Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (19/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (19/?)
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Thanksgiving came and went with a trip out of town and unfulfilling meal at my cousin's. The cranberry sauce was exceptional and the apple pie was so sugary sweet that I was relatively positive that there was a cavity waiting to make itself known in one of my molars, but the food ran out all too quickly and I could physically feel the crowded wooden table of relatives judging me when I went back for thirds. As far as I was concerned, Thanksgiving dinner could not be considered a success unless I felt the need to skip every meal for the next week in order to make up for the copious amounts of food I ate the night, but my stomach barely even hurt when we were driving home. Despicable.
But, nonetheless, the occasion marked the beginning of holiday season, and while I might not be the most cheerful person in existence, I loved Christmas like nothing else. I was beyond ready to start humming holiday songs along with my favorite bands that had covered them and jam with Mark Hoppus as he sang about how much of a pain in the ass wrapping presents was.
The holidays came with their faults, of course. For example, trying to figure out what the hell to get for everyone - not only were there the usual Christmas gifts that needed to be purchased, but my mother's birthday fell on the twelfth and my dad was literally a New Year's baby. I was always broke by January first.
And, also, you know, finals. They were always really fucking fun.
I'd been complaining bitterly about how we were going to be tested on everything we'd learned that semester in math even though I had absolutely no clue how to do any of it and was literally definitely going to get an F when Alex decided that that was the appropriate time to tell me that math was, in fact, his best subject, and that he'd love to help me study. So maybe I would be less tempted to shoot myself during Dead Week if I had that boy around. And, also, he could probably talk my finger off the trigger. If necessary. Which it wouldn't be. Definitely not. Right?
But the end of the semester was in sight, there were advent calendars on top of the fireplace that had not hosted a fire in years because of some smoke rising issue in our living room, and things could be worse. I mean, I still felt like shit and hated everything about myself, but at least the snow that had started to flit down from the sky and wash the town stark white provided a nice backdrop for my burnout. I made it through ten years of schooling with my sanity relatively intact, and figured I was at a fitting time in my life to hit my breaking point.
I spent my classes watching the second hand tick around the clock, thinking about how I'd rather be anywhere but there, and then finally going home only to realize that I wasn't any happier when left alone. It was when I was nursing cups of hot chocolate between fingers numbed from tripping in the snow on my way to the door and peering out our frosted windows at happy couples with glove clasped hands who I couldn't help but despise that I did my best thinking.
And when I say best, I mean most focused and detrimental to my mental health. So, it was due to that that over the course of spending the holidays inside, waiting to be someone else, I became somewhat obsessed with what it means to be alive.
Sure, there's the easy scientific definition of life: living organisms grow, reproduce, evolve, respond to stimuli. There were all those fancy, complicated qualifications that I'd learned in school once upon a time and forgotten long ago. But hard, simple, scientific fact didn't satisfy what I was looking for.
I'd heard once that everything with life wants, and, yes, that seemed to capture it pretty well. Humans long for love, animals hunt for food, plants grow towards sunlight. Everything tries to capture something else, and that is a true of all animate beings. Still, not what I needed.
Of course, there was always the endlessly useless dictionary definition of alive to offer no assistance whatsoever: having life; living; existing; not dead or lifeless. Maybe I'd be better to search the writings of Aristotle than the Webster dictionary. Or, possibly, lifeless text, black on white symbols weren't capable of answering such profound questions.
I didn't even want to know what the meaning of life was, just the real definition of living itself, because I was becoming slightly concerned that I no longer fit it.
I'd been walking through the school hallways lately, alone, view of my world changing from being seen through the eyes that I'd always looked with to a camera lens. I felt like an extra in a movie, not a person. Not real.
It was a strange experience, to be stumbling towards gym one minute and wondering whether or not the light had really shifted or if I was only going insane the next. Colors seemed brighter, yet muted still, as if I was observing my surroundings through a sheet of wax, a dull overlay numbing everything. The picture of my world and everything I felt.
So, yes, scientists and they're black-and-white facts would say that I was very a much a living, breathing human being. And they were right, no doubt about it. But our world is a place of grays and blurry lines, maybes and fuzzy edges, in betweens and doubts. Things like science try to pretend that there are absolute answers to questions about our existence and the reality of it, but there aren't. And I hated that.
While I realized that there were never two boxes that things filed neatly into, it still pissed me off. I liked yes and no and wrong and right. I liked definite things. Irrational numbers pissed me off. I needed to now exact times things would be happening; later didn't cut it. So I wanted a distinct, clean-cut explanation of what it means to be alive. Whether or not Baltimore was a cardboard set that I unwillingly acted on. If what I did with my existence was categorized as really living.
Surely I wasn't doing much as the days ticked by, breaths huffed past my lips, blood pumped through my veins, slipping under the paper skin of my wrists in sapphire slits. I didn't feel like I was living. More like I was existing, passing seconds instead of seizing them, waiting for the weekend and spending it holed up in my room, alone, watching the world move while I was at a standstill.
That was my biggest fear, really: that I'd spend my whole life waiting.
I'd always thought it was strange, how humans are never living in the present, though it hadn't grown to concern me to such an extent until recently. Babies are trained into toddlers, elementary school is spent preparing for middle school, which coaches kids for high school, that is spent striving for high grades to get into a decent college, which is used to get a degree to be hired for a high paying job, and money is saved up for retirement, when seniors spend their days cooing over grandkids starting the exhaustingly tireless cycle, playing golf and turning gray as the end of their lives quietly pass in front of TVs while they wait for it all to end, and then they're dead. The end. It's all over.
I was so scared that I'd always be waiting for the next thing, that milestone that is supposed to be a big, satisfying accomplishment, and then not realize when it happened, and that would be my life. We never notice anything until its sudden, all at once, and big.
Think about it. Friendship, for example, is gradual. I didn't remember how I became friends with Zack, or where the hell Rian came from. There was never one day where it was just, bam, we're BFFs now. Things like that don't happen. In movies, sure, but not in real life.
So my world had the aspects of a movie where it felt fake, but none of the good things about them. Typical.
Some bands get famous over night, and they must be ecstatic about it, because, wow, suddenly all their dreams have come true. Those are the moments that make everything worth it, but the problem is that they ever so rarely really come, because it's the vast majority of musicians who respond that they never had that defining moment when they realized they were famous when they get asked about it in interviews. Maybe there was a night on stage when they looked out at the crowd of thousands, remembering back to a couple years ago when they would have thrown up to have that many people screaming their words back at them. But that's the problem, that they're calm about it, that it doesn't seem special, because we get used to the little changes and small increases as we inch closer to what we want, and it's so gradual and slow in most things that we never realize when we have it.
There's no ultimate goal, either. Maybe graduating college and getting a Ph.D. is the highlight of someone's life: after all those years of studying and not sleeping and drinking grainy two cent coffee, they finally get the degree they worked their ass off for.
But what if you are a musician? Are you reaching for a hundred thousand record sales? Selling out stadiums? Getting on a magazine cover? No, because your fan base will always be growing, and you'll always be wanting it to expand, searching for more and wanting and needing and it will never be enough, even if it might have when you were younger. It's never enough, nothing is, we always want more, and better, and bigger, and we're never satisfied with what we have because humans are so greedy and we are incapable of appreciating what we have because, fuck, there can always be more.
I think that is the greatest flaw in our species. Nothing's good enough.
I felt like I would waste my life aiming for the next goal and turning a blind eye when I passed it, not appreciating what I had, even if what I had was everything I'd ever wanted. And then I'd be on my death bed, looking back at years that I spent failing to reach my goals, idiotically unaware that five year old me would be astonished at my success. And I'd die feeling like I never accomplished anything.
Or, worst case scenario, I really would end up as some homeless bum with nothing to my name who was an actual fiasco. But I didn't care about that possibility, strangely enough, despite the fact that I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't notice what I'd achieved.
Another of humanity's great defects: we're not capable of truly understanding anything. Or, at least, I wasn't.
I went to Washington DC on a school trip back in eighth grade, and spent the majority of it quietly wondering if the streets I walked down really weren't actually in Maryland. I stared at the Lincoln Memorial with wide eyes, completely aware that it was the incredibly famous marble statue that I'd seen in all those pictures, yet failing to have that actually register as it seemed that I was looking at just another piece of stone. The Constitution, hundreds of years old, the document our country had run on nearly since its creation, signed by such historic figures as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, was only another faded piece of paper in a dimly light room.
The Vietnam memorial held the most stark example of this. We saw it late at night when I was completely exhausted and wanted nothing more than to head back to the hotel and watch crappy crime shows until my eyes got too heavy to hold open and the stiff mattress suddenly seemed more comfortable than the bed of a king. Nonetheless, I found my fingers tracing the names of those thousands of soldiers, brain desperately, and pointlessly, trying to comprehend what they truly meant. While I very well knew Joseph A. Lofton, whose name was carved precisely into that black marble, was very much an American soldier who fought in the Vietnam war, and was very much dead, that fact was just another piece of information that meant nothing to me.
I did my best to imagine those tens of thousands of names as people, real people, with likes and friends and smile lines and early morning voices and aspirations and families and vices and pet peeves and favorite colors and virtues and things that made them tick, but I couldn't, because my brain was incapable of comprehending that many human beings being killed in a meaningless war. No matter how just the cause, war was inherently useless in my eyes. Nothing could justify pitting people against each other in battles for the express purpose of killing one another - it was simply and disgustingly barbaric, a horrifying remnant of our past lingering in the modern world.
So, as it was, to me, Joseph A. Lofton was just another white scratch on a block of black who I would never know. He could even be an asshole, for all I knew; I'd never bought into the idea that being dead automatically made everyone a god status hero. Everyone dies, devils and angels alike.
I woke up every morning expressly thinking about how getting out of bed and going to school was at the top of the list of things that I did not want to do and then lay wrapped in blankets hours later, wishing I cherished being there while I could, yet consistently failing to do just that. And I was so worried that everything would be like that.
And this all begs another question: is a life spent waiting a life lived at all?
____________________
A/N: I still can't stop thinking about this, so if anyone has any answers to those various questions and would like to share them, I would greatly appreciate it. Any other comments are also loved!-Rose
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Thanksgiving came and went with a trip out of town and unfulfilling meal at my cousin's. The cranberry sauce was exceptional and the apple pie was so sugary sweet that I was relatively positive that there was a cavity waiting to make itself known in one of my molars, but the food ran out all too quickly and I could physically feel the crowded wooden table of relatives judging me when I went back for thirds. As far as I was concerned, Thanksgiving dinner could not be considered a success unless I felt the need to skip every meal for the next week in order to make up for the copious amounts of food I ate the night, but my stomach barely even hurt when we were driving home. Despicable.
But, nonetheless, the occasion marked the beginning of holiday season, and while I might not be the most cheerful person in existence, I loved Christmas like nothing else. I was beyond ready to start humming holiday songs along with my favorite bands that had covered them and jam with Mark Hoppus as he sang about how much of a pain in the ass wrapping presents was.
The holidays came with their faults, of course. For example, trying to figure out what the hell to get for everyone - not only were there the usual Christmas gifts that needed to be purchased, but my mother's birthday fell on the twelfth and my dad was literally a New Year's baby. I was always broke by January first.
And, also, you know, finals. They were always really fucking fun.
I'd been complaining bitterly about how we were going to be tested on everything we'd learned that semester in math even though I had absolutely no clue how to do any of it and was literally definitely going to get an F when Alex decided that that was the appropriate time to tell me that math was, in fact, his best subject, and that he'd love to help me study. So maybe I would be less tempted to shoot myself during Dead Week if I had that boy around. And, also, he could probably talk my finger off the trigger. If necessary. Which it wouldn't be. Definitely not. Right?
But the end of the semester was in sight, there were advent calendars on top of the fireplace that had not hosted a fire in years because of some smoke rising issue in our living room, and things could be worse. I mean, I still felt like shit and hated everything about myself, but at least the snow that had started to flit down from the sky and wash the town stark white provided a nice backdrop for my burnout. I made it through ten years of schooling with my sanity relatively intact, and figured I was at a fitting time in my life to hit my breaking point.
I spent my classes watching the second hand tick around the clock, thinking about how I'd rather be anywhere but there, and then finally going home only to realize that I wasn't any happier when left alone. It was when I was nursing cups of hot chocolate between fingers numbed from tripping in the snow on my way to the door and peering out our frosted windows at happy couples with glove clasped hands who I couldn't help but despise that I did my best thinking.
And when I say best, I mean most focused and detrimental to my mental health. So, it was due to that that over the course of spending the holidays inside, waiting to be someone else, I became somewhat obsessed with what it means to be alive.
Sure, there's the easy scientific definition of life: living organisms grow, reproduce, evolve, respond to stimuli. There were all those fancy, complicated qualifications that I'd learned in school once upon a time and forgotten long ago. But hard, simple, scientific fact didn't satisfy what I was looking for.
I'd heard once that everything with life wants, and, yes, that seemed to capture it pretty well. Humans long for love, animals hunt for food, plants grow towards sunlight. Everything tries to capture something else, and that is a true of all animate beings. Still, not what I needed.
Of course, there was always the endlessly useless dictionary definition of alive to offer no assistance whatsoever: having life; living; existing; not dead or lifeless. Maybe I'd be better to search the writings of Aristotle than the Webster dictionary. Or, possibly, lifeless text, black on white symbols weren't capable of answering such profound questions.
I didn't even want to know what the meaning of life was, just the real definition of living itself, because I was becoming slightly concerned that I no longer fit it.
I'd been walking through the school hallways lately, alone, view of my world changing from being seen through the eyes that I'd always looked with to a camera lens. I felt like an extra in a movie, not a person. Not real.
It was a strange experience, to be stumbling towards gym one minute and wondering whether or not the light had really shifted or if I was only going insane the next. Colors seemed brighter, yet muted still, as if I was observing my surroundings through a sheet of wax, a dull overlay numbing everything. The picture of my world and everything I felt.
So, yes, scientists and they're black-and-white facts would say that I was very a much a living, breathing human being. And they were right, no doubt about it. But our world is a place of grays and blurry lines, maybes and fuzzy edges, in betweens and doubts. Things like science try to pretend that there are absolute answers to questions about our existence and the reality of it, but there aren't. And I hated that.
While I realized that there were never two boxes that things filed neatly into, it still pissed me off. I liked yes and no and wrong and right. I liked definite things. Irrational numbers pissed me off. I needed to now exact times things would be happening; later didn't cut it. So I wanted a distinct, clean-cut explanation of what it means to be alive. Whether or not Baltimore was a cardboard set that I unwillingly acted on. If what I did with my existence was categorized as really living.
Surely I wasn't doing much as the days ticked by, breaths huffed past my lips, blood pumped through my veins, slipping under the paper skin of my wrists in sapphire slits. I didn't feel like I was living. More like I was existing, passing seconds instead of seizing them, waiting for the weekend and spending it holed up in my room, alone, watching the world move while I was at a standstill.
That was my biggest fear, really: that I'd spend my whole life waiting.
I'd always thought it was strange, how humans are never living in the present, though it hadn't grown to concern me to such an extent until recently. Babies are trained into toddlers, elementary school is spent preparing for middle school, which coaches kids for high school, that is spent striving for high grades to get into a decent college, which is used to get a degree to be hired for a high paying job, and money is saved up for retirement, when seniors spend their days cooing over grandkids starting the exhaustingly tireless cycle, playing golf and turning gray as the end of their lives quietly pass in front of TVs while they wait for it all to end, and then they're dead. The end. It's all over.
I was so scared that I'd always be waiting for the next thing, that milestone that is supposed to be a big, satisfying accomplishment, and then not realize when it happened, and that would be my life. We never notice anything until its sudden, all at once, and big.
Think about it. Friendship, for example, is gradual. I didn't remember how I became friends with Zack, or where the hell Rian came from. There was never one day where it was just, bam, we're BFFs now. Things like that don't happen. In movies, sure, but not in real life.
So my world had the aspects of a movie where it felt fake, but none of the good things about them. Typical.
Some bands get famous over night, and they must be ecstatic about it, because, wow, suddenly all their dreams have come true. Those are the moments that make everything worth it, but the problem is that they ever so rarely really come, because it's the vast majority of musicians who respond that they never had that defining moment when they realized they were famous when they get asked about it in interviews. Maybe there was a night on stage when they looked out at the crowd of thousands, remembering back to a couple years ago when they would have thrown up to have that many people screaming their words back at them. But that's the problem, that they're calm about it, that it doesn't seem special, because we get used to the little changes and small increases as we inch closer to what we want, and it's so gradual and slow in most things that we never realize when we have it.
There's no ultimate goal, either. Maybe graduating college and getting a Ph.D. is the highlight of someone's life: after all those years of studying and not sleeping and drinking grainy two cent coffee, they finally get the degree they worked their ass off for.
But what if you are a musician? Are you reaching for a hundred thousand record sales? Selling out stadiums? Getting on a magazine cover? No, because your fan base will always be growing, and you'll always be wanting it to expand, searching for more and wanting and needing and it will never be enough, even if it might have when you were younger. It's never enough, nothing is, we always want more, and better, and bigger, and we're never satisfied with what we have because humans are so greedy and we are incapable of appreciating what we have because, fuck, there can always be more.
I think that is the greatest flaw in our species. Nothing's good enough.
I felt like I would waste my life aiming for the next goal and turning a blind eye when I passed it, not appreciating what I had, even if what I had was everything I'd ever wanted. And then I'd be on my death bed, looking back at years that I spent failing to reach my goals, idiotically unaware that five year old me would be astonished at my success. And I'd die feeling like I never accomplished anything.
Or, worst case scenario, I really would end up as some homeless bum with nothing to my name who was an actual fiasco. But I didn't care about that possibility, strangely enough, despite the fact that I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't notice what I'd achieved.
Another of humanity's great defects: we're not capable of truly understanding anything. Or, at least, I wasn't.
I went to Washington DC on a school trip back in eighth grade, and spent the majority of it quietly wondering if the streets I walked down really weren't actually in Maryland. I stared at the Lincoln Memorial with wide eyes, completely aware that it was the incredibly famous marble statue that I'd seen in all those pictures, yet failing to have that actually register as it seemed that I was looking at just another piece of stone. The Constitution, hundreds of years old, the document our country had run on nearly since its creation, signed by such historic figures as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, was only another faded piece of paper in a dimly light room.
The Vietnam memorial held the most stark example of this. We saw it late at night when I was completely exhausted and wanted nothing more than to head back to the hotel and watch crappy crime shows until my eyes got too heavy to hold open and the stiff mattress suddenly seemed more comfortable than the bed of a king. Nonetheless, I found my fingers tracing the names of those thousands of soldiers, brain desperately, and pointlessly, trying to comprehend what they truly meant. While I very well knew Joseph A. Lofton, whose name was carved precisely into that black marble, was very much an American soldier who fought in the Vietnam war, and was very much dead, that fact was just another piece of information that meant nothing to me.
I did my best to imagine those tens of thousands of names as people, real people, with likes and friends and smile lines and early morning voices and aspirations and families and vices and pet peeves and favorite colors and virtues and things that made them tick, but I couldn't, because my brain was incapable of comprehending that many human beings being killed in a meaningless war. No matter how just the cause, war was inherently useless in my eyes. Nothing could justify pitting people against each other in battles for the express purpose of killing one another - it was simply and disgustingly barbaric, a horrifying remnant of our past lingering in the modern world.
So, as it was, to me, Joseph A. Lofton was just another white scratch on a block of black who I would never know. He could even be an asshole, for all I knew; I'd never bought into the idea that being dead automatically made everyone a god status hero. Everyone dies, devils and angels alike.
I woke up every morning expressly thinking about how getting out of bed and going to school was at the top of the list of things that I did not want to do and then lay wrapped in blankets hours later, wishing I cherished being there while I could, yet consistently failing to do just that. And I was so worried that everything would be like that.
And this all begs another question: is a life spent waiting a life lived at all?
____________________
A/N: I still can't stop thinking about this, so if anyone has any answers to those various questions and would like to share them, I would greatly appreciate it. Any other comments are also loved!-Rose