“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
– Chuck Palahniuk
Awaking, I check for the color of the walls, only to be met by the tragic realization that they weren’t covered by those little glow-in-the-dark-stars my aunt put up for me when I was younger.
Heaps of tears dimple the teal fabric of the mattress, its attenuated metal springs complacent, yet yearning to penetrate the silver duct tape imprisoning them. He’s next to me, his pallid flesh escapes from the tattered bottom of a coffee-stained wife-beater; cellulite barely drapes his penis. A dim computer screen burns onto his obesity, his thick-framed glasses reflecting my exposed rib cage and protruding collarbones. My breath feels like the first after a coma, tongue withered at the root. It’s warm as I lie naked beside him.
These past three weeks have been stitched together by agony. But I’m starting to like the scent of the menthol cigarettes he brushes his teeth with.
Ashes fall upon the frayed carpet running deep with the scent of cat piss. Smothered by his own skin, he coughs and wheezes, my feeble arm wraps around his porcine stomach in search of comfort, palpitating along with the excess of his shaking flesh. Clamping my wrist, he throws my arm off and steps into his decayed bedroom slippers, outing the cigarette upon the oak dresser. The contorted butt’s ember cooks into the wood, then exhausts following the slam of the bedroom door.
I used to stare at those stars when my aunt fell asleep and the house was still. I’d bite the filth beneath my uncut fingernails, scraping it onto my canines, letting it accumulate with the plaque of my crooked smile. The trick is to keep the fragment of the nail still between your lips, begin to slightly blow and let it flutter between them until it flies across the room. Some call this a habit. I call this a distraction, a remedy, my practice of foul hygiene would lead me to ponder thoughts for hours, reflecting, biting, chewing, ruminating over how each adventitious being lives a life as complex and vivid as my own, populated with their own ambitions, sorrows, routines, worries. A bestseller that continues to invisibly type itself around you, like Roman catacombs sprawling underground, with complex passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know exist. Where you may only appear once, as an extra kissing your beloved in the background of a scene, as a dirty look given at the supermarket, as an attraction far too real to speak to. As anything. There’s some purpose that others hold in my narrative.
The key tumbles the lock, the bolt slides into the door. Paralyzed by my obscure thoughts, I lie here in a windowless room.
Do you ever get that feeling like you’re unique? As if all the shit in life you’re experiencing has some valid reasoning, to mold you, to shape you? Bathing in this feeling of being wanted, of feeling needed, I feel exactly this.
What about the sense of life flashing before your eyes? It seems I’m having just the opposite, thinking forward, to all the things I haven’t accomplished, the places I intend to visit, the objectives and goals I always said I’ll get around to. Most times I’ve pictured the thought alone, but not now. I’m photocopying all the things he and I can be inside my head, if only he could see inside my head. How it pleases. Like this avidity to be bruised by catastrophe, to lose everything in a flood, to survive a car crash. Anything that brings forth an entanglement to that rope we call life, to forge a knot, reinforcing, making that rope tighter, as if to show us there are two ends to it. As if I’m finally seeing the world for what it is, like how your eyes adjust to the darkness of a room.
There’s no need for me to turn the lights back on.
Why stand when you know the next time you fall you won’t get back up?
That’s the thought that runs through my head as I take the delicate arm off my chest. Pulling the last drag from my cigarette, I slip into those bedroom slippers Nataly bought me for Christmas in Vegas of ‘78. There’s something about the last drag of your first cigarette, that goodbye kiss to your lungs. Like your lips, that cage inside your chest will always want more. I’ve found cigarettes are cheaper than affection anyways, but you can pick your poison. Love will make you break, cigarettes just make you rot.
Patting against black walls I find the light switch, FLICK, and those black walls turn a worn white. There’s my shithole of a home. Nataly always said, “People don’t want the truth because they don’t want their little illusions destroyed.” I’m starting to wonder what happens when there’s a lack of checks and balances, when you don’t have someone to maintain the difference in truth and fiction.
When you’re alone, anything can be truth.
So I live in one of those Ikea catalogs and have the greatest art collection you’ve ever seen. From Rembrandt to Pollock, Warhol to Picasso, I have it all. I wear one of those Brooks Brothers American-cut suits with my perfect teeth and confidence. I come home after a long day and feel the compassion of my lover’s arms. I am everything I’m not.
But just how long does one have to lie until it becomes the truth?
Like a bouquet of roses, a dozen .45 caliber bullets fill the clip of a Berretta M9. My heroine, my Nataly vanished. Slipped through the slowly formed cracks of the vial I furnished out of infatuation. I am lost inside myself, forsaken by my own reflection. I would have shown her the world as it was in my dreams, but just like tear drops, those dreams came crashing down, one by one. Her questions came in the same package as the white picket fence. “Can I love without hate? Will I want without need? Will I ever live my life long enough to appreciate the fact that I can’t embrace one without the other? Do I want this? Do I need this?”
All that remains of her is my captive marionette. My Rembrandt, My Pollock. The gallery showing which lies down that desolate hallway is titled: “The Misery She Sparked.”
I pick off transparent flakes from my scalp, the now dried up super-glue, left over from the trashy blonde wig he likes to put on my head. With my feet fettered to the frame of the bed, I can’t help but lie pensive and complacent. Yearning to hear a sound, a voice, to feel his presence, his bittersweet company.
It seems there’s always something audible going on around you. Even in the purest of silence your ear will pick up on that unfathomable decibel, that steadfast murmur, as long as your heart still beats, as long as—
My heart beat stops as the deadbolt slides away. Thoughts of love and death have deafened me; my ears congest from the sight of sweat gushing off the gun’s barrel. Approaching the bed, he places the pistol adjacent to the contorted cigarette butts. As his slush of flesh climbs onto me, engulfing me, I whisper:
“You can have me; I am yours.”
His face twists with spite as the pulp of his hands, skin and sweat, wrap around my neck, drowning me.
Adulation rests within the flesh of limpid eyes. Behind bleached lips, the crush of breath expires, a victim of circumstance. My circumstance.
I have been dead all my life, now I’ve simply finished the preparing of my second demise. Placing the Berretta to the back of my throat, gagging, teeth clenched to the barrel, I whisper the vowels of my beloved’s name into the now deaf ear of my scapegoat.
Near the end I wished to at last feel somewhat alive.
But I do not.
As the white noise fills my brain, clouding my sight, like a flickering light, I burn out, into oblivion, everlasting sleep.
Austin Rick is a senior at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School (CASA).
