i need to remember you just like this [Claire]
In retrospect (retro: things that were then weren't and are again better, spect: a position of seeing) he should have left earlier.
Oh, yes, it was sticky and unpleasant and hurt a bit, but really, they weren't helping him. Just like everyone else, stickiness and crunchiness and (he threw up blood) emptiness besides that. They don't understand. They're not like him. They are Other People and they don't matter and if he tells himself that enough it'll stop feeling like this please god make it stop.
No. No. He's out. He's free, right? Of everything. He can't go back. Anywhere. So he's free. Footloose. Out there making his way. Already picked up a fresh sweater to pull over hospital issued crinkle-clothes, sneakers a little too big taped to his ankles.
He needs boots and darker clothes, and more, because he's so cold sometimes and then he's too hot and then he's freezing, rooted to the spot, he can't stop moving or he'll go back.
He writes down where he is carefully, in spraypaint (where did he get that, he wonders, and then the splotch of blood on it- oh, yes, there) on a brick wall.
WAITING FOR CLAIRE
She walks to work past this alley. He can be patient. He needs to see her. One more time, he promises, just one, and then he'll stop. He thinks about how pretty she is, for a while, how much better her hair is blonde, how she's smiling right again sometimes. He's sure she is.
(Todd is barely a skeleton, a fragile clinging together of bones and wide, wide, wide eyes, short hair in awkward, haphazard spikes, and there is blood on the soles of his shoes and a drying fleck next to his left eye, and that's all. Except for under his sweater. Don't peek.)
He waits. He wonders what he'll tell her.
Oh, yes, it was sticky and unpleasant and hurt a bit, but really, they weren't helping him. Just like everyone else, stickiness and crunchiness and (he threw up blood) emptiness besides that. They don't understand. They're not like him. They are Other People and they don't matter and if he tells himself that enough it'll stop feeling like this please god make it stop.
No. No. He's out. He's free, right? Of everything. He can't go back. Anywhere. So he's free. Footloose. Out there making his way. Already picked up a fresh sweater to pull over hospital issued crinkle-clothes, sneakers a little too big taped to his ankles.
He needs boots and darker clothes, and more, because he's so cold sometimes and then he's too hot and then he's freezing, rooted to the spot, he can't stop moving or he'll go back.
He writes down where he is carefully, in spraypaint (where did he get that, he wonders, and then the splotch of blood on it- oh, yes, there) on a brick wall.
WAITING FOR CLAIRE
She walks to work past this alley. He can be patient. He needs to see her. One more time, he promises, just one, and then he'll stop. He thinks about how pretty she is, for a while, how much better her hair is blonde, how she's smiling right again sometimes. He's sure she is.
(Todd is barely a skeleton, a fragile clinging together of bones and wide, wide, wide eyes, short hair in awkward, haphazard spikes, and there is blood on the soles of his shoes and a drying fleck next to his left eye, and that's all. Except for under his sweater. Don't peek.)
He waits. He wonders what he'll tell her.