His parents won the lottery and you are driving up North with him. Once there, he will explain to them why a big chunk of those winnings should go to him, and, by extension, you, so you can live the lives you both deserve (via being introverted nutcases who want a version of life that feels more like what ‘normal’ people seem to be getting out of it).
You have known his parents your entire life—they won the lottery when he was a freshman in high school and immediately decided that getting the fuck out of the sticks was probably their best bet. For reasons you call him ‘crazy’ to this day, wanted to finish out high school with you and his friends, many of whom no longer talk to him. You think it’s fun how the people you start being friends with are not usually the people you end it being friends with.
It’s so simple, but it’s always a surprise to people when it happens. You guys are practicing the conversation you will have when you get there. He is playing himself and you are playing his parents. He says, “I didn’t want to make a decision based on money, and I didn’t want to abandon something I thought was good for me in the hopes that I could just replace it with something else. If anything, it’s important to get in the habit of holding onto the things that get you out of bed in the morning.” “Why?” you say. “A very small part of your life is the young part. The section that will feel the most ‘forever’ is the part when you’re older, and staying in that shitkick town probably did you no good. Now you’re asking for money to go off to fucking Europe, and meet beautiful boys, one for the each of you, both who will fight anyone and anything for you, who will smell better than you, all the time. Who will be a version of you that you can hold, and tell that you love, that they are beautiful and everyone else is like a human turd compared to them a human made of shit. And we’re just supposed to reach into our sweet lottery cash and lace your asses with funds?” He laughs.
“My mom doesn’t talk like that.” You open your eyes wide like you can’t believe how slow he is. “Uh, yeah, I was supposed to be your dad right there.” He smirks and rolls his eyes. “Right.” You look at him and go, “Break character again and I’m ramming us into these cows. I mean it.” “Ok, ok. I get that” you say “If anything, we should be giving you money to further your education. You think that podunk ‘associates degree’ is gonna matter anywhere but Hooters?” “Okay, this game sucks now.” You look at him, “Cause of me?” The cows move by and he goes, “No. No, definitely not ‘cause of you.”
You turn up the radio and continue driving forward.
After a couple of minutes, you gently lower the radio and say, “You know if…if they’re on-board with making your dream happen, but they’re not comfortable with me being a part of the deal... which is their right, and might even make sense, even if the other way also makes sense…” he takes out a stick of gum and looks at you. “Yeah?” You sniff and say, “Nah, just…if that’s the case, then I’m happy for you. My version of all this might be infinitely harder to come by. Maybe my dream life is supposed to be me just getting used to the things I’m afraid of, and not me trying to make something that I’m not afraid of. So…if that happens, then do what’s best for yourself, alright?”
He nods and looks back at the road as it starts to rain. “Alright,” he says, and you slowly raise the volume of the radio back up, silently wishing he had put up more of a fight.
much as you pretend you don't mind being alone, you do.
you know you hate it when the party is over and
you are by yourself again.
when you come home from work
or school
and noone is there to talk about your day with
you hate it.
but you pretend not to care
pretend
to be strong
but
you
aren't.
Neither am I.
Just been a while and had to catch up a bit, some things I've written recently and the like. School is keeping me terribly busy lately which is the reason for my absence, but I love school so I forgive it for eating all my time like some insatiable beast It’s been three weeks since you’ve seen another person, since the sun has come out—this is not by choice. This is not for lack of trying. With no one around, the two of you have taken to just going into stores and grabbing whatever you want, whatever you need. You disable the cameras, when you can, just in case people show back up all of a sudden. Morality as an ideal against which you compare your behavior, your impulses. your ID has been steadily dying for the last three weeks.
Stealing is bad, but so is waking up one fucking day and being the last man on earth, and then your downstairs neighbor knocking on your door, because he’s also the last man on earth. You did not ask for this. You did not accidentally find a genie, or wish on a shooting star. Not that you can think of, and not that he can think of. Your neighbor. The person you used to look at briefly, in passing. But now you two are stuck together with no explanation.
You try to figure out if this is a thing that’s ‘happening’, or a thing that ‘happened already’. Like, if there is a second phase to this situation, or if the rest of your life will just be this. Survival without the hope that, after your passing, you will be something talked about positively. There is no one left to talk.
Your neighbor wonders aloud one night, the first night you get drunk and also the first night you break into the hotel and use their pool—he wonders if this is a new kind of extinction sort of thing, and now maybe the new life-form to run this planet will start to exist now. Just because the universe is forever doesn’t mean your species is.
You decide not to split up and basically do not leave each other’s side for the next couple weeks.
There is no sign of other people, but the power is still on. There is no television, except for BBC 3, which just plays reruns of a show you've never heard of. It passes the time when reading the same websites and trying not to cry becomes too much. The two of you begin to depend on each other to ward off loneliness. There is no one left to comfort your fears but him, and vice versa. There are lots of conversations in hushed tones.
You once made Dominos pizza in an actual Dominos, then ate it in the back seat of a taxi while conversing about what you had planned on doing with your lives. There are freakout conversations. There is a plan to not rest until another person is found. Eventually there are relaxing moments, when ‘regular life’ starts to feel like a dream that could never actually have happened. There is the day you trip down the stairs to the subway, and fuck up your knee, and you cry because you wish bad things only happened in moderation—like the world should know when you are feeling fragile and to just fucking lay off for three fucking seconds.
But this is the first time he holds you. You are both on the floor of the clean train platform, and he is behind you with his arms wrapped around you and telling you that he is sorry and that you will figure out what is happening and that he won’t let you keep getting hurt and why didn’t you stay by him like he said. He had a girlfriend when the people disappeared, so it’s been about a month since he got to hold someone and tell them everything would work out ok. For you, it’s been a lot longer. Your dad died like 6 years ago, so it’s probably been about that long.
That night, after dinner (steaks stolen from Murano, some fancy place), but before going to sleep, you walked over to him while he combed the internet for any personal site or blog that may have been updated in the last month, and you moved his right arm out of your way, and you sat on his right leg, sat quietly while he went about doing his research. He did not push you away, did not double-take, did not miss a beat in his clicking of the mouse, except to adjust his glasses. “Still nothing,” he says. You rub the top of his head and he looks at you, thinking this is something you did to get his attention, like this means you have something to say—but he looks and you are reading something on the screen, and this is clear you are doing this simply because you felt like it, wanted to. He thinks for a couple seconds—‘should I allow this...’—and he turns back to the screen and asks you how your knee is.
You say it’s fine.
So you look at him like he’s an asshole, and he’s like “are you mad at me?” And you say of course not. And he’s “I feel like you’re treating me like you hate me” And you’re, I don’t fucking hate you, okay? “Then what’s the problem?” Nothing. “Give me a hug then.” So you do. And he says “what the fuck was that?” He asks. You say a hug. “You usually hug me like you mean it. You’re acting like you don’t even want to touch me."
And you want to cry, not because anything actually happened, but because you’re body just wants to,
because dancing feels like a lie,
and smiling feels like frowning,
and drinking feels like digging a grave,
and crying is like going ‘all in’, like popping a pimple.
“Give me a real hug” he says. So you give him one. It lasts 2 seconds, and it feels good but feels bad because you wish hugging lasted until you were 80 years old and never went away. “We good?” he says. You nod, and parts of actual happiness creep into your fake smile, and that’s good enough for him, because he knows what your real smile looks like, and that was basically it.
He runs back into the ocean to chill with the people who actually know how to deal, and when they ask him what your problem is, he says, “Nothing, it’s cool.” But you know it isn’t, but maybe it is, but more than anything you hope that all of your life isn’t JUST pretending that things are ok, that there’s such thing as feeling alright, instead of just always having to prove that you’re happy so that people don’t go around saying that you’re not.
You are my best friend. You get drunk and act like a knucklehead, taking off your shirt cuz you’re the beefiest out of us all, but maybe not necessarily in the best shape. You look good, is the point, and when you drink you just want the eyes on you. Doesn’t matter whose they are. I love that about you. That and your honesty and loyalty. You like Adam Sandler movies and the Killers…wish I could change that about you, but these are minor things, at least within the grand context of the universe. It’s a party. You sit next to me. I put my hand on your head and we pose for a picture for Shelly, my ex. I’m about as drunk as you but I have inhibitions to spare. Wish I could be as free as you. You smell good and I get ashamed of myself for noticing. This has been happening to me lately. So I comment on Shelly’s tits and she walks away. You look me in the face and talk about how many credits you have left and I could probably kiss you, but I’ve never kissed a guy before. Honestly, I’ve never wanted to. Before you, I mean. So screw it—I give you a peck on the lips—our lips touch for exactly 2.4 seconds. You look me in the eye, then, after a brief pause, you laugh softly, mush my face gently.
He hates Tarantino and you didn’t know they made people like that, at least not beautiful ones, but here is one, waiting in the van with you while the others take forever getting cigarette from the CVS. You turn around and half-smile at him without realizing you are smiling—he makes a slack-jaw ‘where am I’ face and it makes you laugh and he laughs too.
You wonder how long you can put up with this—the Neanderthalic behavior of his boys, his acting one way when they’re there, and another way when they are not—not just from him, but from the universe. He wraps his arms around your shoulders from behind and says “Why is summer going by so fast?” You open your mouth to say something about your feelings and he kisses you immediately, softly, on the cheek, because you two are alone in here, and that’s when his brain is ok with how he feels about you, and because he knows that it shuts you up.
“It’ll be okay,” he says, because he knows what you’re thinking, that he is leaving in three weeks, that he will find someone else, that you will too, that the new thing will feel like this old thing, this thing happening now but that will not be happening later, so it’s like it never happened at all. Life is about getting new people to play important roles when the old actor quits or gets fired.
Out the window, you see the others exiting the CVS. You wonder why people bother when pretty much nothing they do lasts, nothing is as unique as we’d like it to be, is as beautiful as we’ll remember it. He says your name. You say hm? He says, “I’ll never forget you. You know that, right?” You nod, yeah. It’s true, probably.
Just know that he doesn’t get why his giving you all that he has to give isn’t enough for you, and his positive attitude doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice when you’re hurting. He just knows that his life is his responsibility, and your life is yours.
Being alone fills me with a feeling like being buried alive—like I am a rabbit, only bigger and with a cell phone. You seem bored with me, and always have, but I know the sex is good, because that’s all my exes ever talk about. I will be a hovering presence in your life for seven months, before you realize how encumbered you are, how many options you have, that you miss your freedom, that I basically told you that you wanted to be with me, because you don’t actually know what you want and I took advantage of it.
I simply wanted you, and it felt good, if only physically. I will meet a dude at a concert. I will blow him, harmonica-style and everything. You will tell me we should take a break. I will not see you for the rest of my life. On my death bed, I will think “Whose touch made me feel the most alive? Whose skin made me feel the most like life would last forever?”
And my heart will answer “Patrick,” and I will smile and think “Yes. Patrick was the one.”
You are Robert, though.
I like you. We hang out cuz I can pretty much talk to you about anything. Mostly. I don’t really talk about girls I hook up with around you, cuz your face does that thing like you’re getting a tetanus shot or something. I hate when you look that way, so I don’t bring up girls or even point out when they're hot. But everything else works. You make me laugh. I don’t know how you do it, but you see the world in a way that I’m always like “Yes!” when you point out something that’s obvious to you but that I need you there to even realize.
Might sound stupid, but you make me feel sexy. Fucking the girls who fall for me makes me feel sexy too. It’s just weird…not weird, but like, it’s funny, just cuz I can tell it means more to you. The way I look does, I mean. I let you touch me sometimes. You’re afraid to when we’re sober. When we’re sober, I try to get you to open up but it’s like you’re ashamed. I tried to hug you at the mall once, as a joke, but really because I wanted to, and you just laughed and pulled away. I played with your hair while we waited in line at the bank and you acted like it made you uncomfortable. But I know it’s really the opposite. When we drink it’s like…how you stare at me, it’s like you’re trying to absorb me with your eyes. You completely zone it. It makes me feel like a giant. It makes me feel like every other guy is a loser and I am the king of something. Girls…they demand respect, and it’s not that you don’t, but it’s like you want me around you so much that you submit to me, like it’s such an honor. It’s cute, but it’ll get you hurt one day. I’ll try not to make it me who does it, don’t worry but, anyway…
I am hungover and want to lay down—it’s hot and I take off my shirt. You sit on the bed and try to force me to get up and watch X2 with you on Starz, down in the living room. My parents are gone. I say to watch it yourself, I want to take a nap and you’re being a bitch. You laugh then stop; you look at my body like it is the promised land and I laugh and cover my eyes with my bed sheet, pretend I am asleep that quickly. I’m taking a nap, I say. You ask if you can stay with me while I sleep. I call you a creeper, as a joke, but you get sad and ask if it’s okay if you stay over til I wake back up. I say, “You got it, buddy.” I can’t see you smile, but I know you’re doing it. You leave the room and gently close the door. I really do love you, but it would be pretty sweet if you loved yourself. Maybe I’ll stick around until you do. Nap time, though. We have the rest of our lives to worry about stupid shit.
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