I can't see, but what was there to see, what was there in the first place? Nothing worth the effort, I think. Nothing worth getting out of bed in the morning. I'm going to sleep now, there's no more reason to be awake.

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Fiction Friday!

It's a Fiction Friday if I want it to be Fiction Friday.  Don't mess with me.

It was late June when I drove with Rachel out of town, to a field somewhere. We hadn't seen each other in a long time, too long, but we had talked. We had talked a lot. We never talked about anything that really mattered.

I parked the car at the side of the road. We got out and laid down in the grass without saying a word. Side by side, we looked at the stars for a while, not needing words to muddle what was going on between us.

Finally, I spoke. “Rachel, you know that I like you.” I turned my head and saw her nod in the moonlight, “I really like you. And I care about you. I want to spend time with you.” Those were all things that she had heard me say before, more or less. They were things that I assumed were true for her too. I hoped they were true. I hoped that I wasn't inventing all of our relationship. Not that we had a relationship. Not that we had much of anything. “I just want you to know how I feel about you.” This was supposed to be freeing or something. It did not feel freeing. It just felt terrifying, this dead space there was, between us. Full of questions. Suddenly, it felt like this was not a good choice, it felt like I had done all the wrong things and said all the wrong things and I was scared. I wanted to go home and curl up in my bed and never leave again.

She reached toward my side and grabbed my hand. I was okay again, in seconds. I didn't say anything else. We just stared up at the stars, dreaming and wishing.

“Do you know what I think of when I look at the stars?” Rachel posed non-questions like that often.

“What do you think of?”

“I think of the future. I think of the past too. I think of myself, a lot. And I think of you. I think of everyone else. I think of interconnectedness and loneliness.”

She always said things like that, in that way that made everyone around her question if she was deep and thoughtful, or if she was just full of shit. No one was ever sure, but that night, I was erring on the side of depth. This wasn't the time when she would joke.

“I think about you a lot. I hope you,” She paused. Holding her breath for a moment. “I hope you realize that.”

“I had hoped that you did.” I replied too fast.

She chuckled, and I heard her moving, on the grass. She moved closer to me, her face above mine, blonde hair brushing my face. “I like you. I like you a lot. I like you as more than friends.”

“I feel the same way about you.”
“That makes me very, very happy.” She kissed me, and touched my hip, in that little strip of exposed skin between my pants and shirt. My heart, for lack of better term, fluttered. She rolled onto her back, closer to me this time. Our sides touching, two layers between our skin.
We were quiet again, staring at the stars and contemplating our interconnectedness and whatever else she had talked about. She was perfect. I loved her. I loved her. I loved her so freeking much. I loved her in the way that a person who had never been hurt can love. I had no idea how to say that. I had feelings, but I didn't know how to express that. I didn't want to express that. I didn't want to put myself out there.

“I”

She glanced at my face again before I spoke. “What?”

“Nothing.” When you put yourself out there, you get hurt. I didn't want any of that.

“No, what is it?”

“It's nothing. I just like this. Being here, being with you.”

“I like it too.” We were quiet again, giving me the space to imagine us. I wanted an us. I wanted to hold her hand and walk down the sidewalk together. I wanted more, more than talking to her late at night. I wanted more than on and off conversation. I wanted a relationship, and all the little couple benefits that it could come with. There was a reason why we were here. There was a reason. There was something I wanted to tell her.

“I'm really concerned about college.”

Rachel was not thinking about the same thing that I was thinking of. “Oh. Why are you so concerned?”
“Because I need to get in. I need to get into a college that's good.”
“I think you'll get in. You have everything going for you. You're going to do fine.”

“Maybe. I don't know. I'm just really worried about it.”

“You'll be okay.”

“I hope so.”
“I believe you'll be okay.” She was so insecure, sometimes. She would be fine, we both knew it deep down.

“We should probably go home.” She sat up, arms straight out behind her, hands on the grass. There was a slight arch to her back, not quite like anyone else. I liked the way my arm fit right there, we belonged like that. She stood up.

I was still lying on the ground. It was now or never. I stood up, brushing bits of grass and dirt off of my back. “Rachel.” I held both of her hands. “There's a reason why I brought you out here. I want us to be something more.” She opened her mouth and I kept talking. “I love you, Rachel. And I know that you might not love me back, and I know that there's a reason why we aren't in a relationship. You don't want to be seen with me, you don't want to be known as my girlfriend. You're ashamed, you want to be with someone who other people like more. I know there's a reason, there's something. I don't care about it. All I want is you. You're my eleven-eleven, you're who I wish for when I blow out the candles on my birthday cake. I love you.”

She stared at me. She stared at me for too long. I had said that too much, too crazy. I sounded like I was too into her. There was an imbalance. No one wants an imbalance. It's weird and it's awkward.
She pulled her hands away from mine. Tilting her head to the side, she asked “Is that really how you feel?” She said it so slowly, like she was talking to someone who didn't speak the same language as she did.

“Yes. That's how I feel.”
“Oh.”
“We should probably go now.”
“Yes.” We walked to the car. I drove home, not speaking, not looking at her, trying to avoid thinking. I would have turned the radio on, but I was positive that the first song we'd hear would be something horribly love-related.

I got to her house, after years of driving. “Bye, I guess.”
“Yeah. Bye. I'll um, see you around.” She got out of the car, walked to the side door, and let herself in, taking care to shut the door as quietly as possible.

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Film School: Part Seven

By the end of their meeting, they had some semblance of a plan. They would hold auditions, for the thousands of people who would obviously be clamboring to star in a movie that was far to indie and far to mainstream to ever be well known in either group.
They were to post flyers on the bulletin boards all across campus stating the day (Sunday) and time (4:00) of the auditions. The auditions were to be held in the quad, since it was large and had no rules governing group meetings or the amount of noise created by such meetings.
The fluorescent paper was plastered throughout the school, which seemed as though it would draw a sufficient crowd. They gathered at the quad twenty minutes before the specified time, despite Vivian's constant worry that they weren't going to be there in time, that they were going to be late to their own auditions, and they were the only ones who seemed to be present for their event. As the time drew near, they all (excluding Grant, who was in one of his moods in which he was incapable of human emotion) got a little more excited.
"Mike?"
"What is it?"
"What do you think they're going to be like?"
"I think they're going to be three-headed purple aliens, Vivian. I think they're going to be aliens."
"Mike, we need to be serious. This is serious. We're making a movie, and it's a really big deal. This is our first real, professional project. We need to act like adults."
"And what do adults act like?"
"Adults do not assume that the people who are going to show up for their auditions are blue aliens."
"You're right, Viv. I'm an adult because there's no way I would expect blue aliens. I, for one, am fairly certain that the aliens will be purple."
"Mike, there's really no reason to get mad at me."
"I'm not mad at you."
"You're acting like you're mad at me."
"Both of you, cut it out." Grant said, sternly.
They looked alarmed.
"Dude, since when do you actually care about this project?"
"Since you two fools roped me into it, that's when."
Mike and Vivian exchanged a look of befuddlement. "Well then, it's good that you finally see what it is that we care about so deeply."
"I saw it all along, I just haven't been putting a lot of effort into it."
"Is it going to change then?"
"Not in the near future, hun."
"I'm not hun." Vivian seemed a little irritated at the perceived patronization.
"Everyone can be hun. I'm Southern. I can do that."
"Grant, you're from Conneictiut."
"I'm Southern in spirit."
"Sure."
They stared off in different directions for a while, checking their phones and looking disinterested, each of them following passers-by with their eyes, hoping against hope that they would be the one. No one was the one. No one glanced their way with a kind of curiosity that screamed "Are you here for me? Are you my ticket to glory?"
Four o'clock became four thirty, which became five. Finally, at five twenty-one, someone gave them that look. She was skinny, wearing all black, with hair dyed a putrid shade of green. "Are you the ones holding auditions for that film?"
"Yes! Yes we are! Would you like to audition? Are you an actress?" Vivian seemed overeager, just a little.
"Uhhh, sure. I can audition. What do you want me to do?"
"You can perform your monologue for us whenever you're ready."
"My monologue?"
Grant rolled his eyes rather visibly while Mike explained "The piece you have memorized? To show us a bit of your acting?"
"I don't have one." Most people would be ashamed or embarrassed at this, but this girl seemed entirely blunt about her lack of preparation.
"Then you can't try out. And anyway, the part is for a male." Grant too, lacked subtlety.
"Grant, really?" Vivian looked displeased and turned to the stranger. "Would you care to improv something?"
"I can, I guess."
"Start whenever you like."
"Okay then. This is a story about my, um, best friend, growing up. We were walking around the town where my parents live, and her parents used to live there, but her dad moved away when her mom died. We were fourteen, and we haven't talked a lot since then. But that's a different story. We were walking down this street, and we pass the graveyard, which is kind of cool in the daytime, because you can look around at the old, worn out headstones, but at night it's just weird. There was this one bush, and in the dark it looked like a pile of dirt, like someone had been digging up a grave. Then, she thinks she sees this guy, or maybe she actually sees this guy, I'm not sure. And then we ran, as fast as we could and we got out of there." She paused to take a breath, which she hadn't done in quite some time.
"Is this a true story?"
"It's an improvisation."
"I see."
"We'll be back to you in a few days if you get the part, alright?"
"Sure. Thank you. Bye." She turned and scurried away.
Once she was out of earshot, Grant leaned foreword so that he could look Vivian in the eye. "Really, Viv? Really? Is that all that this stupid school has to offer?"
"You don't have to be so harsh, you know. She was obviously very nervous."
"No matter how nervous she was, she sucked." Mike interjected.
"Isn't there anyone else around here?"
"There are plenty of people around here. None of them want to be in our film."
"Why is that? What are we doing wrong?" Vivian was frustrated at the thought of there being people who didn't love and adore her.
"It's not what we're doing, it's who we are. We don't have anything that anyone wants in the filmmaking world."
"Gee Grant, aren't you a regular Debbie Downer?"
"I make a special effort, just for you."
"I'm honored."
"Stop it. Now. You're acting like idiots. We're going to break now, and regroup tomorrow. I don't want to see either of you for the rest of the day."
"Good idea. Bye." Vivian turned and left.
"I'm gonna head out, then."
"See you later."

Film School: Part Six

"Mike, what were you texting me about all day? Come to the library, come to the library. I got the message. What’s up?” Vivian looked slightly confused.
“Hey.”
“Oh, um, Grant. Hi. How are you?”
“Good.”
“That’s really great, Grant.” She said “great” and “Grant” next to each other in a sentence. Mistake. It sounded gross. She looked down at the table that she was leaning on. Stood up straight.
He nodded and she turned back to Mike.
“Thanks for coming to the meeting. Sit, please.”
“So I’m allowed to be a part of this?” She sounded needier than she meant to. This was not a situation in which sounding needy would help, not in the least.
“You wanted this? I was roped in.”
“Being a part of something special makes you special. I think this is really special.”
“It is something special. This could be everything, if we make it everything.”
“Mike, let’s cut to the chase. What kind of movie are we making?” Grant interrupted whatever kind of strange, spiritual moment they had been having.
“It’s a one-actor type thing.”
“What kind of a movie has one actor?”
“It’s unique.”
“It’s plotless.”
“Anyway, we’re doing it.”
“You two are so silly and childish.”
“There’s nothing silly or childish about believing in your dreams. You should try it sometime.”
“You just got served, bro.”
“I did not just get served.”
“So let’s start this thing. We need to get storyboarding.”
“That’s gross.”
“Is there something on my face?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand while Mike chuckled.
“We don’t really need to plan this out. We can just go with the flow, you know?”
Vivian turned her head to the right, further than looked possible. “We don't really need to plan? What are you planning on making, a trainwreck?”
“Oh snap!” Mike said.
“Unnecessary, Mike.” Vivian snapped.
“Whatever. I just can't see you two working together. Ever.”
“Can we at least do a little planning on this thing before we just dive in?”
“No.” Mike and Grant said, in unison.
“You are children.”
“Probably true.”
“Well, I'm going to plan this thing out.” She paused for a second, expecting some sort of murmur of agreement. There was none, so, after looking disappointed for a second, she resumed her previously perky disposition and pulled a notebook out of her bag. “Planning is ninety percent of any successful project.”
“Mike, could I talk to you?”
“Yeah.” Mike seemed a little confused by this request.
“You have to get up and walk away.”
“I don't want to get up.”
“I'm just guessing here, but I think he wants to talk to you without me around.” At this, Grant and Mike both felt slightly guilty. They did want to talk without her presence, but they weren't intentionally making her feel left out.
“Um...Okay.”
“Just talk to him.”
They got up and walked away a little, between two bookshelves with titles like A Complete History of German Nationalism and The Soviet Union Today. “What is she doing here?” Grant seemed angry.
“She wanted to be a part of it, okay? I couldn't just say no. And she's really good. Some of the stuff I've seen of hers is way better than anything we've ever made.” A white lie wasn't really a lie, was it?
“Mike, do you go around telling people about your crazy ideas?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“This is a trend that should be stopped dead in it's tracks.”
“Is that all?”
“Whatever.”
And with that, they went back to the table where she had been sitting. Both were considerably more subdued than they had been before.
“You have an outline? Already?”
“I've been working on it for a while now.”
“Oh, um, okay.”
“Do you want to help?”
“Sure.”

Film School: Part Five

“Hi.” Vivian was standing at his door.
“Hi.”
“Are you going to let me in?” She asked, looking past Mike, into his room.
“Why don’t we talk in the hall?” Vivian was more than slightly terrifying, and Mike had no idea of the kind of shenanigans that she would get into if allowed to enter.
He closed the door behind them. The hallway was darker than the room, if that was possible. “So what did you want to talk about?” that seemed like a nicer thing to say than ‘What are you doing here?” which is what he really meant.
“Mike, I know that we’re not best friends or anything,” She looked down and tucked her hair behind her ear, while Mike was struck by how small she was. She was loud and always seemed in control, and it made her seem bigger, somehow. “But I think the movie project that you’re planning has a lot of promise, and I want to help you. I want to create something great, something that we can all be proud of.”
The appeal to emotions was not going to be effective. “What do you have to offer?”
“You’ve seen my work. You know it’s good. Good sense of plot, characters, aesthetics. You know how some movies are just so beautiful that your heart starts beating a little faster? I can make things that feel like that, that give you the same emotional impression.”
He tried not to look impressed. “I see.”
“So, can I?”
“Are you just doing this to get closer to Grant?”
“No.” She seemed just a little defiant, a spirit that didn’t usually show.
“Really? You seem awfully friendly towards him?”
“That’s because we’re friends.”
“Uh huh. I’ll think about it.”
“Okay.” She nodded and walked away.
All she wanted was to be a part of something, for once. Something good, something recognized, something with other people. Was that too much to ask for? Wasn’t she allowed to have something good? Everyone was given things by the universe, inexplicably, without asking. When was her thing going to come? Why couldn’t it be this? She was reaching out for it, she was creating an opportunity for herself, why wasn’t it working?
Because sometimes, nothing works.
Grant was almost asleep when Mike barged into his room.
“Dude, what are you doing here?”
“Remember that movie I wanted to make?”
“That was such a dumb idea, but you were super excited about it.”
“Will you help me make it?”
Grant sat up in bed, alarmed. “You’re actually making it?”
“Yeah.” He paused, in what he hoped was a solemn and dignified way. “I’m making it. Do you want in?”
Grant waited before responding, not deciding on what he would say but on how he would say it. “Yeah. I want to make it.”
“This is fantastic.”
“You’re a nutcase.”

Film School: Part Four

Mike went the next few days without opening his document of plans, without really thinking about it. There were other things to concentrate on, like work and school and the inevitability of death and the fact that Sarah still didn’t know that he existed, despite multiple attempts to get her attention. Really the whole situation with her reeked of middle school. Maybe relationships were like that, forever feeling juvenile and pathetic, even when you were older and over it.
It was silly. He was silly. She was silly. School was silly.
And so he opened the document again, this time while Grant was there. Mike knew that Grant wasn’t fully on board with the idea, but it was okay. When he saw how great this movie was going to be, he would get on board with the idea, and probably say that it had all been his idea in the first place. Clearly, he would win on this issue, which was a good thing, because there was no way Mike could handle it all on his own.
Vivian, he realized, was going to be an issue. She was sort of friends with Grant, for some strange, inconceivable reason. If he was to be involved in a major way, then she would have to involve herself too. Vivian was the kind of a crazy control freak.
Crap.
The next time he saw Grant he wanted to bring it up, he was thinking about it the whole time they were talking, but he couldn’t find a way to say it without going outright and saying “ I hate Vivian. “
He couldn’t do that, but he had to do something.
As Grant was walking away, towards his next class, he blurted out, unintentionally, “Vivan knows.”
Grant turned around, slowly, puzzled. “What does Vivian know?”
“She knows about the movie.”
“What movie?”
“The movie we’re making.”
“We’re not making a movie, Mike. We’re going to school.”
“We can do both.”
“Not well. You get one or the other or half ass on both. I want school, Mike.”
Mike gave him a condescending look. “Grant, let’s face the music.”
“Face the music? Really? Such a cliche’d line.”
“You know what I mean. Facts. Reality. You’re going to have to see the truth. You don’t give a damn about school because you’re a little rich boy who doesn’t even need college and daddy’s paying for everything you need, and he’ll keep on paying for as long as you need. You don’t have anything in your life that you’ve ever worked for. This is something that you can work for, that all of us can work for.”
“Mike, you don’t have a clue. Get out of here.” His voice was lower than it had been before, and he spoke slowly, as if every word was taking extreme effort on his part.
“Just because you’re too stupid to try anything at all doesn’t mean that you have to hold everyone else back!”
“Just because you’re too pathetic to do anything on your own doesn’t mean you have to drag other people along on your stupid ideas.”
And with that, Mike left the room and Grant, pausing for a second to ponder Mike’s new obsession, got back to his previous occupation. It was stupid, wasn’t it? Mike had those kinds of ideas all the time, Grant had seen this sort of thing before. Last month he had decided to start a business farming cockroaches, and thrown away the idea when he realized that he was terrified of cockroaches. Was this the same thing?
But movies were different. Mike really loved movies, more than anyone else he knew. He could give you the plot and starring actors of every movie he had ever seen. Even animated movies, which neither of them had seen in the past fifteen years. He was obsessed, so if he could succeed at anything (a questionable concept) he could succeed at this. They were film students, anyway. Making movies was the kind of thing people like them did. Was it really unreasonable? A cockroach farm was unreasonable. No one farmed cockroaches. But people made movies all the time. Maybe they didn’t make money at it, and maybe no one ever saw them, but it happened. So...why couldn’t it happen for them?
Clearly, it couldn’t happen for them because they were not the right people. They were not the right ones who had the right set of skills to make something happen. Or...were they?
They weren’t, Grant assured himself. They couldn’t be.
He went back to playing video games.
Grant had never been the kind of person who cared. Some people would have considered this a personality flaw or a lack of character. He did not. He considered his mentality to be a result of a privileged upbringing lacking extreme hardship, for which he considered himself to be incredibly lucky. He didn’t have to work hard for anything in his life, and it had given him a unique, if rosy, outlook on life. It was neither good nor bad, it just was, and it could not and would not be changed at present. He would cope. He would move on. He would never be the kind of celebrity who went to third-world countries to adopt babies and be photographed doing charitable works. He would be sheltered and he would be privileged, and that would be okay with him and everyone else.
Was there something wrong with that?

Film School: Part Three

The next day, Mike was sitting in class, bored. It was some academic thing, totally not his cup of tea. He had gone to college so that he could make movies, not so that he could learn about history or math or whatever it was. So, like any reasonable person, he was slacking off. Instead of taking notes, his computer was on a word document, listing a stream of consciousness of what he wanted for this film. It wasn’t a concrete thing so much as it was a mass of ideas.
At the top of the page, he had written “The kind of movie that feels different every time you watch it.” And then listed aspects. “Protagonist: likable, funny, but also profound. Average viewer can identify with him. Reasonably attractive, but not hunky.” It seemed questionable to include an appearance requirement. Did most directors assume that they could find someone who could play the part well and look right? Mike drew an elephant on the desk with a mechanical pencil he had picked up off of the ground earlier. There were more elements to a good film, he knew it. “Protagonist is fighting against someone from his past.” But who was it, from his past? This character didn’t even have a name, and already, they were trying to find some complication in his past. He didn’t have a past, really. He needed depth, complexity. He needed idiosyncrasies. Wasn’t there that one line, in Good Will Hunting, about that kind of stuff? Mike thought about it for a second. There was a line, the therapist said something about his wife, how his wife had those little oddities that everyone has, and how he was the only person who knew all of them, and how that made her special, right? Something like that. This character needed those. He started typing again, listing every weird thing that he could come up with. “Has never had a different haircut than he has now. Has never grown a beard. Is a horrible dancer. Wears no jewelry. Hated most of school. Not terribly social. Dislikes chocolate. Prefers sour candies to sweet candies. Reads books that others thought were boring, not because he liked them, but to spite people. Wears shiny black shoes with pointed toes that looked like they hurt, but didn’t Maybe cowboy boots, for “out there” occasions. Has not owned a pair of athletic shoes since high school, which was an indeterminate amount of time ago.” This was far too much to be talking about shoes, he knew it. Something else, there had to be something else to talk about. “He has a mysterious past, full of things that are ungood in a sad way, not in a dark way. Has probably contemplated suicide at some point in time, but never attempted it. Ran away from home when he was a teenager, ended up staying with extended family for a while. Sees no point in getting comfortable, getting used to a place or a routine. Perpetually unattached.”
Mike bit his lower lip and tapped on his laptop. There was something, something digging into his side. He looked over and saw Vivian, clad in a kelly green sweater, looking at him.
“Oh. Hi there.”
“What are you doing?”
“Learning, sitting in class, you know. Doin’ the school thing.” He had worked with Vivian on a project once, and she was the kind of girl who got in everyone’s business, all the time. Controlling, detail oriented.
“No, what are you typing?”
“Uhhh, this? It’s notes, you know. Because I’m paying attention in class.” Gosh, how did he become such a terrible liar? Really, now, it was pathetic.
“It doesn’t look like notes.” She looked exceedingly proud of herself, and also terrifying. “Maybe this is weird, but I’ve been watching you for the better part of an hour now. It looks as though you’re planning out a story of some sort. A visual story. Like a movie. I think it has a lot of promise.”
“What? A movie? I’m not making a movie. It’s a plan for a, um, webconic. A web, webcomic.”
“Oh.” She looked slightly crestfallen. “Well then. I’d just like to let you know that I think it could be a really great film. I’d make it with you, if you’d like.”
“Well, given that I’m not really making anything, there’s nothing for you to help with.”
“Mike.” She looked him in the eye and placed her hand on his arm.
“How do you know my name?”
“I just do. Don’t ask questions. I think that you have something real, something real and something with the potential to be amazing here, and I want to help you to this future. For you . And for me.”
“Well, that’s really nice and all, but I have to go right now.” He got up and grabbed his things.
“Class isn’t even over.”
“I have a doctor’s appointment. Syphillis. It’s very bad.”
“Oh.” She looked sad now, disappointed.
“Yeah, so see you around, right?”

Film School: Part Two

Grant was sitting on the couch, orange and tan stripes, in Mike’s room, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling and catching it on the way down. He had perfected the art of very nearly almost hitting the ceiling.
“Grant?”
“Hmmh?”
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Righto.”
“I see that.”
“You know that movie we were going to make, but never did make?”
“Which one?”
Grant sat up, catching the tennis ball in one quick swipe and placing it on the couch beside him. “The one that won us several Oscars.”
“Oh yeah, that one.”
“It’s our Good Will Hunting.”
“Bro, are you saying that you want to make Good Will Hunting?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“We can’t make Good Will Hunting. Someone else already made it.”
“I don’t want to make Good Will Hunting. I want to make a movie the same way they made Good Will Hunting.”
“Mmmm, yeah. Hey, Adam Sandler? I was wondering if you could come over here and write a screenplay with me. Can you bring Matt Damon too?” He mimed, with his phone.
“You dumbass. If they can do it, we can do it. Get me a piece of paper.”
“I don’t have any paper.”
“Fine.” He pulled a wadded up receipt out of his pocket. “We’re gonna have a character. Main guy, the one who you root for, the one who’s a better version of you.”
“Geez.”
“Not you particularly, but a general viewer.”
“I see.”
“Yeah. We got the good guy, we need a bad guy.”
“Oh, I see, it’s a deep, artsy film about a couple of superheros and evil villains? Yeah. Cool.”
“Who peed in your mountain dew?”
“What? It’s a possibility.”
“We need an antagonist. They make plot.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do we want a person? Do we want someone to be out there, trying to get them?”
“This is your thing, not mine.”
“I know, dumbass. I’m bouncing my ideas off of you.”
“Whatever.”
“The world’s just going to be angled against them. Everything out there hates us sometimes.”
Silence.
“And so he’s going to go out into the world. Because when he was a kid, he got this idea in his head, this idea that everyone was against him. Right now, he’s just trying to see if it’s true.”
“Personal journey.”
Mike nodded. That sounded okay, even when you said it out loud. Good sign, he knew. “A personal journey makes a good story.”
“But it’s been done before.”
“Your mom’s been done before.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I know. But really, is that an okay story?” He needed confirmation, reassurance before he went any further. He always had that, the worry that it wouldn’t be okay, that he wouldn’t be successful. Weird. Unwanted.
“Yeah, it is. If you do it right.”
“How would I do it right?”
“Don’t hit anyone over the head with your message of deep, touchy feely, personal growth. That’s gross.”
“I’m not an inspirational speaker.”
“Look in a mirror once in a while, okay?”
“Ouch.”
“Truth. It hurts.”
“Whatever. I’ll try not to talk about feelings too much. You’ll police me on that front.”
Grant stood up, theatrically. “What? What are you talking about?”
Mike scrunched his eyebrows and spoke in the kind of voice usually reserved for explaining very complicated concepts to unintelligent people. “Well, when we’re writing the script for our film, you will tell me when I’m writing something that is more emotional than you’d like. Get it? You can make changes so that it’s not sappy, which everything I write is, apparently.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t I just explain what I was talking about?”
“No, I didn’t catch that one bit. There was something about me changing things, I think, and that seems like it was out of place and very unlikely. I’m not doing this. This is your stupid little project, and you can do your own thing with it.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’ll just screw around with it myself, and you can do whatever you want. You’re right, you’d probably just make it all suck.” Mike said, feigning a lack of confidence.
“I would make it all suck, even more than you would.”
“Why even bother making a movie, right?”
“This is what I’ve been saying all along.”
“Shut up.”

Film School: Part One

Everyone sat down in the theater for a clandestine showing of their film. Each of them had seen it, in bits and pieces, editing it into something coherent, but this was the first time they’d watched it together, all the way through. Someone turned the lights out and pressed play on the computer. Black screen. “Screw the Danger” in white letters. Helvetica. Grant had pushed for it, Clark had hated it, and the others had more important things to care about than typefaces. The letters dropped away in a cute little animation. Clark’s idea.
The black turned into a greyscale image, which turned into a coloured image, still with a lot of grey and dark blue tones. Vivian had said that they should start out with that aesthetic.
The camera was zooming in towards the back of Clark’s head.
“It seemed cool at the time, but now, so strange. Awkward.”
“I think it’s okay. It’s an original style to start in.”
“Shut up!”
“Fine!”
Clark turned around. Pale, skinny, wide jaw, wide pointed nose and messy bleached hair. He was singing something, but you couldn’t quite read his lips and the voiceover was talking, slow then faster and faster, reading poems without the appropriate pauses and rhythm.
Then it went silent. His lips stopped moving at the very same instant. He looked up. The camera panned to the sky, and back to him, now laying down on impossibly green grass.
A pair of shoes walked up next to his head and Clark started talking.
They remembered how the exact words had been ad-libbed. It hadn’t mattered what he said, so long as it seemed like he was spilling his guts to the camera/ And the effect, they unanimously decided, had been positive.
The camera switched to a bird, just sitting on a little branch. It moved it’s head, looked down, and then just flew away.
Fade to black.
And now Clark was sitting at the counter in a diner, fifties style. He was wearing a button down shirt and tie. Drinking coffee and staring straight forward. He never took his hand off the mug. When he was finished, he reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Took out money, laid it on the counter, stood up, and walked away.
He walked outside, and the camera focused on his shoes, shiny and black, looking like they would fit in far better in a church, worn by a man who was religious because he was a sinner than the Clark they knew. But in that moment, Clark, kicking pieces of gravel as he walked down the side of the road, became someone new, someone fresh.
“This is amazing.”
“Was I wearing brown socks with black pants and black shoes in that shot?”
“It doesn’t matter, it’s perfect.”
“I can’t believe you let me go like that.”
And then they were silenced by a passing semi truck that blew Clark’s hair to the side. And he turned away from the road, took off his shoes, loosened his tie, and started running. They all remembered shooting this scene, how Clark insisted that they get it right the first time, because there was no way he was running away from them twice. They had filmed until he turned into a speck in the woods at the end of the field, and taken years to come back. They’d filmed too, when he was coming back. It wasn’t planned, but they had put it in during the credits. To give closure to the scene, which , someone suggested, would leave the viewer feeling satisfied more than a scene without closure would.
The movie went on like that. Clark didn’t like it. It was too much of him, too much of the strange shots at strange locations, not enough plot. It wasn’t a story, it was a study in narcissism.
And when it was over, someone got up to turn off the computer and projector and turn on the lights.
“It’s not wh-”
“No. We’re not discussing it. Not now. We need to let it sink in, to become a part of us, before we try and do something more with it.”
“Okay. I’m find with that.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m good with that too.”
And their group, having felt so connected, so wildly together a mere hour ago, dissipated.

Once Upon a Time

In a land far, far away...
There was a team of directors who were to direct a play.  Sadly, they couldn't think of a play to do  They were sad.  Then, one of them realized that she could write a play just for them to preform.  She wrote a play.  They all lived happily ever after.
If you want to read this play, go here.

Fiction Friday

Or Old School Fiction Friday.  Or Flashback Fiction Friday.  Or Wait - Is That A School Assignment From Sophomore Year Fiction Friday.

Whatever you want to call it, I was going through an old flash drive and found this.  Philosophes.  In hell.  I distinctly remember thinking that this was hilarious.  And you get to see my casting decisions as well.  Party on.

    An Epic Salon in Hell!

    Characters-

    Samantha-Machiavelli: Believes that the devil should stomp out bad mutinous ideas in hell.

    Sanyia-Neitszche:

    Emaline-Robespierre: Believes that he should rule, wants to kill everyone.

    Marie-Satan: Welcomes everyone to hell.

 Satan: I am having some issues with my control of hell. There is a newcomer, I think his name is Hitler.  He keeps on trying to take over hell.  It’s ridiculous.  We must stop him.  As a significant philosopher of governmental theory, I have invited you to come and tell me about your opinions on how to best preserve my control of hell at my salon.

Robespierre: That sounds like a fabulous idea.  You know, that’s how I started my whole revolution thing. Maybe we should start with a new title. “Devil” has to go. Sounds too mean.  Perhaps we should try Citizen-

Satan: No, no, no, I don’t want to start a revolution.  I just want to maintain control.

Machiavelli: I can help you maintain control.  I will maintain control.  I can do this.  I am the ninja of maintaining control of large groups of people.

Satan: Really?

Machiavelli: Do you know who I am?  I’m Machiavelli.  Hello.  That means that I’m full of excellent ideas about how to keep the people down.  I love to keep the people down. I love it like zombies love brains.

Satan: How do you suggest we keep the people down?

Machiavelli: You have to be fierce. It’s better if they hate you than if they love you, but you probably can’t have both. It’s a part of life. 

Nietzsche: But, he’s dead.

Machiavelli: Whatever, it’s a figure of speech!

Nietzsche: You have to be Superman!

Satan: Superman? But isn’t he good?

Nietzsche: No, no, no. This is a different kind of Superman. This Superman is a philosopher.

Satan: And this Superman can help me defeat this Hitler?

Nietzsche: Superman can do anything.

Machiavelli

You have to outsmart this Hitler

Robespierre: What does he want to do?

Satan: He wants to take over and create a superior race.

Nietzsche: A superior race?

Satan: Yeah-the Aryan race or something.

Nietzsche: Then maybe Hitler should rule. He does have a good quantum of power.

Satan: What? No. I need to keep my position as THE ruler of Hell.

Robespierre: Just kill him. It’s as simple as that. We could use the guillotine, if you like.

Nietzsche: You’re doing it all wrong. We need a Superman. Get him in now!

Machiavelli: I think you should kill Hitler then put his head on a stick. That would make for a nice example.

Robespierre: No, just kill him. Kill them all! Him and his so-called “pure” race.

Satan: What the fork? That would be like half the population. All I need to do is keep control. If there are no people, what the heck am I controlling? Oh yeah….NOTHING!

Robespierre: However this is Hell we are talking about.  People are pretty much dead as it is in this place.  (To Nietzsche and Machiavelli) We should just kill Satan.

Machiavelli: This plan I like.

Nietzsche: This is a very different idea, but I am completely for this plan as well.

Robespierre: Alright let’s come up with a master plan

Machiavelli: Okay so we should just call Hitler, since he murdered thousands in Europe already. Then we shall get rid of Hitler later.

Nietzsche: Hmmmmm….I like this idea quite a lot. It is very dark, but I like it.

Robespierre: I like dark things too!  TO SATAN: Where’s Hitler?

Satan: I have no idea.

Robespierre: Well, that's a problem.  Find him, bring him here.  We’ll take care of him.

Neitzsche: Do you feel bad lying to him?

I think there was more.  There really should be more of this, because it is clearly stellar material.  I'll check at school tomorrow to see if I've saved anything there.  In the meantime, ARTHUR MILLER, GET OFF OF MY RUNWAY.
Edit: I found the rest of it at school. Here it is.  It's very nice.  There are some edits that overlap with what I posted earlier.

Robespierre: I like dark things too! Where’s Hitler?
Satan: What are you whispering about? (whispered)
Robespierre: We’re looking for Hitler so we can kick his butt.
Satan: I’ll show you where he is.
Robespierre, Satan, Nietzsche leave
(Machiavelli stays, smiling sadistically)
Machiavelli: (soliloquy) Well, I want to kill somebody. I feel like Robespierre is my biggest threat. He’s the most Machiavellian, out of everyone there. Is it weird to use your own name as an adjective? Maybe. But I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who had a name that was an adjective. Or maybe a verb. Could you machevelli that for me? See, doesn’t that sound nice? Yes. Yes it does. It sounds delicious.

Robespierre and Nietzsche come back in

Machiavelli: Where did you lose Satan?

Robespierre and Nietzsche exchange glances and then say “we took care of him”

Machiavelli: I really didn’t think you two would have the guts to do that.



Robespierre: *Angrily* What do you mean? I killed thousands. I ruled all of France.

Machiavelli: Oh yes you did. And whose ideas did you use to do that?

Robespierre: Certainly not yours.
Machiavelli: Shakes head and laughs.
Nietzsche: It’s so funny that you two believe that you can rule. You are mere mortals. You are not supermen. Supermen should clearly be the ones ruling everything. Not you fools.
Machiavelli: And what makes you think that we’re not Supermen?

Nietzsche: You’re not perfect. You don’t possess the kind of features that a Superman has.
Robespierre and Machiavelli glare and walk towards him.
Nietzsche runs away, preferably squeaking.
Machiavelli laughs, smirks, whatever. (Awkward silence…)
Machiavelli: So…who’s going to rule Hell now?

Robespierre: We should have a Hamlet-style fight to the death!

(they fight, they die)

Robespierre: O Fortinbras! He has my dying voice!

Fiction Friday

I'm sorry. I do not know what is happening with this. Did I mention that I was sorry? Because I am.

I see the stars all on their own
Tonight
In the woods, with only the trees.
I remember when it was just you and me.
Before the world fell in
through the ceiling
on top of us.
Remember how much we laughed?
That one day when we drove to
the beach and raced into the waves
so loud and so quiet and so together and
so alone.
And it was strange
at that moment
because I remember
thinking that
we were perfect together
but only at that second
and
soon
everything would
change.

And I'm a little bit scared
you know how
I get scared for
no reason sometimes
and when I
did, you could always tell
even if I tried to hide it.
You said it was in my eyes.
And that was why we had been so
amazing together
like we could conquer the world.

Fiction...Saturday

Don't ask.
There's a lot of things that I don't like about this story, but I need to put something on the blog right now. While typing this up, I read a word that I had written that appeared to be "froe" I do not know what this word means. I am special.
Here goes nothing.


My feet are trying to get out of these shoes and my hands are ripping violently at the chains and suddenly, after years of tearing my fingers to shreds from trying so hard, I break free.
At first, I'm shocked. I run and scream and jump and I'm naked but it doesn't matter because I am so happy, for once in my life.
Pure. Unburdened.
After all that, I thought they might notice. They might see that I wasn't like them anymore, that I had broken out of the mold. I tried to pretend. I was like a clown, having all the same features but incredibly out of proportion, like them, only not.
I tiptoe between people, like statues, frozen in time. I'm the only one who's alive here, and I love it. By failing to live, they've unknowingly given me my own world to play in, to do whatever I want. It's fun at first and then I feel alone. Not lonely, just alone. It's not sad, but it is quiet. I like the quiet because it's very free and very alone, and I've never had enough of that.
I was born to a world of screams, passed back and forth between people who talked far too much for their own good and then I grew and they screamed at me sto don't run don't fall and later quiet down listen to me pay attention to me I matter more than you and then I started school and it got even worse and everyone around me was yelling all the time only now they called it fun and they called it recess but I didn't think like them and I didn't play like them and they were still the same even years later.
But it's going to stay quiet now, I think.


So, what do you think of it? Do I want to know? Hm...we'll ponder that. In the meantime, if you'll excuse me, I'll be off at The Selby, which is like The Sartorialist's cooler interior design cousin.

Fiction Friday

I just wanted you to know that I did 81 pushups (well, the knee kind) in a row today. Yesterday. Thursday, whatever. It's worth writing home about.
This is the second part of that one story. Remember?

And there was still a part of me that questioned it, a part of me that wondered if we would want to be there, when the supplies started running out. Did we want to be here now? I had thought that I did, thought that I would be one of the few, one of the fighters.

I'm not sure about that, not any more.

The first to go was an old man. He talked a lot. We all talked a lot in the beginning, but his was different. While the rest of us were trying to decide what to do, where to go, if anyone else was alive, he was telling us about his family. He was talking about people, his people. He was talking like they were still alive, like he was going to see them soon.

One night, we were sleeping in the woods, in lean-to's, before we found our tents. We heard rustling in the trees, but we didn't think anything of it. There were still enough animals out there that it wasn't surprising.

No one was shocked when they heard the gunshots. We just hadn't realized that he had a gun.

There were two others who hanged themselves, only a day apart. That was after we had stopped walking all together, and started keeping our own pace, a snake stretched a mile long. They just couldn't handle being alone, I think.
After that, there was one more. Yesterday, or it could have been the day before, a short woman who I'd never heard speak (except maybe to the one who was first to go) took a bit of tubing out of her pack, sucked some gasoline out of an abandoned car, and lit herself on fire.

I realized how much we hand changed when non of us even looked shocked.

That was when I asked myself if I still wanted to be around.

There were seven of us left. We didn't speak. We hadn't spoken since the first one to go. We didn't know each other's names. I had given them nicknames in my head. The weird, kinda crazy guy who had appointed himself to be the leader, he was Alpha. The skinny guy who hadn't looked like he would last two days when we started out was DeadMeat. All one word. The little one was Diva, because you could tell that she had been one before the incident. She was having trouble adjusting, I could tell, but no one said anything. I wasn't sure that any of us even remembered how to talk. Doesn't the brain just lose the pieces that it doesn't need? Maybe that had happened, maybe we all had words, but no speech. The other girl, the incredibly plain one, she was Wall. I was working on a better name, that wasn't really sufficient. There was another guy who had started out our journey just as horrible as we all did now. His name was Skid. And then there was Raw, who only did things in the excess. He would run fast and then walk incredibly slowly. I might have hated him for it, if I had the energy to hate anyone right now. We didn't have the time to hate any more. There weren't enough people to hate any more. One would have thought that we were better people now than we were before, but I knew that wasn't it. We had just become different...now...that...everything...

I fell asleep, finally. And I dreamed. I never used to dream. I'd go through life, hearing about the way things were in this other dimension. I was jealous, no, more curious about what it was like to dream. What would it be like, dreaming, I asked myself when I went to sleep.

I have dreams now. I have dreams that aren't so much dreams as they're memories escaping, flashes of emotion that I don't want to feel. Fights, disasters, anger, failure. I always dream about things that make me feel like that, make me feel worthless. I'm afraid that I'm dreaming them wrong sometimes, that I was originally a horrible person before, not just the bad person I thought that I was. I wonder how much my memories are addled now. These are the only memories I have, really. Even if I try, I can never remember my past while I'm awake. Maybe it's amnesia, maybe it's because of the bomb, maybe it's self-defence. I don't think I'll ever know why, and I don't think that I'll ever be able to remember while I'm awake.

Before the bomb, I always thought that the cure for all of my issues would be more time to think. If I just had time to look at all of my memories, all my past laid out to examine everything and see where I've gone wrong. Then fix things, obviously.
I've had time to think, now. Not about my past, but about life and decisions and just about everything that was making me crazy.
Surprise surprise, that's not how it worked out. When I had the opportunity to stop and think about everything, things just got worse. Thinking made me into a different person than I'd been before it happened. Thinking about things, it made me kind of deep. I was never deep before. I was thoughtless, and while things may not have been good, they were better, weren't they? Or was it just in my head, a sick kind of nostalgia? I hate that I'll never know.

But I'll get used to it, I know I will. I'll eventually be okay with the fact that I don't know what the future holds, that I don't know enough of my past. It will just take time.

That, I realized, is what we have in common. We're broken. We were broken from the start, but the bomb tore down all the curtains, let everyone see just how broken and messed up we really were.

And that was fine.

Fiction Friday?

It's Friday as long as I haven't gone to sleep, right? On with the story. This is part one. Part two will be coming at a later date.

Kill me, or something else will. We're running. We might be running to smewhere. An outsider might think that we're running for a good reason, because we want to. They're lucky. I wish we were running to something or from something. We're just running, running so we don't do something worse. Running so we don't just kill each other.

I'm fine with that. I've worn huge holes through my shoes, and then I took them off and threw them into the ditch. We had all done that at one point or another. We had started out mostly presentable, somewhat dressed up. Now we were barefoot and dirty, in torn up clothes. We were the only onew who were left, as far as we knew.
It was okay. There was nothing to be sad about, not really. You were gone, but you had been going for a long time before it happened. We're all going, in a way. It just tore you away, like ripping off a band-aid.

It didn't matter though. I was done dealing with it. We hat all finished dealing with it for what felt like weeks. We didn't really know. .

I don't know when time stopped mattering to us. Probably around the time when dead bodies stopped shocking us, but hey, who really cares? I dont'.

None of us really talk any more. I have a theory about people, and that theory states that there are two ways in which people can become emotionally close. The first is spending a lot of time together. People don't do that. It takes too much effort and we don't know how. We've lost that ability, as a culture. Bits of past get forgotten like that. It's not like it was that important anyway.

The second way, that's what we all have now. It's growing close through hardships, strangers who have this weird new kind of relationship. We don't know what to call it, we don't know what to think about it. It's very foreign to me, but it's still a part of me.

We set up camp at the first sutiable spot we can find after the sun has gone down. We find wood, set up our tents (breaking into that outdoors store really was a fantastic idea, since it also yeilded some freeze-dried food. We were saving it for later, when everything in the fields and grocery stores was gone) start some firse, find some water and boil it. We had decided that, since we don't know what happened, really, we were going to boil all the water we drank. We weren't idiots though. We knew that there was probably nuclear contamination in us, in our food, in our water. We would all die of cancer. It kind of sucked, knowing that even if we lived through all this crap, we'd still die from it.

It had occoured to me that one day, we would run out of stuff. There wasn't food growing anymore, and we would run out, eventually.

There's a novel? Forrealz?

It occours to me that I have a novel ("Because I have a voice!" from The King's Speech trailer, which I have not seen the movie for because it is only showing in New York, Toronto, and L.A.) and since I have said novel, I can give you quotations. Yay quotations.

“Well, it's sort of like an apology. In fact, I think you deserve a formal apology. So here it is; I'm sorry. I'm really sorry that I thought and talked like I knew everything about your life, because I totally didn't. I'm sorry.” I looked into her eyes, which were pointedly looking away from me “Will you accept my apology?”
“I would.” My hopes flew, until I realized quite what that could mean. “Except for one thing.”
“And what is that one thing?”
“The fact that you said it in the first place. The fact that you said it in the first place tells me one thing, and that is that you think you really do understand me. You don't. I need to talk to someone, and you're here, and I'm going to talk. I hope you're okay with that. I hope you don't read more into it than it's meant as, because all I need is a friend. You're that friend.”
I nodded. “Okay then. I'm here to listen.”
“Just listening.”
“Yeah...yeah, just listening.”
“And not judging.”
“No judging will be happening.”
“And all psychoanalysis will occur solely inside your own head.”
“But it's helpful, it really is. I'm just trying to help.”
She glared at me.
“Okay then, I get it. No psychoanalysis. Got it. That's fine.” She could be a little scary sometimes.
“Here it goes.” She nodded, closed her eyes, and started talking.

Fiction Friday

I'm jealous of you. I know this is a fully irrational feeling, but I can't help it and I don't care to help it in the least.

Is that wrong? Is dissatisfaction wrong?

Is rebellion wrong? And what if, for once in my whole entire life, I did something that no one would have expected me to do and what would they do then? What could they do then? They have no where to run, no where to hide, and nothing that they can change about me. Bite me. Try it. Kill me. Try it.
I wonder sometimes, if they, if you pass out life as a punishment or as a gift.

I think it's a little bit of both, depending on what kind of a mood you're in. That's sick. That is really, truly sick.

I want you to care about me, and I want you to leave me alone and I want you to be concerned about me, all at once. Can you manage that? Please? For me?

A Belated Fiction Friday

I was going through my drafts and dug up this old post from July. I don't know why I didn't post it then, but I'm sure I had a reason.

I was going to post this yesterday, but then I forgot and it suddenly turned into today. Funny how time happens, isn't it? I wrote this a couple nights ago when I couldn't fall asleep 'till 6:30 or something. Staying up late is fun until about 4, when all you want to do is get some sleep. Annnd...I found a new video of Jo. Why didn't anyone tell me about this when it happened? I think it's cool.


Anyway, here it goes. The story, I mean.

"What do you do when you're alone?"
"What do you mean? I'm always alone."
"You're not alone right now."
"Actually, I am."
"No you're not, silly. I'm here."
"Yeah. You. But you're always here. You don't count."
"Ouch, what would you do if I was gone?"
"I would wait for you to come back, of course."
"I'm never coming back."
"Way to tell me in advance. I'll spend my time hating you with ever fiber of my being."
"Why is your being so fibrous?"
"Because I eat my fruits and vegetables, just like mommy says I should."
"When was the last time you talked to mommy? She disappointed in you?"
"I don't have a mother."
"Neither does God, and he turned out alright."
"Yeah, something just went wrong with me, I guess."
"Something went wrong with all of us, didn't it?"
"Then what seperates them from us?"
"Getting caught."
"Someone once told me that grade-school bullies end up as cops or criminals."
"I wasn't a bully."
"Neither was I."
"So we keep on getting fucked by the bullies, over and over."
"Pretty much."
"Shit like that makes me lose faith in socicety a little more every day."
"They've lost faith in you, don't you think?"
"Kicked outta the playground for good."
"I always wonder if life is easier for other people."
"Or if they're just better actors."
"I used to want to be an actor."
"Really?"
"I thought it was an art where I could hide myself. Everything else, it seems to revolve around putting yourself out there, and I just wanted to hide."
"I kind of think we're all looking for someplace to hide."
"But it's better for us, I think, not to find it."
"Getting too safe and too comfortable is what kills everyone sooner or later. You have to keep moving, even when you don't want to."
"What's the danger in getting yourself killed sooner rather than later? The dead only pity the living."
"And you can talk to them?"
"No, but I like to think that they have it a little better than this."
"Oh, welcome to the middle ages! Where are the horsemen?"
"I killed them."
"You gotta stop killing the symbolism. Wasn't the house of Usher enough for you?"
"I just wanted to be one of the cool kids."
"You're not a cool kid, and you're stuck that way."
"Can't people change?"
"Never enough. Never, ever enough."