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I was a heavy heart to carry
Sometimes the thought of moving forward makes him hopeful. More often it makes him want to panic. It feels like actual, literal motion, like something that takes exactly that amount of effort and coordination and twice the faith. Sometimes he doesn't even believe that "forward" exists, not for him. It exists for people with jobs and careers and ( Read more... ) -
I have survived to this day
The place looks sad ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
The next few days, he waits and he tries to pretend that he isn't waiting. He lies awake at night, staring up at the patterns of the shadows on the ceiling and listening to the footsteps in the hall outside his door, but he doesn't push the call button and ask for more painkillers, for anything to take the edge off and knock him out ( Read more... ) -
And carve your name and hearts into the warhead
Somewhere between finding out the news and hitting the tarmac in Newark, he decides not to go to Neil immediately.
Some of it is fear, plain and simple, though he'd only come out and call it that under extreme duress. But it's not fear of Neil, not really. It's both more complex and more horrible than that. It's fear of disappointing him. Fear of ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
He's had a fucking year. A year to think. To brood. To try to reach out, again and again, and each time Neil's felt a little further away from him, until finally--somewhere in between the fifth letter (barely answered) and the seventh (not answered at all)--he had let it go. Let the silence descend ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
He wakes up slowly, and it takes him a while to realize that it isn't the first time, and longer to understand why the body draped over him and the limbs tangled up with his don't seem strange or out of place. Once he's awake enough to grasp that, he's awake enough to wonder what time it is--he can see light through the curtains--but he can't see ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
Neil ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
In the end he's not sure what to do with the news. It doesn't come as a shock--someone like him gets moved around a lot, and he knows by now to not get comfortable anywhere he goes--and really it should come as a relief, leaving the middle of fucking nowhere, even if he's going to a more southerly bit of fucking nowhere, because as least that will ( Read more... ) -
New worlds for the weary
On the last day of Mike Pinocchio’s life he gets up while it’s still dark, and he dresses in the darkness, and in the darkness he leaves Tom and Neil, and in the darkness he passes the girls sleeping soundly in their little beds, and in the darkness he walks out into the world ( Read more... ) -
Testament
(Inserted between the front flap and first page of Mike's journal, clearly written more recently than the rest)If you're reading this, I'm probably not around anymore. I'm sorry about that, because I guess that must be rough. I didn't want to go. There's a lot here that I would have preferred to stick with. But we don't get to make that choice, and ( Read more... )