She picks up her phone again and scrolls. It’s only a few seconds. Back to the carpet it goes, but still in front of her face – just in case someone responds.
“I don’t even want to do anything on here,” she mutters. Her eyes drift out the window. They’re itchy and dry and they’re begging for a rest. Maybe tomorrow.
“I wish you could meet the good me,” she says to the boy. “She’s so cool. She’s funny, and clever, and empathetic…”
“I think I’ve seen glimpses of her,” the boy says. His face is insistent, particularly his eyebrows.
“No you haven’t.”
The boy doesn’t reply. The rumble of the air conditioning keeps the room from complete silence. Overtop a face twists in thought, the boys eyes wander upward. The girl checks her phone. Twice. Still nothing.
“What would she do if she were here?” the boy finally asks. “The good you.”
The girl looks up from her phone. The boy asks the question again with his eyes, waiting.
“I don’t know…” the girl trails off. She looks down, then out the window again. The boys gaze waits bravely for hers to return.
“Just one thing. Gimme one thing.” the boy softly pushes. The air conditioning cuts off, delivering a proper silence this time. It’s a short one.
“She liked to dance,” the girl says.
Past tense, the boy thinks, but he forces himself to move along. And up. He moves up. His hands push his hips up from the rug. Both his knees crack as he stands. He whips his phone from his pocket.
“To what?” he asks. He extends his one empty hand.
“I don’t know.”
The girl leaves the boy’s hand outstretched. He retracts that hand and extends the other, the one with the phone.
“Just pick a song.”
The girl sighs – but takes the phone without a word. Her face fills with a focus and glows with reflection of the phone’s light. The boy smiles. He likes her face like this.
“Ok, this one,” she taps the phone.
The song plays. A lone bell is smacked at an upbeat tempo. The boy recognizes the tune immediately.
“I love this one!” the boy exclaims. His feet tap and his hands wave. He moves. And turns.
He dances.
“So sad what happened to her,” the girl mutters, speaking about the untimely death of the song’s artist. The boy ignores her effort to highlight another negative.
“Doesn’t make it any less groovy!” he exclaims. He continues to dance. Not well, of course. He would never claim that. Certainly well enough, though. He has always been proud of that.
For a whole minute he dances – barely even looking at the girl. The boy looks rather foolish, dancing alone in his parent’s basement in front of a girl refusing to join him. He hates feeling foolish. Still, he dances.
The first chorus comes to a close. The boy looks back at the girl. Her eyes are elsewhere, out the window once again.
But her feet are present. They tap softly against the carpet, as if afraid to be heard.
“You’re telling me you don’t want to dance a litttttttle bit?” the boy goads. The girl maintains her stare out the window. Her foot continues to tap. The song’s verses build. The boy’s knees bounce faster and faster. He extends another hand.
“I’m just gonna keep asking.”
“You’re so dumb,” the girl blurts out. A smirk nearly follows. Nearly. She masks with a scowl. The boy moves closer, still bouncing up and down with an outstretched hand.
The girl groans. The boy grins even wider. They remain at an impasse as the chorus approaches. Twenty seconds away. Fifteen. Ten.
.
.
.
.
Five.
.
.
Two.
One.
The next part is a blur. The girl takes the boy’s hand. She stands. And for a few seconds…
She dances. Yes, really. She dances. She may even smile. But it’s all too fast to be sure of. A blur, as previously stated. So fast the boy has almost missed it.
Almost. The chorus ends.
The girl sits back down, looking sad.
The boy sits back down, feeling lucky.
He’s just caught a glimpse.
mourning the living
It’s a tiresome thing, to wait for a death. Waiting so often turns into hoping. No, the boy would never hope for death.
But he will wait for it. How can he not? She is mostly gone already, He is not afraid to admit this. The “mostly” is subjective. There’s no percentage to attach to it. It would be much easier if there was.
“Detach yourself from me,” she says. The boy squirms internally. She always says this and he always hates it.
Has she ever been told such a thing? The boy wishes he could talk to someone who has. Maybe they’d have advice. Maybe they’d have words that would allow him to un-clench his fists.
Death is not so sad. The boy has seen plenty. The dead do not look sad. They even look happy, although that may just be in contrast to the living. The living are always so sad around the dead. The boy feels disconnected from these people. What is so sad about a lack of pain? It is over for them. Neutral. The boy is jealous of the dead sometimes.
No. Even in his own mind the boy must wrangle his words. He does not mean he wants to join the dead. He has wanted to before, but that was a different boy.
Right?
Yes. Yes and no. Yes, he is not going anywhere. No, he is not a different boy, no matter how hard he tries to convince himself.
“What keeps you here??” the boy asks the girl one day. “Wait-”
He immediately regrets asking..
What if his question is, for her, unanswerable? Will he have placed a nail in the coffin? He would feel such a fool for pushing her. Wait-
What is his own answer?
Hm. This can’t be good.
He should know by now. And should’ve known if he was going to ask the question. So stupid. Wait-
Where’d the girl go?
The boy looks around. He can’t find her anywhere.
It’ll be okay. The boy repeats it to himself. It’ll be okay. She’s out there somewhere. He’ll just have to keep looking.
She’s out there somewhere.
Hm. Maybe that’s his answer.
watching, waiting, wanting…
The boy wishes he could walk away with the stoicism of someone not hurt by hurt.
He has been wishing often lately. Often for different things. He has been wishing for different things too often. He wishes he would stop. There’s another one.
He will list them from now on. Each wish, as it comes to him. Three days should be enough. OR is it too long. The boy wishes he wasn’t so scared of his own mind.
Gah!
There’s the first. The boy finds a piece of paper and folds it in half two times. He always keeps a pen in his pocket. Now it will have a friend.
The boy’s day continues. It rains. He does not wish for sun. He likes rain. Being wet from rain is not so bad. It reminds him of being small.
Big people don’t get wet unless they’re getting into a pool. Or a lake. Or a river. Or an ocean. Being big is being scared. The boy wishes he wasn’t big. The boy wishes he wasn’t scared. There’s number two. The boy checks his phone. He wishes he didn’t do that so often.
There’s a text. From Mom. “Mum” in the phone. The boy did that a while ago. He forgets why.
“How are you doing?” reads the text.
So many ways to answer the question. The response the boy gives is usually candid to the moment he’s in. Right now, he wishes he communicated better with his parents.
He texts those words to his mom. He doesn’t usually do thi. Mostly because he knows he won’t feel this open for long. Still, he’s glad to have done it in the moment. He just wishes it were easier.
Maybe he will get there. The conversation with Mom goes well. Regardless of how it affects him down the line, he has told a truth, and he is proud to have done so.
The rain has stopped. The clouds have left. The sidewalk steams under returning sun. THe air is sticky. So is the boy’s shirt. Such is the cost of rain. It is a fair price.
THe boy elects to stop at his local gym. They have a basketball court. He doesn’t use the exercise equipment. Just the court. He pays $50/month to visit the gym one to two times a week and only use the basketball court. It is the only gym he can walk to , and he really enjoys playing basketball.
It is a fair price.
He shoots for a half hour. He hasn’t shot in a while. He’s never been a good shooter. Sometimes he can get his mechanics right, but it’s as if it’s not in his nature to be consistent. The boy used to wish he wasn’t that way. He still may, as soon as tomorrow. But right now, he is happy to be playing basketball. The boy plays the perfect amount of time each week – whenever he feels like it.
Some other boys, small ones, ask if he wants to play with them. It will be three-on-three. Each team will have two small boys and one big one.
The boy sets a half hour timer. He needs them or he’ll lose track of time entirely.
The small boys are young and each vary in skillet. One of them looks unsure each time he touches the ball. He laughs off each mistake, overly dismissive of errors he wishes he hadn’t made. The boy, being older, and bigger, knows his goal will to encourage the smaller boy. And so he does. They play for what feels like a few minutes. The timer goes off. Must have been more. He sets it again.
Slowly, and very un-assuredly, the small boy grows into the game. He makes his first shot. THen another.
The boy wishes this smaller boy smiled in his successes as often as he did when trying to appear apathetic to his failures. He starts high fiving the boy after each success. One by one, the smiles trickle in at the right moments more than the wrong ones. The timer goes off again.
The boy resets his timer two more times before the game comes to an end. He’s not sure how many times it was total. He would gladly set it again if it weren’t time for the gym to close. He wishes the game could’ve lasted longer. Actually, the boy’s legs are more tired than he though. He’s glad the game ended when it did. He just wishes he did this kind of thing more often. And that he wasn’t so sweaty.
The boy heads home, tired from the long day. He showers, and after a quick dinner of various leftovers, he finds he finds himself surprisingly tired. He likes it.
The boy follows the feeling to bed. This day is done.
He wonders what he’ll wish for tomorrow.
pressure of a goodnight
No, not a good night. Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s a no good, very bad night when the pressure arrives in full. Still, on good nights, that pressure remains. It’s always there. It always will be. Sometimes the pressure isn’t felt. Sometimes it’s forgotten. Only sometimes. Sometimes has not arrived for the boy in a long time.
“What was the last thing you said to them?”
The boy asks himself this question with each loss. If the answer is good, he doesn’t have to ask again. Before his grandma died, the boy told her he loved her. He was young. The words were said out of response and routine. Still, he meant them as much as any young child could, even if he did not know they would be his last to her. An acceptable answer, the boy had decided, and the question has not been asked since.
“What was the last thing you said to them?”
This is a much harder question when the boy thinks about his brother. He asks it to himself often, hoping a different answer will surface with each new ask. It is a stupid hope to have. Memory does not save gifts for later.
“See ya later,” is what the boy had said. He was running late getting back to college. His brother was in bed, upright, and on his computer. He looked busy.
The boy has no guilt about his choice of words. They were fine. Hindsight is an unfair judge.
But the boy also remembers what he didn’t say, or rather do. He remembers wanting to embrace his brother. It was a habit he had tried to maintain when giving goodbyes. He had hugged everyone else.
As previously stated, his brother looked busy, and the boy was running late. So, a little ashamed, the boy elected to forgot the hug with his brother. It seemed like it would be a bother and the boy hated being that for people. That was the lat time the boy saw his brother alive.
The boy does not feel guilty.
The hug would not have made a difference.
His brother did not want the hug, anyway.
The boy does not feel guilty.
The hug would not have made a difference.
These are things the boy must tell himself.
These are things the boy must believe.
The pressure of a goodnight is the pressure of not knowing if you will get to tell that same person good morning.
For healthy friends and family, the pressure has lessened over time. The boy tells them how he feels as often as he can. He cannot spend his days worrying over them. They will be okay. They have to be.
But for those not-so-healthy, the pressure builds. It squeezes words out of the boy.
The boy thinks about the girl he knows who is sick. She has told him she will die soon. The boy does not know when. It could be soon. In fact, it could have already happened. He hopes not, but he must not be caught by surprise, so he must accept the possibility.
The day-to-day status of the girls’ life will always leave him wondering about what his final words to her will be – or will have been. He does not expect to get the closure of knowing beforehand.
The boy wonders if the girl-who-is-sick thinks about this from the other side. It must be different – she knows when she’ll die, after all. Will she be thinking about her final words to people, and theirs to her?
Only she knows the end. They must speak to her each day as if they will see her tomorrow. The girl can speak to them knowing otherwise. She knows the future, in a way. In one, specific way.
She knows that whatever conversation she has with someone – that conversation will be burned into their memory.
She could start a fight if she wanted – and leave someone haunted by the things they yelled. She could show support in someone – and leave someone with a faith that will never waiver. Or she could just… disappear.
It’s a lot like a superpower, the boy considers. One that she only gets to use once.
What will she do with it? What will she give people to sit with, forever? It could be anything.
It could even be a hug.
at last
The boy, in an effort to work through his confusion, begins to write.
He doesn’t expect anyone to read it, least of all the girl who instigated this habit. It would be rude to be expectant of the dying, thinks the boy writes the boy. He’s tired of thinking in circles. At least he’s writing. These circles take longer to close.
The boy finds his inspiration comes best in a state of avoidance.
So, he writes at restaurants, bars, parks (while they’re busy); he even writes at the gym. As long as he is avoiding, he is safe from stagnation. Stagnation. The boy likes that word. It’s how he feels. But he can avoid that feeling as long as he has something to run from.
So the boy goes to the most social of spaces and doesn’t say a word – although he writes many. He likes his written words better than his spoken ones. No one can hear them. The boy doesn’t mind when people hear his words, but he will always worry if they actually want to hear them.
With his words written, they exist without any effort to impress or engage. They simply are. If someone read them, they would be admitting their interest the moment they laid eyes on the first line. But the boy does not need them to read his written words in the way he needs them to hear the ones that he speaks.
Speaking is too vulnerable, the boy decides – and subsequently writes. He will not stop speaking. His world and many of his joys demand it. But perhaps for him, the less he speaks, the truer to himself he will be.
As the boy sits at the lively, boisterous (and increasingly dim) bar, he feels more himself than he ever has.
He is awkward.
He does struggle to socialize. The boy wonders how others see him in this setting, sitting alone and writing like he is. Do they see him as comfortable as he feels?
That’s what the boy likes most about writing in the bar: If someone were to see him, hunched over and scribbling, and it were their first impression of him, he is not sure he could pick a better introduction. No. Better is the wrong word. Honest. A more honest introduction.
THe boy has been putting out his “best” impression for as long as he can remember. MAybe this is the day he finally stops.
Funny the boy thinks writes.
All of this self progression, self praise even, it can’t be the whole picture. Writing in the bar, finding himself, it’s more than it seems. A single word returns to the boy’s mind. As new customers seat themselves at the bar, the boy brings a candle closer to his pad and writes the same word five times. He doesn’t care if anyone sees it. He wants them to.
Avoidance
Avoidance
Avoidance
Avoidance
Avoidance
The boy reads it as he writes it and writes it as he reads it. He is a master of avoidance – but to delve into that would be avoidance in and of itself.
Focus, the boy writes. Again. Focus.
On what?
Avoidance.
Avoidance of what?
Now we’re cooking.
The boy supposes what. He will put the pen down and think. Just for a minute.
Okay.
Maybe two
Or three
Or ten.
Fuck.
Focus. Focus!
Avoiding…what? It’s to do with the sick girl, that the boy is sure of. But there’s nuance to it. What exactly?
What is he scared of sitting with? It must be something that fills him with fear or shame. Or both. It’s on the tip of his tongue. If he doesn’t write it down, it will be lost.
The boy is worried that the girl who is sick does not like him. Keep going.
Okay! the boy thinks writes thinks writes.
The boy is selfish. It’s okay to be selfish. It’s bad to deny it’s presence.
There it is. The boy is nervous. He knows what he’s been avoiding. He must write it.
The boy is just as afraid of the girl dying as he is of the girl living and not wanting him in her life. The boy feels a weight leave his chest while an ugly thing twists in his stomach. It’s true, whether he wants it to be or not. He can no longer deny the presence of one behind the excuse of the other.
With this truth, he will have to step back. The girl will ask for help if she needs it.
The boy will answer that call if it comes, but he will not wait for it. He cannot wait for it. He must not wait for it.
Or he may become sick himself.