Original Stuff: Between
Author: Stephanie
Genre: Prose
Title: Between
Word Count: 3610
Rating/Warning: R (Rape, Death, Inability To Write When Half Asleep)
Summary: Once upon a time, life was always just as fucked up as it is now.
Chapter One: Happy
There was once a very happy girl who lived in this apartment.
The mattress I’m sitting on now is stained with vomit, piss, shit, a thousand other things that can puss out from a human or dog or whatever animals we have let in here over the years. The room is choked with smoke, for once entirely my fault. There is a cigarette burning in one ash tray, a joint resting beside it. I take a hit of one, let the high sink in, take the other and try and bring myself back with the coughing fit that follows.
Fancy and reality. I move between the two looking for a balance. That exact spot in the middle where both are open to you entirely. Instead I find myself hitting the ends each time. Fancy hits hard, then reality harder, and I can’t figure out how they did it.
The way I’m sitting on the mattress with my typewriter, instead of at the table where it would be easier to work, is a direct result of the fucked workmanship of my apartment. I can reach out and flick a bit of my own skin around in the trail of blood and bits of flesh leading from the loose nail in the kitchen into the bathroom.
I wrapped my foot in newspaper and stuffed it in a sock. Only when I woke up, it had turned black looking where the flesh had been pulled away, and I couldn’t stand up. So I took the sock off, and picked at the blackened skin.
It isn’t the sort of apartment that breeds happiness.
Beside me, this girl, she says that she read in a book about a rich kid who carved the word ’FAKE’ across her stomach. She did, and almost killed herself, but her parents locked her away in a psyche ward. All the money in the world, and she got locked away in just another asylum. The point of the book, she said, was that the rich are less happy then the poor. It was about a psychologist, and all her rich, unhappy patience who would rather be poor.
So I ask, had the author, had she seen the poor lately?
She says, she named it Willow. It’s a good name, she thinks, and it only took her three years. Willow, it’s perfect because she can call it Will. No matter what the gender.
She says, do you remember, there was once a very happy girl in this apartment. She asks, have I mentioned her yet? In the book that I’m suppose to be writing.
I pick at my foot, peeling back a strip of skin. No more painful then pulling off a calluses, not until I hit the bright red skin around the darkened bits. Then it hurts like fuck.
Take a hit of fancy to make it go away. Then reality, to make it hurt again, so that the next pull will be worse. You always want things to hurt so you can tell people about it. You want them to be painless so you don’t end up in pain. The middle ground between the two, the perfect balance.
I tell her to fuck off, I’m getting to it, and I peel of skin, throwing it with the others, in the line of dried blood from yesterday.
And she says, she was always happy. But never as happy as I am now. And she’s right.
Chapter Two: Porn
I don’t actually remember how I met Will, so I’ve fucked myself over in this chapter.
I know everyone should have that perfect story about how they met their best friend. The generation before us remembers where they were for everything. The Kennedy assassination, the Berlin wall, every fucking time the present ate a fucking meal, they remember where they were.
I don’t even remember how I met Will.
I remember how my two favorite TV characters kissed, and I remember the first PG-13 movie I was allowed to see. The first computer my family got, I remember bouncing in a chair while my dad set it up, hoping we liked it. It was a piece of fucking shit, and I remember it. But the details of how I met Will are gone.
I know that in middle school, I knew him, and by freshmen year, I took drama even though I hating being on stage, just because he was taking it, and it would suck not being in class with him.
I guess that is what is really important, anyway.
I remember that Will use to jokingly call my mom ‘mom’ and she would, not so jokingly, call him ‘son’. I remember that from junior to senior year of high school, he almost lived with us. There was nothing wrong with his parents, they were less strict then mine, even. They bought Will a car and beer for the same birthday, but still he lived at our house. Enough that my mom bought him an extra mattress that now smells of piss, and shit, and pus. But at the time, it usually just smelled like teenage boy, which is almost just as bad.
I guess it isn’t too important how we really got there, just that be senior year, my parents were buying him socks and underwear, and my mom helped him write his college application.
I remember, junior year, Will said, you’re gay right? He didn’t really ask it, just said it to me.
So I said, fuck.
Then, I don’t know.
See, when I thought of the guys at our school, no I wasn’t gay. I didn’t want to make out with any of them, and that was what being gay was, right? Then no, if I had to pick out a guy I knew, no I wasn’t. But then, same with the girls. I didn’t want to fuck any of them, not even in a typical teenage, screw anything that moved way.
But, Will said he’d seen my computer. Of course he had, he lived at my house. He said he saw the gay porn. And the straight porn. And the lesbian porn. So what did I like?
I liked sex, I think, but not people. Sex sounded fun, sex was hot and messy and wonderful. It’s just people. I wasn’t that attracted to them.
So, being a seventeen year old guy, you know what he said already. He said, so ducks then?
And I said, fuck.
And I think, yeah, I think that was when I met Will, you know?
Chapter Three: Fucked
I never could play much with other kids. You know all those popular kid games? Hide and seek and all that, I hated them. I hated playing with other kids. They always fucked the games up.
Other kids liked house, but I lived in a fucking house and I knew it was no fun. Other kids wanted to play spacemen or cowboys or cops, and I wanted them to go the hell away and stop shooting at me.
I liked to play this one game call ‘Kidnapped’. I would sit in the front yard, just sit there, and maybe talk to myself to keep myself occupied. I would sit and sit and sit, quiet as any kid could be, which isn’t that quiet. Sit and sit and sit, and then a car would turn the corner near our house, and I would scream.
The idea being that this car, they were going to stop and pull me into the trunk and leave me there. So I had to scream and run and hide before they passed. If I didn’t hide in time, I died.
It was fucked game. After a year of it, my mom kept running outside to see what was happening when I screamed. Oh, she thought, he’s just playing that game of his.
Would have served her right, if someone had kidnapped me. Some creep had grabbed him and shoved me into the back seat. Maybe stripped me down, made me suck him off, and then throw me back into my yard, ashamed and crying.
I only say that, because I wanted it to happen.
See, when I played it, I had to hide, and if I didn’t, then I would be caught, and I would lay on the grass and imagine the scene. Me in the trunk, then the bad guys pulling me out, making me do things. It started out childish, you know. They made me clean their house, or sold me as a slave, or beat me to death, but I started to get older and it started to change.
Like with little girls, their first sexual act is with their Barbies, slamming them together where Ken’s dick should have been. Ask any girl who had those little plastic sex bunnies, they all did it.
So my first sexual act was laying in the yard with those nasty men that drove by my house to snatch me away. They would touch me and beat me and make me do it. It wasn’t my fault, like it wasn’t those girls fault that the dolls were nude and fit together. It was never really our fault. They caught me, and I couldn’t say no.
We all want to be abused, but never injured. We want to tell people, oh look at me, look how hurt I am, but we don’t want the actual bruises that go with it, you know? We want the excitement and glamour of a good beating without the actual beating.
Even as an eight year old spread out on his lawn, no concept of shit, rape was the perfect sex to me. You are violated without losing your innocence. Poor me, I had sex but I’m still pure, I didn’t want it. Still an innocent child, but an innocent child whose sucked dick.
I think I’m still disappointed that no one ever kidnapped me, even though I always made sure to never hide in time.
Chapter Four: Guilt
I don’t know what they were expecting, but I’m pretty sure that I messed up every expectation my parents ever had of me.
The son they were proudest of, of course, was Will. Right up until the end, they loved him the best, and I was okay with that. I know it sounds fucked, but I didn’t care that they showered him with praise. He was so smart and responsible and charming, they would say, and it was inexplicably implied that I was pretty much worth shit compared to Will.
And I think he knew it, that I only acted like it was sibling rivalry. That I would fume in private about how much they loved him, and I would complain to it about friends, but I think he knew that I didn’t give a fuck. I pretty much knew I was screwed up, and why shouldn’t my parents have one person they could be proud of? But it felt like something I should have been pissed about, so I acted like it bothered me, and the fact that it didn’t, that honestly did get under my skin, so it wasn’t hard to act all upset and indigent about their love.
She says that fake emotions are the most real, but she knows that doesn’t make sense. But if she was right, then I am the most emotional bastard in the world.
I remember when I was little, seeing my mom cry, and I don’t think I felt bad for her. I don’t know why the fuck not, okay? I just didn’t. But I knew I was suppose to, so I went over and I hugged her and climbed up into her lap and told her I loved her. I did all of that because I felt so guilty about not feeling bad, but it made my mom feel better.
She says that I am the easiest person to talk to, because my emotions are always spot on what I should be feeling. I know, because that was always what they were feeling in books and TV and movies. So I knew how to react, and when I didn’t do it naturally, I felt guilty about it enough to over correct, to use what I saw in the movies.
Turns out that people don’t want real emotion. They want to be fond over like in the movies, they want to have that scripted sympathy. Turns out, everyone is trying to find a balance between wanting attention and not wanting to deal with the emotional clean up. So my way of not emoting, of following instructions set down by every actor I’d ever seen, that was what people wanted from me.
Turns out, when you can fake emotions, you are the perfect friend. So I kept on at it.
Guilt and jealousy, I guess those are the only two things I felt. Those are the two things I honestly remember feeling. Guilt because I had to fake those fucked up moments, because I wasn’t really feeling all that much. Jealousy for others who seemed to, you know, actually have those moments. And she says that no, that isn’t true at all. I felt something for Will.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Chapter Five: Death
Did I feel something for Will? And if I did, wouldn’t it come out when he died.
She called me the prefect friend. Sitting beside me with her it baby, she says she would still call me that, even knowing what she knows.
Even knowing that when I was confronting her, even knowing that every thing I told her was just a collection of lines I read from books, that it was the best thing she’d ever heard. That I spoke so beautifully, when I was faking distress.
She said that she can remember all this, so I better type it up. That I told her that hate did nothing, that hating the guys that kill Will, that was pretty damn fucked. Because hate killed Will, so hating those guys, it was just like her killing Will. And didn’t she love him, I asked her that. She should keep loving him, no matter what.
I think I remember the book I read that from. I think, but I don’t know. I don’t remember much.
I remember not being necessarily sad. That the first book that made me want to cry, it was so much sadder then Will’s death. Maybe that is why people appreciate faked drama so much. It is so much real than we can ever be.
Really, when Will died I just thought, fuck, who is going to pay the other quarter rent?
When Will died I thought of all the shit that we hadn’t done yet. Not in a sad way, just, that fucker, he promised we’d go out to California next year, and know who was going to go with me?
At the funeral, I remember thinking, hell, couldn’t have Will died in a nicer month than fucking January? It was freezing.
And while I was thinking that, the girl says that I was telling her, you loved him so powerful that death isn’t going to break you apart. He loved you so much that he’ll still be here with you, always. Throw away shit lines I got from some paperback novel. I don’t know.
The girl says that only in movies, do people get that upset over death. In real life, people stand in front of their love one’s corpse and think, Goddamn you, now I have to drive through rush hour traffic. They cry on each other’s shoulders and thank, great, now how are we going to send Cynthia to college.
We all know how we should act, though, from the movies we know that people don’t think those sorts of things when their loved ones die. They just cry and feel terrible, and then we feel even more terrible about not feeling that way. About not feeling some manufactured, guaranteed to be heart wrenching depression. That was what made me so good to have around at funerals. At least I knew what I was doing, instead of trying to repress all those thoughts I shouldn’t be having. I let them beat around my skull and let the guilt sink so that I felt bad enough to act it up.
What did you think about me? Of course she would ask that. Like she didn’t already know.
I peel back black sin, take a hit, try and drown it out and then keep peeling for more pain. Back and forth, trying to land somewhere in between.
I thought, fuck, who I am going to get ready for the class with a fucking corpse in the tub.
She says, but did I think it looked artistic. She shit in the tub after bleeding to death, I said, it wasn’t artistic. It was nasty. She says, yeah, but did I like it? She’d want to go out like a rich brat, so she took a bottle of valium and carved empty into her stomach.
Of course, she hadn’t been empty, but that was three whole years ago, and it doesn’t matter now.
Chapter Six: Love
The first time with another guy, I said, hey, I closed my eyes and pretended he was forcing me to do it. And I think, yeah, I think I remember feeling something when he fucked me. Not fireworks or some shit, but something. Scared, violated, and utterly turned on.
“Okay,” I said when he was over me, fingers shoved up my ass, holding my legs against my chest like I was a fucking ball, and I loved it, because I could pretend that I couldn’t struggle away. I didn’t want to struggle away, but I wanted him to make sure I couldn’t. “Okay, now hit me.”
This guy seemed confused for a while. What did I say? Hit me. You know it isn’t really proper rape unless you beat me to death afterwards. I didn’t mention that last part. Anyway, that was what I told him, and the guy just shrugged, and then he hit me.
“Fuck!” I jumped out of bed, kicking this guy away and grabbed my pants, flying out of there.
Turns out, I hadn’t actually wanted to be hit.
The way Will tells it, that is a lot like how love happens.
He says that when he met Cynthia, he didn’t know he would be in love with her. He just wanted to fuck her a few times, and she seemed kind of cool so he let her hang around our shitty apartment with lose nails sticking everywhere. He said that he said he loved her a few times. “I love you,” he said, “I love you.”
Then, when he actually feel in love with her, he ran away.
The way Will tells it, he said it because he thought he wanted to be in love. Fake movie love, with the kissing and the happy ending. Then, when he actually fell in love with this happy girl he was keeping in the apartment, he was fucked.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Will tells me from the other side of the bed. “Suddenly it was like, fuck, you’re pregnant and fuck, we’re poor and fuck, no love isn’t making it better and we will not have a happy ending but I wanted to stay anyway.”
He asks me now what he asked me then. “What do you call that?” He asked me, master of all emotional logic. Who knew exactly what reaction went with what situation, because I had to know to be able to react. He was scared shitless about this, about all the way their life was a mess, and he knew it would only get worse, but he wanted to stay with Cynthia anyway. That was never how it looked in the movies, so what do you call it. When you want something, when you feel that much for a person on accident.
And I say, “Rape.”
Chapter Seven: Ending
There was once a very happy girl who lived in this apartment.
She seemed out of place, I’ll give you that. Of course, everyone thinks I’m a very happy boy. I teacher children, right, which is what I wanted. What I went to school for. And I have this roommate best friend who every one thought I was in love with. And we had this life, in this apartment, with a very happy girl.
Then Will tells me, “I only wanted to love her like in the movies. Not this shit.” And he leaves to the ATM to empty out his bank card to give the money to Cynthia to raise the kid so that he can run away and find movie love, not the real thing.
And then some kid stabs him in the spine.
And when I ask, he says, it felt like love, which feels like rape, which feels like a stabbing. He isn’t really sure how else to explain it.
And when I ask Cynthia she said it felt like being rich of a day, when she cut open her own stomach.
And I type all this up between smoking the joint and the cigarette, trying to find that balance between what is real and what is fake, thinking that if I can just hit the middle, that is where I want to be. And I write about them, or at least try, but it only turns into letters, not really words. Back and fourth, more letters and less sense. But I don’t really know.
Genre: Prose
Title: Between
Word Count: 3610
Rating/Warning: R (Rape, Death, Inability To Write When Half Asleep)
Summary: Once upon a time, life was always just as fucked up as it is now.
Chapter One: Happy
There was once a very happy girl who lived in this apartment.
The mattress I’m sitting on now is stained with vomit, piss, shit, a thousand other things that can puss out from a human or dog or whatever animals we have let in here over the years. The room is choked with smoke, for once entirely my fault. There is a cigarette burning in one ash tray, a joint resting beside it. I take a hit of one, let the high sink in, take the other and try and bring myself back with the coughing fit that follows.
Fancy and reality. I move between the two looking for a balance. That exact spot in the middle where both are open to you entirely. Instead I find myself hitting the ends each time. Fancy hits hard, then reality harder, and I can’t figure out how they did it.
The way I’m sitting on the mattress with my typewriter, instead of at the table where it would be easier to work, is a direct result of the fucked workmanship of my apartment. I can reach out and flick a bit of my own skin around in the trail of blood and bits of flesh leading from the loose nail in the kitchen into the bathroom.
I wrapped my foot in newspaper and stuffed it in a sock. Only when I woke up, it had turned black looking where the flesh had been pulled away, and I couldn’t stand up. So I took the sock off, and picked at the blackened skin.
It isn’t the sort of apartment that breeds happiness.
Beside me, this girl, she says that she read in a book about a rich kid who carved the word ’FAKE’ across her stomach. She did, and almost killed herself, but her parents locked her away in a psyche ward. All the money in the world, and she got locked away in just another asylum. The point of the book, she said, was that the rich are less happy then the poor. It was about a psychologist, and all her rich, unhappy patience who would rather be poor.
So I ask, had the author, had she seen the poor lately?
She says, she named it Willow. It’s a good name, she thinks, and it only took her three years. Willow, it’s perfect because she can call it Will. No matter what the gender.
She says, do you remember, there was once a very happy girl in this apartment. She asks, have I mentioned her yet? In the book that I’m suppose to be writing.
I pick at my foot, peeling back a strip of skin. No more painful then pulling off a calluses, not until I hit the bright red skin around the darkened bits. Then it hurts like fuck.
Take a hit of fancy to make it go away. Then reality, to make it hurt again, so that the next pull will be worse. You always want things to hurt so you can tell people about it. You want them to be painless so you don’t end up in pain. The middle ground between the two, the perfect balance.
I tell her to fuck off, I’m getting to it, and I peel of skin, throwing it with the others, in the line of dried blood from yesterday.
And she says, she was always happy. But never as happy as I am now. And she’s right.
Chapter Two: Porn
I don’t actually remember how I met Will, so I’ve fucked myself over in this chapter.
I know everyone should have that perfect story about how they met their best friend. The generation before us remembers where they were for everything. The Kennedy assassination, the Berlin wall, every fucking time the present ate a fucking meal, they remember where they were.
I don’t even remember how I met Will.
I remember how my two favorite TV characters kissed, and I remember the first PG-13 movie I was allowed to see. The first computer my family got, I remember bouncing in a chair while my dad set it up, hoping we liked it. It was a piece of fucking shit, and I remember it. But the details of how I met Will are gone.
I know that in middle school, I knew him, and by freshmen year, I took drama even though I hating being on stage, just because he was taking it, and it would suck not being in class with him.
I guess that is what is really important, anyway.
I remember that Will use to jokingly call my mom ‘mom’ and she would, not so jokingly, call him ‘son’. I remember that from junior to senior year of high school, he almost lived with us. There was nothing wrong with his parents, they were less strict then mine, even. They bought Will a car and beer for the same birthday, but still he lived at our house. Enough that my mom bought him an extra mattress that now smells of piss, and shit, and pus. But at the time, it usually just smelled like teenage boy, which is almost just as bad.
I guess it isn’t too important how we really got there, just that be senior year, my parents were buying him socks and underwear, and my mom helped him write his college application.
I remember, junior year, Will said, you’re gay right? He didn’t really ask it, just said it to me.
So I said, fuck.
Then, I don’t know.
See, when I thought of the guys at our school, no I wasn’t gay. I didn’t want to make out with any of them, and that was what being gay was, right? Then no, if I had to pick out a guy I knew, no I wasn’t. But then, same with the girls. I didn’t want to fuck any of them, not even in a typical teenage, screw anything that moved way.
But, Will said he’d seen my computer. Of course he had, he lived at my house. He said he saw the gay porn. And the straight porn. And the lesbian porn. So what did I like?
I liked sex, I think, but not people. Sex sounded fun, sex was hot and messy and wonderful. It’s just people. I wasn’t that attracted to them.
So, being a seventeen year old guy, you know what he said already. He said, so ducks then?
And I said, fuck.
And I think, yeah, I think that was when I met Will, you know?
Chapter Three: Fucked
I never could play much with other kids. You know all those popular kid games? Hide and seek and all that, I hated them. I hated playing with other kids. They always fucked the games up.
Other kids liked house, but I lived in a fucking house and I knew it was no fun. Other kids wanted to play spacemen or cowboys or cops, and I wanted them to go the hell away and stop shooting at me.
I liked to play this one game call ‘Kidnapped’. I would sit in the front yard, just sit there, and maybe talk to myself to keep myself occupied. I would sit and sit and sit, quiet as any kid could be, which isn’t that quiet. Sit and sit and sit, and then a car would turn the corner near our house, and I would scream.
The idea being that this car, they were going to stop and pull me into the trunk and leave me there. So I had to scream and run and hide before they passed. If I didn’t hide in time, I died.
It was fucked game. After a year of it, my mom kept running outside to see what was happening when I screamed. Oh, she thought, he’s just playing that game of his.
Would have served her right, if someone had kidnapped me. Some creep had grabbed him and shoved me into the back seat. Maybe stripped me down, made me suck him off, and then throw me back into my yard, ashamed and crying.
I only say that, because I wanted it to happen.
See, when I played it, I had to hide, and if I didn’t, then I would be caught, and I would lay on the grass and imagine the scene. Me in the trunk, then the bad guys pulling me out, making me do things. It started out childish, you know. They made me clean their house, or sold me as a slave, or beat me to death, but I started to get older and it started to change.
Like with little girls, their first sexual act is with their Barbies, slamming them together where Ken’s dick should have been. Ask any girl who had those little plastic sex bunnies, they all did it.
So my first sexual act was laying in the yard with those nasty men that drove by my house to snatch me away. They would touch me and beat me and make me do it. It wasn’t my fault, like it wasn’t those girls fault that the dolls were nude and fit together. It was never really our fault. They caught me, and I couldn’t say no.
We all want to be abused, but never injured. We want to tell people, oh look at me, look how hurt I am, but we don’t want the actual bruises that go with it, you know? We want the excitement and glamour of a good beating without the actual beating.
Even as an eight year old spread out on his lawn, no concept of shit, rape was the perfect sex to me. You are violated without losing your innocence. Poor me, I had sex but I’m still pure, I didn’t want it. Still an innocent child, but an innocent child whose sucked dick.
I think I’m still disappointed that no one ever kidnapped me, even though I always made sure to never hide in time.
Chapter Four: Guilt
I don’t know what they were expecting, but I’m pretty sure that I messed up every expectation my parents ever had of me.
The son they were proudest of, of course, was Will. Right up until the end, they loved him the best, and I was okay with that. I know it sounds fucked, but I didn’t care that they showered him with praise. He was so smart and responsible and charming, they would say, and it was inexplicably implied that I was pretty much worth shit compared to Will.
And I think he knew it, that I only acted like it was sibling rivalry. That I would fume in private about how much they loved him, and I would complain to it about friends, but I think he knew that I didn’t give a fuck. I pretty much knew I was screwed up, and why shouldn’t my parents have one person they could be proud of? But it felt like something I should have been pissed about, so I acted like it bothered me, and the fact that it didn’t, that honestly did get under my skin, so it wasn’t hard to act all upset and indigent about their love.
She says that fake emotions are the most real, but she knows that doesn’t make sense. But if she was right, then I am the most emotional bastard in the world.
I remember when I was little, seeing my mom cry, and I don’t think I felt bad for her. I don’t know why the fuck not, okay? I just didn’t. But I knew I was suppose to, so I went over and I hugged her and climbed up into her lap and told her I loved her. I did all of that because I felt so guilty about not feeling bad, but it made my mom feel better.
She says that I am the easiest person to talk to, because my emotions are always spot on what I should be feeling. I know, because that was always what they were feeling in books and TV and movies. So I knew how to react, and when I didn’t do it naturally, I felt guilty about it enough to over correct, to use what I saw in the movies.
Turns out that people don’t want real emotion. They want to be fond over like in the movies, they want to have that scripted sympathy. Turns out, everyone is trying to find a balance between wanting attention and not wanting to deal with the emotional clean up. So my way of not emoting, of following instructions set down by every actor I’d ever seen, that was what people wanted from me.
Turns out, when you can fake emotions, you are the perfect friend. So I kept on at it.
Guilt and jealousy, I guess those are the only two things I felt. Those are the two things I honestly remember feeling. Guilt because I had to fake those fucked up moments, because I wasn’t really feeling all that much. Jealousy for others who seemed to, you know, actually have those moments. And she says that no, that isn’t true at all. I felt something for Will.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Chapter Five: Death
Did I feel something for Will? And if I did, wouldn’t it come out when he died.
She called me the prefect friend. Sitting beside me with her it baby, she says she would still call me that, even knowing what she knows.
Even knowing that when I was confronting her, even knowing that every thing I told her was just a collection of lines I read from books, that it was the best thing she’d ever heard. That I spoke so beautifully, when I was faking distress.
She said that she can remember all this, so I better type it up. That I told her that hate did nothing, that hating the guys that kill Will, that was pretty damn fucked. Because hate killed Will, so hating those guys, it was just like her killing Will. And didn’t she love him, I asked her that. She should keep loving him, no matter what.
I think I remember the book I read that from. I think, but I don’t know. I don’t remember much.
I remember not being necessarily sad. That the first book that made me want to cry, it was so much sadder then Will’s death. Maybe that is why people appreciate faked drama so much. It is so much real than we can ever be.
Really, when Will died I just thought, fuck, who is going to pay the other quarter rent?
When Will died I thought of all the shit that we hadn’t done yet. Not in a sad way, just, that fucker, he promised we’d go out to California next year, and know who was going to go with me?
At the funeral, I remember thinking, hell, couldn’t have Will died in a nicer month than fucking January? It was freezing.
And while I was thinking that, the girl says that I was telling her, you loved him so powerful that death isn’t going to break you apart. He loved you so much that he’ll still be here with you, always. Throw away shit lines I got from some paperback novel. I don’t know.
The girl says that only in movies, do people get that upset over death. In real life, people stand in front of their love one’s corpse and think, Goddamn you, now I have to drive through rush hour traffic. They cry on each other’s shoulders and thank, great, now how are we going to send Cynthia to college.
We all know how we should act, though, from the movies we know that people don’t think those sorts of things when their loved ones die. They just cry and feel terrible, and then we feel even more terrible about not feeling that way. About not feeling some manufactured, guaranteed to be heart wrenching depression. That was what made me so good to have around at funerals. At least I knew what I was doing, instead of trying to repress all those thoughts I shouldn’t be having. I let them beat around my skull and let the guilt sink so that I felt bad enough to act it up.
What did you think about me? Of course she would ask that. Like she didn’t already know.
I peel back black sin, take a hit, try and drown it out and then keep peeling for more pain. Back and forth, trying to land somewhere in between.
I thought, fuck, who I am going to get ready for the class with a fucking corpse in the tub.
She says, but did I think it looked artistic. She shit in the tub after bleeding to death, I said, it wasn’t artistic. It was nasty. She says, yeah, but did I like it? She’d want to go out like a rich brat, so she took a bottle of valium and carved empty into her stomach.
Of course, she hadn’t been empty, but that was three whole years ago, and it doesn’t matter now.
Chapter Six: Love
The first time with another guy, I said, hey, I closed my eyes and pretended he was forcing me to do it. And I think, yeah, I think I remember feeling something when he fucked me. Not fireworks or some shit, but something. Scared, violated, and utterly turned on.
“Okay,” I said when he was over me, fingers shoved up my ass, holding my legs against my chest like I was a fucking ball, and I loved it, because I could pretend that I couldn’t struggle away. I didn’t want to struggle away, but I wanted him to make sure I couldn’t. “Okay, now hit me.”
This guy seemed confused for a while. What did I say? Hit me. You know it isn’t really proper rape unless you beat me to death afterwards. I didn’t mention that last part. Anyway, that was what I told him, and the guy just shrugged, and then he hit me.
“Fuck!” I jumped out of bed, kicking this guy away and grabbed my pants, flying out of there.
Turns out, I hadn’t actually wanted to be hit.
The way Will tells it, that is a lot like how love happens.
He says that when he met Cynthia, he didn’t know he would be in love with her. He just wanted to fuck her a few times, and she seemed kind of cool so he let her hang around our shitty apartment with lose nails sticking everywhere. He said that he said he loved her a few times. “I love you,” he said, “I love you.”
Then, when he actually feel in love with her, he ran away.
The way Will tells it, he said it because he thought he wanted to be in love. Fake movie love, with the kissing and the happy ending. Then, when he actually fell in love with this happy girl he was keeping in the apartment, he was fucked.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Will tells me from the other side of the bed. “Suddenly it was like, fuck, you’re pregnant and fuck, we’re poor and fuck, no love isn’t making it better and we will not have a happy ending but I wanted to stay anyway.”
He asks me now what he asked me then. “What do you call that?” He asked me, master of all emotional logic. Who knew exactly what reaction went with what situation, because I had to know to be able to react. He was scared shitless about this, about all the way their life was a mess, and he knew it would only get worse, but he wanted to stay with Cynthia anyway. That was never how it looked in the movies, so what do you call it. When you want something, when you feel that much for a person on accident.
And I say, “Rape.”
Chapter Seven: Ending
There was once a very happy girl who lived in this apartment.
She seemed out of place, I’ll give you that. Of course, everyone thinks I’m a very happy boy. I teacher children, right, which is what I wanted. What I went to school for. And I have this roommate best friend who every one thought I was in love with. And we had this life, in this apartment, with a very happy girl.
Then Will tells me, “I only wanted to love her like in the movies. Not this shit.” And he leaves to the ATM to empty out his bank card to give the money to Cynthia to raise the kid so that he can run away and find movie love, not the real thing.
And then some kid stabs him in the spine.
And when I ask, he says, it felt like love, which feels like rape, which feels like a stabbing. He isn’t really sure how else to explain it.
And when I ask Cynthia she said it felt like being rich of a day, when she cut open her own stomach.
And I type all this up between smoking the joint and the cigarette, trying to find that balance between what is real and what is fake, thinking that if I can just hit the middle, that is where I want to be. And I write about them, or at least try, but it only turns into letters, not really words. Back and fourth, more letters and less sense. But I don’t really know.