To ya-chan
To ya-chan
Prompt: Merry Christmas, Kiss My Ass by All-Time Low
Original
The Bar Lacks Ambiance
-
THE PAST:
Once, he dated the most sophisticated woman he knew.
She knew glamour like the back of her hand, knew how to celebrate the littlest of things that got caught up in her life. She lived off and scavenged for the admiration of others, although she wasn’t quite enough to reach celebrity status. At the back of his mind, he was quite sold to the idea that she might’ve been his childhood sweetheart, long before they parted ways- her going to one of the uppermost cities of Manchester, and him staying in the more rural areas of Birmingham.
He was a writer fond of quoting poets and famous last words who tried to worm his way into her heart, winning her over with handwritten notes passed her way (There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy. Her heart1)- him pretending to smoothly down his drink, and her glancing at his direction. The only common ground they shared and he had worked on involved glasses and glasses of wine, champagne, rum, gin, beer. He met her at a bar that lacked ambiance; she met him at the best place she knew where to hang out. He caught the scent of her mink-flavored coat the first time he laid his eyes on her; she caught the smell of his mint-tinted breath the third or fourth time he garnered courage to talk to her.
He had this nagging feeling whenever he talked to her growling in the pits of his stomach, which he dutifully ignored in favor of winning her over (I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul2). She ranked high, if not first, in his list of people who had the sweetest smiles, in his list of people who had the whitest of teeth, and in his list of people who can catch his eyes without damn trying. She was all he ever wanted; he was the one thing she could have wanted but didn’t have enough reserve to do so.
He pumped a fist into the air when he got her; she answered with a glint of something else in her eyes, a smile adorning her lips.
.
“Ma, Pa,” he rammed in his phone the next morning, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, “She said yes. I got myself a girlfriend! You’ll like her, I know you would. I- yes, the one who transferred to Manchester? Yeah. She told me she’d very much like to see you, so we’ll be home by the third of January- yeah, well. She might like a bit of festivity, so.”
.
THE PRESENT:
After their relationship bit a couple of months or so, he found out a list about her. There are props to every first out there.
She doesn’t like her coffee with sugar. She likes to sip her tea from a teacup, and will not have it otherwise. She likes to shop as much as he’s come to loathe it, and will stop at nothing to drag him out in a lovely Sunday afternoon to fish for clothes and shoes and bags and, occasionally, fur coats. He always yields, not that he has much of a choice (although he has, he just chooses to turn a blind eye at the healthier option), and not that she can give him options, either.
She possesses a taste aversion for spaghetti, but loves carbonara. She likes jazz, she likes her music fine and mellow and soft like a trickle of breath into her ears. He guesses that her preference has much to tell about her. He guesses that his getting a tad disappointed at her for it has something to tell about their relationship. But he guesses, too, that this slight difference is something they can overcome; like any good relationship, it goes through a series of bumps first.
.
Once, they find themselves chilling on his bed. There’s little excuse to be made as to why they ended up on his bed.
Skin to skin itching to kiss and fabric that melts with every inch of their proximity blurred and burned, a history long forgotten now being thinned, being pressed together like a single seam between the warmth of their bodies and the carnival of their lives, but he trusts her and she trusts him, so it’s almost logical that nothing happens, nothing follows. But this is not the nothing he anticipates. He expects a halcyon episode, a moment of remembering and leafing through fond memories with the merest sentences evoked by the merest instant, but he is instead faced with her void, her fatuousness, her unnerving quietness, and something tells him that this is his loss.
In an attempt to salvage the situation and his dignity, he leans forward and closer, eyes squeezed shut, his lips almost puckering- even this, however, ends in futility, because no response came. He stays still; she stays still, and the atmosphere cringes back to a halt. When he pries his eyes open, he catches a full view of her eyes widening up at him, her body unmoving underneath his, and he waits, he waits, she tries, she gingerly smiles up at him and whispers, I can’t.
He gets tired of thinking. He frees her from his grip, turns over, and lands on his back on the other side of the bed. She leaves him at a loss. She leaves him grappling for words he can’t even find. She leaves him in this internal struggle for a scaffolding he so badly, so desperately, needs.
“Thank you,” she mutters, as if softening a blow, and all he can think of is, Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious3. She sears through him with an expectant stare to which he replies with a stuttering one. As if finding nothing, she gets up, grabs her mink coat, and he thinks, something could’ve happened. Thinks, I should’ve known where this is going.
That night, he puts in writing her words, I can’t, on his journal.
.
“A confession,” comes his words one stormy night, when they both thought it best to stay cooped up in his house, “I really want to kiss you right now.”
There’s an awkward amount of shifting and re-shifting as she adjusts her lithe body against his on the couch, vying for a space her body can claim, not that there is less to claim in the area.
“A confession,” she chimes, nosing the underside of his jaw quite affectionately, “I want to kiss you.”
Their first kiss is a meeting of the lips in the most mundane manner with a tinge of something wet, something slobbery, something he knows he could’ve perfected if given the time. Just a macabre of lips and teeth and all mouth, never quite tongues, a mishmash of sentiments he’s always wanted to unleash. He feels the silliest with his efforts; a man can only do much with his amateur lips, and a woman (who is definitely not her) can only demand so much. He rests their case. She is as demanding as ever, carding her fingers through his hair starting from his nape and up. He remains a fool for believing that he is responding to her urges the way she wants him to, for believing that the fuzzy, lukewarm feeling is mutual, for believing that she can be his own brand (If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love4) of addiction.
But no, he is mistaken. She is not the woman he possesses. She is not the taste he’s waited years to get a hold of. She is not going to be the woman he’ll get used to, for she will be someone else’s. She is, however, the manufactured growth hormone he’s always needed, the backbone he’ll one day have to crush with a newer, better vertebral column.
.
“Oh, did I hurt you?” she tells him one day, hoisting herself up a bit to twist her body a little to face him; she has her elbow planted below the pillow, “I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry, you fell down on your own! I was right there beside you, but did you see yourself fall? You fell mighty and you fell hard, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have hit rock bottom. But you did, didn’t you? You were glad that I was there, and you’re still glad that I’m here, but we won’t be playing this anymore.”
He holds her eyes, trying to remain unaffected, although his silence might just have belied the very thing he’s meaning to answer her with.
She purses her lips together.
“You don’t need me, and I don’t need you, so what’s the point of staying?”
She eyes him on tenterhooks.
“Am I an excuse, then?” he says, after a beat, the words wringing themselves free from the tight cavern of his mouth, “Am I a stepping stone, am I still the moon to your sun, or the droplet to your drizzle?”
“You are one fine man,” she says, smiling, “I’d hate to lose you, but I am not yours, and you are not mine.”
All this time he is thinking, so this is what a poem feels like. This is what it feels like when you let the words slip right through the cracks of your fingers, of your senses, of your memories like sand would in your hands, and you won’t really have an inkling of what they mean, what they might mean, and what kind of impact will they have on you the moment they come back to haunt you.
“But that’s alright,” he speaks out, exhaling a tight-lipped smile and thinks, her eyes have never been bluer than they are now, “As long as I am your excuse.”
“And you are no longer,” she rallies, gently shaking her head, and all he can think of is, About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you5, “You’re a free man now, starting from the moment you asked me out.”
.
THE FUTURE:
He will pass by her house and gauge out the sounds and the lights from her dwelling, wondering if she’s home, wondering if someone else is with her, wondering, too, if the right time is now. He will find nothing, he will find his visit senseless, and so he will trudge back to the snow-coated ground, defeated (I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long6). Not because his effort will have been for naught, but because he will be expecting something and will have found nothing, instead.
But a tingle of hope will peek through the cracks of his endeavor, manifesting itself through the simplest task of her looking through the blinds of her window, as if sensing his presence and waging an internal war of whether or not she should be inviting him into her flat. She will know the price she paid for letting go, the same way he will know that he paid for far greater (Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life7).
In a while, though, it will be Christmas Eve. She will spend it with the ghouls in her house, the voices inside her head, and will relive the tragedy of her family through a photo album thick and ripe with last year’s Christmas party, with last year’s Christmas disaster, with last year’s Christmas loss, as is her tradition. She will put down the last framed picture in the row on the length of the wooden table, and wonder how she’ll survive another year having to go through the same ordeal again.
Still, he will have her back.
She will never have his.
.
Notes:
Quote 1 by Melanie Griffith
Quotes 2, 5, 6, 7 by Pablo Neruda
Quote 3 by Oscar Wilde
Quote 4 by Thich Nhat Hanh
Prompt: Merry Christmas, Kiss My Ass by All-Time Low
Original
The Bar Lacks Ambiance
-
THE PAST:
Once, he dated the most sophisticated woman he knew.
She knew glamour like the back of her hand, knew how to celebrate the littlest of things that got caught up in her life. She lived off and scavenged for the admiration of others, although she wasn’t quite enough to reach celebrity status. At the back of his mind, he was quite sold to the idea that she might’ve been his childhood sweetheart, long before they parted ways- her going to one of the uppermost cities of Manchester, and him staying in the more rural areas of Birmingham.
He was a writer fond of quoting poets and famous last words who tried to worm his way into her heart, winning her over with handwritten notes passed her way (There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy. Her heart1)- him pretending to smoothly down his drink, and her glancing at his direction. The only common ground they shared and he had worked on involved glasses and glasses of wine, champagne, rum, gin, beer. He met her at a bar that lacked ambiance; she met him at the best place she knew where to hang out. He caught the scent of her mink-flavored coat the first time he laid his eyes on her; she caught the smell of his mint-tinted breath the third or fourth time he garnered courage to talk to her.
He had this nagging feeling whenever he talked to her growling in the pits of his stomach, which he dutifully ignored in favor of winning her over (I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul2). She ranked high, if not first, in his list of people who had the sweetest smiles, in his list of people who had the whitest of teeth, and in his list of people who can catch his eyes without damn trying. She was all he ever wanted; he was the one thing she could have wanted but didn’t have enough reserve to do so.
He pumped a fist into the air when he got her; she answered with a glint of something else in her eyes, a smile adorning her lips.
.
“Ma, Pa,” he rammed in his phone the next morning, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, “She said yes. I got myself a girlfriend! You’ll like her, I know you would. I- yes, the one who transferred to Manchester? Yeah. She told me she’d very much like to see you, so we’ll be home by the third of January- yeah, well. She might like a bit of festivity, so.”
.
THE PRESENT:
After their relationship bit a couple of months or so, he found out a list about her. There are props to every first out there.
She doesn’t like her coffee with sugar. She likes to sip her tea from a teacup, and will not have it otherwise. She likes to shop as much as he’s come to loathe it, and will stop at nothing to drag him out in a lovely Sunday afternoon to fish for clothes and shoes and bags and, occasionally, fur coats. He always yields, not that he has much of a choice (although he has, he just chooses to turn a blind eye at the healthier option), and not that she can give him options, either.
She possesses a taste aversion for spaghetti, but loves carbonara. She likes jazz, she likes her music fine and mellow and soft like a trickle of breath into her ears. He guesses that her preference has much to tell about her. He guesses that his getting a tad disappointed at her for it has something to tell about their relationship. But he guesses, too, that this slight difference is something they can overcome; like any good relationship, it goes through a series of bumps first.
.
Once, they find themselves chilling on his bed. There’s little excuse to be made as to why they ended up on his bed.
Skin to skin itching to kiss and fabric that melts with every inch of their proximity blurred and burned, a history long forgotten now being thinned, being pressed together like a single seam between the warmth of their bodies and the carnival of their lives, but he trusts her and she trusts him, so it’s almost logical that nothing happens, nothing follows. But this is not the nothing he anticipates. He expects a halcyon episode, a moment of remembering and leafing through fond memories with the merest sentences evoked by the merest instant, but he is instead faced with her void, her fatuousness, her unnerving quietness, and something tells him that this is his loss.
In an attempt to salvage the situation and his dignity, he leans forward and closer, eyes squeezed shut, his lips almost puckering- even this, however, ends in futility, because no response came. He stays still; she stays still, and the atmosphere cringes back to a halt. When he pries his eyes open, he catches a full view of her eyes widening up at him, her body unmoving underneath his, and he waits, he waits, she tries, she gingerly smiles up at him and whispers, I can’t.
He gets tired of thinking. He frees her from his grip, turns over, and lands on his back on the other side of the bed. She leaves him at a loss. She leaves him grappling for words he can’t even find. She leaves him in this internal struggle for a scaffolding he so badly, so desperately, needs.
“Thank you,” she mutters, as if softening a blow, and all he can think of is, Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious3. She sears through him with an expectant stare to which he replies with a stuttering one. As if finding nothing, she gets up, grabs her mink coat, and he thinks, something could’ve happened. Thinks, I should’ve known where this is going.
That night, he puts in writing her words, I can’t, on his journal.
.
“A confession,” comes his words one stormy night, when they both thought it best to stay cooped up in his house, “I really want to kiss you right now.”
There’s an awkward amount of shifting and re-shifting as she adjusts her lithe body against his on the couch, vying for a space her body can claim, not that there is less to claim in the area.
“A confession,” she chimes, nosing the underside of his jaw quite affectionately, “I want to kiss you.”
Their first kiss is a meeting of the lips in the most mundane manner with a tinge of something wet, something slobbery, something he knows he could’ve perfected if given the time. Just a macabre of lips and teeth and all mouth, never quite tongues, a mishmash of sentiments he’s always wanted to unleash. He feels the silliest with his efforts; a man can only do much with his amateur lips, and a woman (who is definitely not her) can only demand so much. He rests their case. She is as demanding as ever, carding her fingers through his hair starting from his nape and up. He remains a fool for believing that he is responding to her urges the way she wants him to, for believing that the fuzzy, lukewarm feeling is mutual, for believing that she can be his own brand (If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love4) of addiction.
But no, he is mistaken. She is not the woman he possesses. She is not the taste he’s waited years to get a hold of. She is not going to be the woman he’ll get used to, for she will be someone else’s. She is, however, the manufactured growth hormone he’s always needed, the backbone he’ll one day have to crush with a newer, better vertebral column.
.
“Oh, did I hurt you?” she tells him one day, hoisting herself up a bit to twist her body a little to face him; she has her elbow planted below the pillow, “I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry, you fell down on your own! I was right there beside you, but did you see yourself fall? You fell mighty and you fell hard, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have hit rock bottom. But you did, didn’t you? You were glad that I was there, and you’re still glad that I’m here, but we won’t be playing this anymore.”
He holds her eyes, trying to remain unaffected, although his silence might just have belied the very thing he’s meaning to answer her with.
She purses her lips together.
“You don’t need me, and I don’t need you, so what’s the point of staying?”
She eyes him on tenterhooks.
“Am I an excuse, then?” he says, after a beat, the words wringing themselves free from the tight cavern of his mouth, “Am I a stepping stone, am I still the moon to your sun, or the droplet to your drizzle?”
“You are one fine man,” she says, smiling, “I’d hate to lose you, but I am not yours, and you are not mine.”
All this time he is thinking, so this is what a poem feels like. This is what it feels like when you let the words slip right through the cracks of your fingers, of your senses, of your memories like sand would in your hands, and you won’t really have an inkling of what they mean, what they might mean, and what kind of impact will they have on you the moment they come back to haunt you.
“But that’s alright,” he speaks out, exhaling a tight-lipped smile and thinks, her eyes have never been bluer than they are now, “As long as I am your excuse.”
“And you are no longer,” she rallies, gently shaking her head, and all he can think of is, About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you5, “You’re a free man now, starting from the moment you asked me out.”
.
THE FUTURE:
He will pass by her house and gauge out the sounds and the lights from her dwelling, wondering if she’s home, wondering if someone else is with her, wondering, too, if the right time is now. He will find nothing, he will find his visit senseless, and so he will trudge back to the snow-coated ground, defeated (I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long6). Not because his effort will have been for naught, but because he will be expecting something and will have found nothing, instead.
But a tingle of hope will peek through the cracks of his endeavor, manifesting itself through the simplest task of her looking through the blinds of her window, as if sensing his presence and waging an internal war of whether or not she should be inviting him into her flat. She will know the price she paid for letting go, the same way he will know that he paid for far greater (Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life7).
In a while, though, it will be Christmas Eve. She will spend it with the ghouls in her house, the voices inside her head, and will relive the tragedy of her family through a photo album thick and ripe with last year’s Christmas party, with last year’s Christmas disaster, with last year’s Christmas loss, as is her tradition. She will put down the last framed picture in the row on the length of the wooden table, and wonder how she’ll survive another year having to go through the same ordeal again.
Still, he will have her back.
She will never have his.
.
Notes:
Quote 1 by Melanie Griffith
Quotes 2, 5, 6, 7 by Pablo Neruda
Quote 3 by Oscar Wilde
Quote 4 by Thich Nhat Hanh