Friday, April the Ninth. Rain was flushing worms from beneath the sidewalk and coldly drowning them in puddles.
Kevin realized with detached bemusement that he didn’t care about anything in the house enough to take it with him and skipped packing. Changed his mind when he got downstairs and, for reason unclear, grabbed a kitchen knife. Michael Meyers style, still in its cardboard sheath, a condensed homage to the meticulousness of his mother. He looked through the hallway into the living room, where he could see the top of her head and protruding feet asleep on the couch. Despite being close to the flickering gas fireplace, she had an afghan pulled around her shoulders, half draped on the floor.
Some tentative emotion, a tobacco smoke wisp lingering but for a moment, rippled through his soul like a pebble thrown into a pool. It was an incongruous sense of affection. He had never really felt that he loved his mother; she was a sort of necessary character, background, neither Yin nor Yang, and Love was a word his dictionary couldn’t explain. To be honest, he never felt that he knew her.
Then the knife felt real in his hand again. His eyes focused on the blade, and with a deliberate movement he slid it beneath his coat and slipped quietly out the door.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Concerning the Rain
Rain-stirred consciousness, an expanding ringlet moving out away from the shore into infinity from a single droplet of water. Waking to the realization that the gentle scratching was not the liquescence of his mind, but rainwater rolling down the window-pane. Glaring into red alpha-numerics burning his retina. Scarce after four PM.
He sat up slowly, palm wiping a face waxy and plasticine, and moved to the window to gaze into a brick landscape blurred by waterspots and crowded grey skies.
How many times had he woken this way? Seventeen years worth of nights, and mornings, and afternoons, each movement blurred into the next until the line where an end became another beginning vanished altogether, leaving just a series of one-act plays. How pathetic it all seemed from this vantage at the threshold of a hangover, where clarity was ironically often its most salient. How long would he remain here, just getting by in empty existence doping up in this bedroom in his parents’ house? Every passing motion an immolation to Hopelessness. Sooner or later it would come to a breaking point; he knew it was just a matter of time. He needed to get the hell out of here before that.
But Ivy was right. He did need someone. He didn’t want to do it alone, a paradigm shift he recognized with as crystalline certainty as he saw the world through the rain-washed window. Admitting it frightened him, but he knew more surely than he could know anything that he didn’t want to be anywhere without her.
He sat up slowly, palm wiping a face waxy and plasticine, and moved to the window to gaze into a brick landscape blurred by waterspots and crowded grey skies.
How many times had he woken this way? Seventeen years worth of nights, and mornings, and afternoons, each movement blurred into the next until the line where an end became another beginning vanished altogether, leaving just a series of one-act plays. How pathetic it all seemed from this vantage at the threshold of a hangover, where clarity was ironically often its most salient. How long would he remain here, just getting by in empty existence doping up in this bedroom in his parents’ house? Every passing motion an immolation to Hopelessness. Sooner or later it would come to a breaking point; he knew it was just a matter of time. He needed to get the hell out of here before that.
But Ivy was right. He did need someone. He didn’t want to do it alone, a paradigm shift he recognized with as crystalline certainty as he saw the world through the rain-washed window. Admitting it frightened him, but he knew more surely than he could know anything that he didn’t want to be anywhere without her.
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