shades in a neutral spectrum (pg) jack
Title: Shades in a Neutral Spectrum
Fandom: Lost
Pairing/Characters: Jack, mentions of Sarah and Boone.
Rating: PG
Prompt: #97- Writer's Choice for Gray at
50_darkfics
Word Count: 2967
Summary: Seven times Jack saw things it terms of black and white and the one time he couldn't, ranging from childhood to post-Through the Looking Glass.
Jack is eight when his mother drags him by the uniform tie of his prep school to the piano instructor's house.
Wind chimes sway in the breeze of the incoming storm as the porch's floorboards creak under his shifted weight, his mother watching from the car in the driveway.
Ms. Cline answers the door with a flurry, her thick glasses blinking back magnified eyes as she looks him up and down. She shakes her head disapprovingly, but waves him in, smiling falsely at the car outside and the slamming the door shut.
Jack glances around at the living room: stacked newspapers clutter every surface, knick-knacks sprinkled over the space until he's sure their eyes are following him. She slides onto the piano bench and hovers over the keys momentarily, as if breathing in the scent of creative flow, before striking one index finger onto a white one near the middle-left. Then her digits dance over the instrument, music pouring out of the wooden box.
It's always reminded him Gothically of a coffin.
But then the notes pause, as if the thing has sucked all of the noise in the room and is holding it there for ransom. They're both silent, Jack waiting for her to speak, the only sound being the rustling of trees on the front lawn and the dinging chimes. The wind howls as the sky grows dim.
She teaches him chopsticks as the world spins like a washing machine around them.
Looking back, Jack thinks she must have known he was a lost cause. He could play, for sure, that his mother promised, but he would never feel the music. Never taste the rhythm on his tongue, never have the tinny black ink scratches pour from his fingers. Maybe it was something about his personality: he could never just close his eyes and just feel, know, understand. Everything had to have a reason. Jack could read the notes, but he would never be a musician. Though she pats the empty space beside her, as if pitying him for the world he would never know. She teaches him the melodies, shows him where to press his fingers, how to posture his back, when to use the bronze pedals beneath his feet.
Jack practiced until his fingers were raw and he only saw in black and white. His mother was pleased, but Ms. Cline remained saddened.
He could play, but he would never be a musician.
---------
Barney had cataracts and a bad leg when they put him to sleep.
His father never sugarcoated the truth with promises of green-fielded farms or canine angel wings. Jack's dog was in pain and the best thing, the responsible thing, was to put him out of his misery.
Jack understood that.
He was a reasonable person, even at twelve. But something didn't sit right with him.
Jack sat Indian-style on the yellowed linoleum floors of the veterinary hospital, running his flattened palm slowly over Barney's fur, taking a moment the scratch the place just behind his ear that he had always appreciated, even in his dilapidated state. Barney blinked up at him, the harsh lights catching the glare off his glossy eyes and Jack couldn't bear to return the gaze. The veterinarian approached from down the white hall, his expression not quite sympathetic enough for Jack's taste.
This isn't right, he thought as he led the leash back toward the exam room, a one way trip for at least one of them involved.
It was all too sanitary. The sharp click of foot steps on the flooring, Barney's nails scratching at the ground with each pace, the absence of shadows versus the overwhelming presence of light, the monotone voices, the robotic movements of the physician as he injected the syringe into his tight skin... it was all so rehearsed. Like they were both a piece of inconsequential lint that had gotten caught in the cogs of a machine.
Jack thinks about his dog as he blinks slower and slower.
The world is painted in shades of gray, black and white and empty things all that's left. He can barely keep his eyelids open, until there's nothing but a dead heart and a stilled chest.
Jack can't fall asleep that night.
--------
Jack is used to being awake and caffeinated at four in the morning even though most of his girlfriends would call him crazy and roll over, falling back to sleep. But even after he’d worked at the hospital long enough to make his own hours and he had every reason to sleep until the sun was sloping in through his window, most mornings he would get into his car and drive. Where didn’t matter.
It was habit left over from his med school and intern days, and he soon discovered it was the only time of day he could stand. There was something to be said for the deserted streets and the empty parking lots, the quiet calm that only you and the other drivers were there to witness, like you knew a secret that everyone else never realized they were missing. The world is cast in a hazy shade of blue that dulls every color, except for the traffic lights he’s sure he could run until he reached the coast. It was peaceful and everything seemed simply uncomplicated in a way that he could only find in those moments, the transient time between night and daylight, sleep and cognizance, calm and stress, dead and alive. Jack knows it would be medically impossible for his heart to stop beating and his lungs to still their consistent expanse and contraction without being deceased, but if it were, this would be it.
The sun rises with a burst of citrus oranges and stinging pinks, like those fruity drinks his usual type of girl would order at those bars he hated, which makes him hate the sunrise a little by association, but just a little.
So for a moment, he can pretend that the world is still black and white except for the sky and the neon lights, even if it never was at all.
----------
In the moment, Jack believes his words.
He'd pieced together their lives, their history, every time they'd kissed and every fight and put it together. Dismantled it and rearranged the pieces until he thought they made sense. Until they formed a picture.
There had been an accident, and then a miracle. Jack didn't believe in them, but he poured over the charts for weeks after and he couldn't find a sufficient medical reason why the sheets on her hospital bed still shifted from the movement beneath or how her toes still curled under at every horrible joke the nurses made.
This has to be the reason, Jack thinks to himself.
She would dance at her wedding, and that wasn't something that he could point to the x-rays and explain away. Somewhere along the way her wedding had become their wedding, their invitations, their reception.
Jack looks at her at the rehearsal dinner, the microphone clutched tightly in her fists and wonders what he'd done to deserve someone who almost literally worshipped him.
You fixed me, she explains, but he doesn't have the heart to tell her she's all wrong. He didn't do anything.
The groom's men's tuxedoes are so blindingly white that it hurts his eyes.
He can still taste the tequila on his tongue from the night before, and he reaches into his pocket for the blank sheet of paper that should contain his words of comfort and love. He wonders what this is a sign of, the empty paper that reflects his directionless heart. Jack knows this is something he’d never understood, something he could never pinpoint.
Love. It was shapeless and elusive and everything that made him nervous at night, made him clutch the blonde in his arms tighter, knowing that that, at least, was real. Tangible. While he’d never been sure, this was as close as he’d come in the last two years.
Jack fixes his tie in the mirror, the crisp white and the hell-pitch black, clear lines of distinction that he can respect and appreciate for their simplicity and founded personality.
Jack may not understand miracles and he may not understand love, but there had to be something to say for the fact that both came wrapped up it this pretty little package that was looking up at him like he was the best thing she’d ever seen.
And that had to mean something.
-------
No one would suspect if he burned it down, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the house that wasn’t really his anymore.
Jack lights the match, his fingers twitching from the alcohol and the momentary hesitation, waiting. He’s waiting for something, he just hasn’t quite decided what yet.
The miniature fire harnessed by the small splinter flickers, dances in the whispering breeze.
Jack recognizes the color of her hair there, the shade of her eyes in the liquid blue that sinks into the core of the flame. And there’s the intensity with which she used to look at him, something gentle but powerful. He wonders whether she looks at him the same way now, the nameless man that shifts into his unconscious mind while his asleep, always faceless but always touching her with his shady hands. He wants to know who, but there’s only resistance on her lips.
His mind flashes over what it would look like after. The walls singed. The photo albums peppered with undead memories left to flaky tendrils. Her empty drawers that he hadn’t had the heart to fill again, split open by heat. The mirror that she’d applied her makeup in every morning, bubbled over, sooty, light brown like a toasty marshmallow. The curtains, the ones they’d picked out together, burned at the suspended ends. The deep red fabric would look like the petals of a dying rose, he suspects, as he pictures them.
Everything would be laced with the black fibers of destruction, scalloping over every edge.
It would be peaceful he thinks, to bypass cleaning or moving, to just sweep it all away with a broom like it was just careless muddy footprints or butterfingers that had caused it.
But he lets his alcohol tainted breath snuff it out, the tiny fire that could consume it, consume him. Not worth it.
He decides that he’d imagined it all, that she’d never really looked at him like that, like she loved him more than her body could handle.
It makes it easier to loose something if you convince yourself you never had it to begin with.
---------
He hates the smell, death, like the rotting isn’t really the poor guy that’s dangling lopsided and strapped to the monstrous wreckage, but somewhere deep inside him. Like he’s wasting away but he hasn’t realized it yet. But these people aren’t his fault, he reasons, as he hefts another piece of luggage into the sand. They hadn’t lived long enough to be his responsibility. Here, these people that move tiredly but with some unexplainable hope, these people are his responsibility. His burden. But as he glances up at the man who has been staring him down for the last two hours, he realizes that reason has very little to do with his guilt as of late. The woman belted in next to him, her arm hanging limp from the other jutting pieces in this fallen vehicle, is pretty, he thinks. He wonders if she was his wife, if they’d talked on the plane before they’d become coffin-mates. Jack wonders if he really hopes that they had, that they hadn’t died alone.
He shakes his head of such thoughts, reminding himself that he hadn’t known them, their past, and they wouldn’t own him in death. He steps forward, reaching for another scrap of shrapnel, but his foot places unevenly onto the sand. When he peeks down, he notices the small plastic toy. Jack reaches for it, unearthing it partially from the blonde grains, and realizes it’s a cow. The black and white marbled spots glimmer back at him in the intense sunlight. He browses over his surroundings, but his visual sweep only affirms the knowledge he already has; there were no children scampering over the beach. Walt would be too old for such simple toys, so this figurine had to belong to someone in there, the cavern of bodies and blood, unshed screams and the last shreds of their sophisticated humanity.
“Hey, you alright man? You don’t look so good.” Jack looks up at Boone, turning the hunk of plastic once in his hand before slipping it into the duffel bag at his feet.
“Yeah, fine.” Boone nods and turns away, back to the blonde sister and the responsibility he seems intent on taking for himself.
Jack returns to the corpses and the smell, slipping the fabric back over his nose, not realizing the palpable comparison between the water-solvent guilt over these strangers and that which he’ll feel over the young walking savior-complex that just strode away.
--------
His feet stomp loudly in the twigs and ground cover, feeling safe for the first time since their premiere night here to make unadulterated noise in the jungle. Before it had always been light footing, the haziness of a whisper in their voices.
They laugh loudly now, stretch the torches before them, not fearing a faceless group that came from the shadows. Despite the fact that a small sector of them, those that he’d faced dangerous treks with and come up against what he’d thought was entirely myth before, know that there’s still reason to be wary, for the first time he can’t bring himself to care.
The hard dirt shifts to sand under him and he can hear the ocean, the first in a long line of distance wary people to see the crowning waves through the trees. They break the forest with a sigh, some dropping into their tents and settling in to sleep, others forming rings to discuss the future and the immediate past. One or two run to the ocean, dipping their aching feet into the salty water. Tension is palpably lighter.
Jack doesn’t look to see where Danielle and Alex set Ben, because he knows that no one would be more careful of him escaping than them.
At first he doesn’t know what to do with himself, his shoulders seeming odd with no burden there to weigh him down. He’d been so occupied the last few weeks with operating or escaping or planning or leading that his mind is completely blank after shaking out all the excess information to make room for keeping them alive.
Jack finally moves to the beach, the prospect of washing the utter filthiness off him a welcome notion. Rolling his jeans’ legs to his calves and removing his shoes carefully, he wades into the water, unbelievably clear considering the blood that’s been shed around it.
But he doesn’t let himself think about that.
He lets his eyes flutter closed, drawing on a faint memory from the back of his mind to imagine his surroundings into the manageable ones he was used to. Before.
There are sandcastles and brightly colored swimming trunks and Coke bottles dug into the sand when the containers were still glass. The recollection flickers before him like slides in a projector, not quite living anymore due to their age.
He had been young, he knew because he had no fully cognizant memories of trips to the beach, back when his parents could be in each other’s presence without the tense spine and clipped words. He could just make out the smile on his father’s face, not the ironic or grimacing one that he knew all too well, but a genuine smile. It made him a little sad, but not too much because this was what he wanted. Something uncomplicated to immerse himself in.
But something faintly nudging against his bare leg drags him out of the sunny past. Jack glances down and snatches the thing out of the foamy water, holding it towards the light for inspection. He recognizes Charlie’s shoe almost immediately, but he wanted to be sure, to make sure the scenarios in his head weren’t completely unfounded. Staring at the black and white checkered print, Jack tries to imagine a way that this article could be in his hands and that Charlie would return, unharmed.
But instead he tucks in into his back pocket, figuring he doesn’t need to tell everyone about this just yet. They all look so happy, so carefree, sitting lazily in the sand and allowing themselves the simple pleasure of conversation. No, he can sit on this for a little longer.
He just wishes he could have the same privilege.
-----------
Jack nurses the bottle against his lips, swallowing more than he should and letting the excess drip onto his shirt. The haziness almost blurs away his apartment, the maps scattered everywhere like tissues in a sick person’s bedroom, the dishes that overflow onto the countertops, the trashcans that are in similar disarray.
Things are quiet around him, so quiet he can hear himself think, so he takes another drink, skimming over his past and trying to latch onto the good memories, the ones that had made him keep going. But it’s like they’re coated in a slippery film, because he can’t gab a hold of them, sliding back onto his mistakes and his guilt.
Jack has been around long enough to know that that nothing’s right and nothing’s wrong. The world isn’t cast in shades of white and black.
He takes another swig from the bottle, feeling the burn and the pills slide further down his throat, and he tries to forget it.
Fandom: Lost
Pairing/Characters: Jack, mentions of Sarah and Boone.
Rating: PG
Prompt: #97- Writer's Choice for Gray at
50_darkfics
Word Count: 2967
Summary: Seven times Jack saw things it terms of black and white and the one time he couldn't, ranging from childhood to post-Through the Looking Glass.
Jack is eight when his mother drags him by the uniform tie of his prep school to the piano instructor's house.
Wind chimes sway in the breeze of the incoming storm as the porch's floorboards creak under his shifted weight, his mother watching from the car in the driveway.
Ms. Cline answers the door with a flurry, her thick glasses blinking back magnified eyes as she looks him up and down. She shakes her head disapprovingly, but waves him in, smiling falsely at the car outside and the slamming the door shut.
Jack glances around at the living room: stacked newspapers clutter every surface, knick-knacks sprinkled over the space until he's sure their eyes are following him. She slides onto the piano bench and hovers over the keys momentarily, as if breathing in the scent of creative flow, before striking one index finger onto a white one near the middle-left. Then her digits dance over the instrument, music pouring out of the wooden box.
It's always reminded him Gothically of a coffin.
But then the notes pause, as if the thing has sucked all of the noise in the room and is holding it there for ransom. They're both silent, Jack waiting for her to speak, the only sound being the rustling of trees on the front lawn and the dinging chimes. The wind howls as the sky grows dim.
She teaches him chopsticks as the world spins like a washing machine around them.
Looking back, Jack thinks she must have known he was a lost cause. He could play, for sure, that his mother promised, but he would never feel the music. Never taste the rhythm on his tongue, never have the tinny black ink scratches pour from his fingers. Maybe it was something about his personality: he could never just close his eyes and just feel, know, understand. Everything had to have a reason. Jack could read the notes, but he would never be a musician. Though she pats the empty space beside her, as if pitying him for the world he would never know. She teaches him the melodies, shows him where to press his fingers, how to posture his back, when to use the bronze pedals beneath his feet.
Jack practiced until his fingers were raw and he only saw in black and white. His mother was pleased, but Ms. Cline remained saddened.
He could play, but he would never be a musician.
---------
Barney had cataracts and a bad leg when they put him to sleep.
His father never sugarcoated the truth with promises of green-fielded farms or canine angel wings. Jack's dog was in pain and the best thing, the responsible thing, was to put him out of his misery.
Jack understood that.
He was a reasonable person, even at twelve. But something didn't sit right with him.
Jack sat Indian-style on the yellowed linoleum floors of the veterinary hospital, running his flattened palm slowly over Barney's fur, taking a moment the scratch the place just behind his ear that he had always appreciated, even in his dilapidated state. Barney blinked up at him, the harsh lights catching the glare off his glossy eyes and Jack couldn't bear to return the gaze. The veterinarian approached from down the white hall, his expression not quite sympathetic enough for Jack's taste.
This isn't right, he thought as he led the leash back toward the exam room, a one way trip for at least one of them involved.
It was all too sanitary. The sharp click of foot steps on the flooring, Barney's nails scratching at the ground with each pace, the absence of shadows versus the overwhelming presence of light, the monotone voices, the robotic movements of the physician as he injected the syringe into his tight skin... it was all so rehearsed. Like they were both a piece of inconsequential lint that had gotten caught in the cogs of a machine.
Jack thinks about his dog as he blinks slower and slower.
The world is painted in shades of gray, black and white and empty things all that's left. He can barely keep his eyelids open, until there's nothing but a dead heart and a stilled chest.
Jack can't fall asleep that night.
--------
Jack is used to being awake and caffeinated at four in the morning even though most of his girlfriends would call him crazy and roll over, falling back to sleep. But even after he’d worked at the hospital long enough to make his own hours and he had every reason to sleep until the sun was sloping in through his window, most mornings he would get into his car and drive. Where didn’t matter.
It was habit left over from his med school and intern days, and he soon discovered it was the only time of day he could stand. There was something to be said for the deserted streets and the empty parking lots, the quiet calm that only you and the other drivers were there to witness, like you knew a secret that everyone else never realized they were missing. The world is cast in a hazy shade of blue that dulls every color, except for the traffic lights he’s sure he could run until he reached the coast. It was peaceful and everything seemed simply uncomplicated in a way that he could only find in those moments, the transient time between night and daylight, sleep and cognizance, calm and stress, dead and alive. Jack knows it would be medically impossible for his heart to stop beating and his lungs to still their consistent expanse and contraction without being deceased, but if it were, this would be it.
The sun rises with a burst of citrus oranges and stinging pinks, like those fruity drinks his usual type of girl would order at those bars he hated, which makes him hate the sunrise a little by association, but just a little.
So for a moment, he can pretend that the world is still black and white except for the sky and the neon lights, even if it never was at all.
----------
In the moment, Jack believes his words.
He'd pieced together their lives, their history, every time they'd kissed and every fight and put it together. Dismantled it and rearranged the pieces until he thought they made sense. Until they formed a picture.
There had been an accident, and then a miracle. Jack didn't believe in them, but he poured over the charts for weeks after and he couldn't find a sufficient medical reason why the sheets on her hospital bed still shifted from the movement beneath or how her toes still curled under at every horrible joke the nurses made.
This has to be the reason, Jack thinks to himself.
She would dance at her wedding, and that wasn't something that he could point to the x-rays and explain away. Somewhere along the way her wedding had become their wedding, their invitations, their reception.
Jack looks at her at the rehearsal dinner, the microphone clutched tightly in her fists and wonders what he'd done to deserve someone who almost literally worshipped him.
You fixed me, she explains, but he doesn't have the heart to tell her she's all wrong. He didn't do anything.
The groom's men's tuxedoes are so blindingly white that it hurts his eyes.
He can still taste the tequila on his tongue from the night before, and he reaches into his pocket for the blank sheet of paper that should contain his words of comfort and love. He wonders what this is a sign of, the empty paper that reflects his directionless heart. Jack knows this is something he’d never understood, something he could never pinpoint.
Love. It was shapeless and elusive and everything that made him nervous at night, made him clutch the blonde in his arms tighter, knowing that that, at least, was real. Tangible. While he’d never been sure, this was as close as he’d come in the last two years.
Jack fixes his tie in the mirror, the crisp white and the hell-pitch black, clear lines of distinction that he can respect and appreciate for their simplicity and founded personality.
Jack may not understand miracles and he may not understand love, but there had to be something to say for the fact that both came wrapped up it this pretty little package that was looking up at him like he was the best thing she’d ever seen.
And that had to mean something.
-------
No one would suspect if he burned it down, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the house that wasn’t really his anymore.
Jack lights the match, his fingers twitching from the alcohol and the momentary hesitation, waiting. He’s waiting for something, he just hasn’t quite decided what yet.
The miniature fire harnessed by the small splinter flickers, dances in the whispering breeze.
Jack recognizes the color of her hair there, the shade of her eyes in the liquid blue that sinks into the core of the flame. And there’s the intensity with which she used to look at him, something gentle but powerful. He wonders whether she looks at him the same way now, the nameless man that shifts into his unconscious mind while his asleep, always faceless but always touching her with his shady hands. He wants to know who, but there’s only resistance on her lips.
His mind flashes over what it would look like after. The walls singed. The photo albums peppered with undead memories left to flaky tendrils. Her empty drawers that he hadn’t had the heart to fill again, split open by heat. The mirror that she’d applied her makeup in every morning, bubbled over, sooty, light brown like a toasty marshmallow. The curtains, the ones they’d picked out together, burned at the suspended ends. The deep red fabric would look like the petals of a dying rose, he suspects, as he pictures them.
Everything would be laced with the black fibers of destruction, scalloping over every edge.
It would be peaceful he thinks, to bypass cleaning or moving, to just sweep it all away with a broom like it was just careless muddy footprints or butterfingers that had caused it.
But he lets his alcohol tainted breath snuff it out, the tiny fire that could consume it, consume him. Not worth it.
He decides that he’d imagined it all, that she’d never really looked at him like that, like she loved him more than her body could handle.
It makes it easier to loose something if you convince yourself you never had it to begin with.
---------
He hates the smell, death, like the rotting isn’t really the poor guy that’s dangling lopsided and strapped to the monstrous wreckage, but somewhere deep inside him. Like he’s wasting away but he hasn’t realized it yet. But these people aren’t his fault, he reasons, as he hefts another piece of luggage into the sand. They hadn’t lived long enough to be his responsibility. Here, these people that move tiredly but with some unexplainable hope, these people are his responsibility. His burden. But as he glances up at the man who has been staring him down for the last two hours, he realizes that reason has very little to do with his guilt as of late. The woman belted in next to him, her arm hanging limp from the other jutting pieces in this fallen vehicle, is pretty, he thinks. He wonders if she was his wife, if they’d talked on the plane before they’d become coffin-mates. Jack wonders if he really hopes that they had, that they hadn’t died alone.
He shakes his head of such thoughts, reminding himself that he hadn’t known them, their past, and they wouldn’t own him in death. He steps forward, reaching for another scrap of shrapnel, but his foot places unevenly onto the sand. When he peeks down, he notices the small plastic toy. Jack reaches for it, unearthing it partially from the blonde grains, and realizes it’s a cow. The black and white marbled spots glimmer back at him in the intense sunlight. He browses over his surroundings, but his visual sweep only affirms the knowledge he already has; there were no children scampering over the beach. Walt would be too old for such simple toys, so this figurine had to belong to someone in there, the cavern of bodies and blood, unshed screams and the last shreds of their sophisticated humanity.
“Hey, you alright man? You don’t look so good.” Jack looks up at Boone, turning the hunk of plastic once in his hand before slipping it into the duffel bag at his feet.
“Yeah, fine.” Boone nods and turns away, back to the blonde sister and the responsibility he seems intent on taking for himself.
Jack returns to the corpses and the smell, slipping the fabric back over his nose, not realizing the palpable comparison between the water-solvent guilt over these strangers and that which he’ll feel over the young walking savior-complex that just strode away.
--------
His feet stomp loudly in the twigs and ground cover, feeling safe for the first time since their premiere night here to make unadulterated noise in the jungle. Before it had always been light footing, the haziness of a whisper in their voices.
They laugh loudly now, stretch the torches before them, not fearing a faceless group that came from the shadows. Despite the fact that a small sector of them, those that he’d faced dangerous treks with and come up against what he’d thought was entirely myth before, know that there’s still reason to be wary, for the first time he can’t bring himself to care.
The hard dirt shifts to sand under him and he can hear the ocean, the first in a long line of distance wary people to see the crowning waves through the trees. They break the forest with a sigh, some dropping into their tents and settling in to sleep, others forming rings to discuss the future and the immediate past. One or two run to the ocean, dipping their aching feet into the salty water. Tension is palpably lighter.
Jack doesn’t look to see where Danielle and Alex set Ben, because he knows that no one would be more careful of him escaping than them.
At first he doesn’t know what to do with himself, his shoulders seeming odd with no burden there to weigh him down. He’d been so occupied the last few weeks with operating or escaping or planning or leading that his mind is completely blank after shaking out all the excess information to make room for keeping them alive.
Jack finally moves to the beach, the prospect of washing the utter filthiness off him a welcome notion. Rolling his jeans’ legs to his calves and removing his shoes carefully, he wades into the water, unbelievably clear considering the blood that’s been shed around it.
But he doesn’t let himself think about that.
He lets his eyes flutter closed, drawing on a faint memory from the back of his mind to imagine his surroundings into the manageable ones he was used to. Before.
There are sandcastles and brightly colored swimming trunks and Coke bottles dug into the sand when the containers were still glass. The recollection flickers before him like slides in a projector, not quite living anymore due to their age.
He had been young, he knew because he had no fully cognizant memories of trips to the beach, back when his parents could be in each other’s presence without the tense spine and clipped words. He could just make out the smile on his father’s face, not the ironic or grimacing one that he knew all too well, but a genuine smile. It made him a little sad, but not too much because this was what he wanted. Something uncomplicated to immerse himself in.
But something faintly nudging against his bare leg drags him out of the sunny past. Jack glances down and snatches the thing out of the foamy water, holding it towards the light for inspection. He recognizes Charlie’s shoe almost immediately, but he wanted to be sure, to make sure the scenarios in his head weren’t completely unfounded. Staring at the black and white checkered print, Jack tries to imagine a way that this article could be in his hands and that Charlie would return, unharmed.
But instead he tucks in into his back pocket, figuring he doesn’t need to tell everyone about this just yet. They all look so happy, so carefree, sitting lazily in the sand and allowing themselves the simple pleasure of conversation. No, he can sit on this for a little longer.
He just wishes he could have the same privilege.
-----------
Jack nurses the bottle against his lips, swallowing more than he should and letting the excess drip onto his shirt. The haziness almost blurs away his apartment, the maps scattered everywhere like tissues in a sick person’s bedroom, the dishes that overflow onto the countertops, the trashcans that are in similar disarray.
Things are quiet around him, so quiet he can hear himself think, so he takes another drink, skimming over his past and trying to latch onto the good memories, the ones that had made him keep going. But it’s like they’re coated in a slippery film, because he can’t gab a hold of them, sliding back onto his mistakes and his guilt.
Jack has been around long enough to know that that nothing’s right and nothing’s wrong. The world isn’t cast in shades of white and black.
He takes another swig from the bottle, feeling the burn and the pills slide further down his throat, and he tries to forget it.