you and me, we aren't a sunset
today was a wierd kind of day
in the corner of my physics notes I drew a picture of beckett as a child (aged 7ish?) and wrote this:
the world is full of mothers naming their babies ordinary names
like phil and jonathan and rob
in hopes that their babies will grow up to do ordinary things
like go to school and settle down and get a decent job
when I’m older and they tell me, it’s gunna be a boy
I’ll name him Citrus
in hopes that he’ll grow up
to do lines of coke off his lover’s backside
I may upload the picture later, when my camera stops being a bitch.
also, Jenn says to me, "sometimes I would like to hold you down and suck out your eyeballs, so that you would stop looking at me like you do."
and then, going through some of my old stuff I found a story I started writing at the beginning of the year and now want to resurrect. it reminds me of a fic I read recently, that I can't be bothered to find the link to right this second.
the beginning. (or the end, actually. haha. that's funny.)
Its five in the morning and my bladder’s full but I won’t stop to pee until at least Tennessee. There is less than two weeks until The End now and it will probably take at least half that to convince her. I think to the last time I’ve seen her, nearly a decade ago now, how she was then with her wide eyes and blond hair and I hope that she hasn’t turned brown with the years.
I must remember that it’s been a long time since who she was then, since her sad smile and her whispered, I think I could love you forever.” I must prepare myself for rejection when I ask her, will you die with me?
It ended with college, for the last year it was a gray cloud in the distance ever gaining on us, though we tried to run. We loved so hard that it nearly destroyed us at the rift. There was talk of long distance, but somehow neither of us were quite that person, so after the first few years it fizzled out and eventually we no longer spoke. There is a certain bitterness associated with a break that neither really wants and it spreads into the heart, infecting and softly settling with a dull ache that is without blame. I carried it as I moved on.
I finished school and went to graduate, eventually getting that doctorate in astrophysics. I wanted to work for NASA. It had been my dream, but they say life is full of disappointments and I guess it was my turn, so I wound up instead working as part of a team with very little government funding doing work that would probably have very little affect on the scientific community. It mostly involved a lot of measurements and stargazing. I can’t say I hated it because I didn’t, but it was sometimes tedious.
That was, of course, before it happened.
Space is a big place. Sometimes we like to forget that. Sometimes we like to forget that we are not, in fact, the center of anything at all, solar system, milky way, galactic cluster. We like to forget that on the scale of this ever expanding universe we are not particles. Not even subparticles. We like to forget that at any given moment, a hunk of rock bearing a remarkable resemblance to our doom could be sailing towards us, already too late and we could have no idea, unless some poor schmuck happened to be looking in just the right section of that vastness. The chances of this, well, I won’t bore you, but I know them, and they are slim. To none. But, true story, shit happens.
And happened. Lightning strikes twice, baby.
The end will not be swift. It will not be flashy. The earth will not explode, implode, disintegrate, fall out of orbit. The only ones to die instantly will be those directly under the radius of impact. Instead, dust and soot will fill the air, blocking sun. Plants will die, people will wither, and with a collective hoarse grunt, the human race will pass, just like the dinosaurs before us. So, less like lightning and more like that in between, counting- one locomotive two locomotive three - and finally the thunder.
Relief comes in the form of a gas station advertising cheap fuel and cheaper beer two miles past Welcome to Tennessee. I squat over the toilet and concentrate on the burn in my thighs from holding my ass off the seat because it keeps me from concentrating on the smell of shit and stale disinfectant. A small inner debate on the pros and cons of actually touching the sink in order to wash my hands has me debating the pros and cons of doing anything quote unquote good for me. Why wash my hands? I’m not planning on sucking on my fingers any time soon. Screw good hygiene. Screw good health. I walk into the minimart and buy a carton of cigarettes. I’ve never smoked a day in my life.
I stand outside the mart with a cigarette in my mouth while a kid in a beige jumpsuit puts gas in my car. I’ve got a little green bic with a stubborn turnwheel and a memory of my mother, on the porch, with a cocktail and a parliament, looking cross-eyed and stupid as she tried to light it. I suck on the stick and cough as hot, unpleasant smoke hits my throat. It tastes like crap, but also a little bit like the way her house used to smell, so I put it back to my lips and try to get something down into my lungs.
Later today, I’m going to have diarrhea from this cigarette.
it's not great, (nothing ever is) but it was fun to write, so I think I'll continue.
edit!: found a second chapterish thing:
Gassed and back on the road, I roll down the windows and turn up the volume on the car stereo. That was the only moment I’ve had in the last week that resembled fun. Sitting on the carpet of my studio apartment: What do you listen to on a road-trip to The End of the world? Would I try to listen to all the music I always swore I would get into but didn’t? Strive to get an appreciation of classical or grow to like Dream Theatre? I hit repeat for the second time this hour and Attonito tells me I’m hopeless.
There’s a CD, sitting at the bottom of the pile of my teenage reminisces, that I won’t play for another day. And when I do, it’ll rain, and the heat will go out, and I’ll pull over, believing for a moment that this is all just a scene in a movie.
She bought me that record. My birthday comes and she’s at the door struggling with the bulk of a turntable. Behind her, Matt and Chris are swearing and maneuvering a humongous speaker out of her trunk. “Move or I’m dropping it, and you’re not getting shit.”
“I don’t have room for that speaker, you know.” I feel like being contrary.
“Fuck you; also, there’s a bag in the passenger seat.” She leans towards me to kiss, my temple I suppose, but I twist away and blow in her face. Just call me Mary, Mary. She closes her eyes against the gust. “It’ll fit.”
Matt and Chris are shuffling up the stairs and as I pass Chris swats at my hip, momentarily leaving Matt groaning under the bulk of the weight. “Happy birthday, kid.”
“Don’t scratch anything.”
I reach the car and press my stomach against the hot metal to lean in through the open window. The interior smells like salty towels and hot febreeze and there are grains of something embedded in the cushion when I brace my hand against it and fish for the plastic bag where it slid to the floor. I skim my fingers along the glossed cardboard inside and when I get purchase on it my thumb has slipped into the sleeve so that I can feel the ridges in the vinyl. The heat is starting to itch my stomach; the skin over my gut tingles pleasantly as I rest my weight on the door and flip over the album to read the cover.
“Ziggy, oh cool.”
An hour later she takes my hand in hers as we lay next to each other on the hardwood floor in my bedroom. “It’s a sad story, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, in some ways... It’s the good kind though. I mean, thank you.”
“You thought it wouldn’t fit.”
I crane my head away from her and towards my bed, now home to the turntable and speaker, and start laughing.
Through my laughter, she’s squeezing my fingers in hers and walking her other hand across my waist to the opposite arm, singing in my ear, “...oh gimme your hands.”
in the corner of my physics notes I drew a picture of beckett as a child (aged 7ish?) and wrote this:
the world is full of mothers naming their babies ordinary names
like phil and jonathan and rob
in hopes that their babies will grow up to do ordinary things
like go to school and settle down and get a decent job
when I’m older and they tell me, it’s gunna be a boy
I’ll name him Citrus
in hopes that he’ll grow up
to do lines of coke off his lover’s backside
I may upload the picture later, when my camera stops being a bitch.
also, Jenn says to me, "sometimes I would like to hold you down and suck out your eyeballs, so that you would stop looking at me like you do."
and then, going through some of my old stuff I found a story I started writing at the beginning of the year and now want to resurrect. it reminds me of a fic I read recently, that I can't be bothered to find the link to right this second.
the beginning. (or the end, actually. haha. that's funny.)
Its five in the morning and my bladder’s full but I won’t stop to pee until at least Tennessee. There is less than two weeks until The End now and it will probably take at least half that to convince her. I think to the last time I’ve seen her, nearly a decade ago now, how she was then with her wide eyes and blond hair and I hope that she hasn’t turned brown with the years.
I must remember that it’s been a long time since who she was then, since her sad smile and her whispered, I think I could love you forever.” I must prepare myself for rejection when I ask her, will you die with me?
It ended with college, for the last year it was a gray cloud in the distance ever gaining on us, though we tried to run. We loved so hard that it nearly destroyed us at the rift. There was talk of long distance, but somehow neither of us were quite that person, so after the first few years it fizzled out and eventually we no longer spoke. There is a certain bitterness associated with a break that neither really wants and it spreads into the heart, infecting and softly settling with a dull ache that is without blame. I carried it as I moved on.
I finished school and went to graduate, eventually getting that doctorate in astrophysics. I wanted to work for NASA. It had been my dream, but they say life is full of disappointments and I guess it was my turn, so I wound up instead working as part of a team with very little government funding doing work that would probably have very little affect on the scientific community. It mostly involved a lot of measurements and stargazing. I can’t say I hated it because I didn’t, but it was sometimes tedious.
That was, of course, before it happened.
Space is a big place. Sometimes we like to forget that. Sometimes we like to forget that we are not, in fact, the center of anything at all, solar system, milky way, galactic cluster. We like to forget that on the scale of this ever expanding universe we are not particles. Not even subparticles. We like to forget that at any given moment, a hunk of rock bearing a remarkable resemblance to our doom could be sailing towards us, already too late and we could have no idea, unless some poor schmuck happened to be looking in just the right section of that vastness. The chances of this, well, I won’t bore you, but I know them, and they are slim. To none. But, true story, shit happens.
And happened. Lightning strikes twice, baby.
The end will not be swift. It will not be flashy. The earth will not explode, implode, disintegrate, fall out of orbit. The only ones to die instantly will be those directly under the radius of impact. Instead, dust and soot will fill the air, blocking sun. Plants will die, people will wither, and with a collective hoarse grunt, the human race will pass, just like the dinosaurs before us. So, less like lightning and more like that in between, counting- one locomotive two locomotive three - and finally the thunder.
Relief comes in the form of a gas station advertising cheap fuel and cheaper beer two miles past Welcome to Tennessee. I squat over the toilet and concentrate on the burn in my thighs from holding my ass off the seat because it keeps me from concentrating on the smell of shit and stale disinfectant. A small inner debate on the pros and cons of actually touching the sink in order to wash my hands has me debating the pros and cons of doing anything quote unquote good for me. Why wash my hands? I’m not planning on sucking on my fingers any time soon. Screw good hygiene. Screw good health. I walk into the minimart and buy a carton of cigarettes. I’ve never smoked a day in my life.
I stand outside the mart with a cigarette in my mouth while a kid in a beige jumpsuit puts gas in my car. I’ve got a little green bic with a stubborn turnwheel and a memory of my mother, on the porch, with a cocktail and a parliament, looking cross-eyed and stupid as she tried to light it. I suck on the stick and cough as hot, unpleasant smoke hits my throat. It tastes like crap, but also a little bit like the way her house used to smell, so I put it back to my lips and try to get something down into my lungs.
Later today, I’m going to have diarrhea from this cigarette.
it's not great, (nothing ever is) but it was fun to write, so I think I'll continue.
edit!: found a second chapterish thing:
Gassed and back on the road, I roll down the windows and turn up the volume on the car stereo. That was the only moment I’ve had in the last week that resembled fun. Sitting on the carpet of my studio apartment: What do you listen to on a road-trip to The End of the world? Would I try to listen to all the music I always swore I would get into but didn’t? Strive to get an appreciation of classical or grow to like Dream Theatre? I hit repeat for the second time this hour and Attonito tells me I’m hopeless.
There’s a CD, sitting at the bottom of the pile of my teenage reminisces, that I won’t play for another day. And when I do, it’ll rain, and the heat will go out, and I’ll pull over, believing for a moment that this is all just a scene in a movie.
She bought me that record. My birthday comes and she’s at the door struggling with the bulk of a turntable. Behind her, Matt and Chris are swearing and maneuvering a humongous speaker out of her trunk. “Move or I’m dropping it, and you’re not getting shit.”
“I don’t have room for that speaker, you know.” I feel like being contrary.
“Fuck you; also, there’s a bag in the passenger seat.” She leans towards me to kiss, my temple I suppose, but I twist away and blow in her face. Just call me Mary, Mary. She closes her eyes against the gust. “It’ll fit.”
Matt and Chris are shuffling up the stairs and as I pass Chris swats at my hip, momentarily leaving Matt groaning under the bulk of the weight. “Happy birthday, kid.”
“Don’t scratch anything.”
I reach the car and press my stomach against the hot metal to lean in through the open window. The interior smells like salty towels and hot febreeze and there are grains of something embedded in the cushion when I brace my hand against it and fish for the plastic bag where it slid to the floor. I skim my fingers along the glossed cardboard inside and when I get purchase on it my thumb has slipped into the sleeve so that I can feel the ridges in the vinyl. The heat is starting to itch my stomach; the skin over my gut tingles pleasantly as I rest my weight on the door and flip over the album to read the cover.
“Ziggy, oh cool.”
An hour later she takes my hand in hers as we lay next to each other on the hardwood floor in my bedroom. “It’s a sad story, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, in some ways... It’s the good kind though. I mean, thank you.”
“You thought it wouldn’t fit.”
I crane my head away from her and towards my bed, now home to the turntable and speaker, and start laughing.
Through my laughter, she’s squeezing my fingers in hers and walking her other hand across my waist to the opposite arm, singing in my ear, “...oh gimme your hands.”