Title?

You sit in the darkened apartment, dimly aware of the clock behind you ticking its merry way toward midnight. Even the drifters on the steps of your building have gone to sleep, their soft snores drifting up through the night air. How long has it been since you wrote something?
The typewriter in front of you silently challenges. How dare you call yourself an author? You can't even get a first sentence on paper. Silently your eyes stare back at the typewriter. One of your feet taps the ground. Slowly, your hands seem to take on a life of their own and reach for the keys of the typewriter. You watch from inside yourself as they strike one key, then the next. Slowly an idea unfolds in some part of your mind, and begins to translate itself onto the paper.
You type faster and faster, refusing to let the idea lose steam and die like so many others. Your fingers fly over the keys, making careless errors as they go. It doesn't matter, you can correct them later.

The typing doesn't stop until hours later, when the alarm clock beside your bed goes off. God damn it, you swore you'd get some sleep. Slowly, you stumble across the room and turn the alarm off.
The sunlight slanting through the open window is too bright, the shrilling of the alarm clock still ringing in your ears. Outside the window the five a.m. traffic gets progressively noisier as each car pulls out of its driveway. It's like any other morning in the past month, and you're beyond caring about any of it. You're beyond caring about the thankless job that lies behind the steel fire doors of that horrible concrete block across town. You doubt they'd even notice if you never showed up.
One look at the bed...it looks so much more inviting than going out into the world. A safe cocoon of warmth and covers. You know before you even try to fight back that the struggle is over. You aren't going to work today.

Five new messages. Who new that people cared that much? Erase all. You don't want to hear what they have to say...they're all just going through the motions of caring.
The last true friend you had was sometime back in September, back before you moved across town and started retreating further and further into your mind. It's better in here, you think. You'll never get hurt because you never get close to anyone. It's better this way, completely numb, so that when someone walks out you never feel the pain, never shed a tear. It was a conscious decision. Sometimes...life just gets to be too much and you need a buffer.

The pages and pages you wrote in your frenzy last night are scattered on your desk. Slowly you walk over and pick one up, then another. You read a sentence, two...what were you thinking? This stuff is pure crap. You're not a writer anymore...just a failure.
Suddenly the apartment is too oppressive, the air too close and still. You have to get out, to run. The breath catches in your lungs as you careen down the fourteen flights of stair and out the door onto the tarmac of the street. As you run you cease to exist, you become two eyes and a pair of feet pounding along the street. No one sees you, but you can see them. You watch them, wonder what they would do if they knew you were watching.
Your life doesn't matter, it isn't real either. Your run slows to a walk as you observe all that's around you. Your brain yells NOTICE ME GODDAMMIT...but your body doesn't hear. It's walking automatically now, carrying you toward the bridge.
Inside its bubble your brain spins frantically, knowing what is real around you and also knowing that it is completely unattached to that reality. What's left if nothing's real? All your memories happened to some other person, some former incarnation of yourself. Or maybe you never even knew her. The girl who worked as a secretary, who had dreams of being a writer, who is she?
All that's left is your brain, quietly, analytically observing anything around you, and your feet carrying you along. When did you lose the ability to emotionally connect?

At the center of the bridge your eyes survey the scene. You want to take off and fly into the sunshine that's glinting off the water. Why couldn't you do it? Your brain is soaring high above the waves of the bay, inviting your body to come along for the ride.
The entire scene seems to ripple and sway unrealistically, the blues too blue and the orange of the bridge far too orange. Are you real? You know the less real you feel the more likely you are to do something stupid...like actually attempt to fly off the bridge. You have to prove that you're real. You have to. You know you still are, logically, but somehow you fail to grasp this. It can't be true because it doesn't feel like it.
You think of all the things you would do if you kept on not feeling real...everything somehow gets easier. It scares you just a little bit. Enough to make you definitely want to do something about it.

Back in the stuffy apartment your hands open the shoebox and take out what you've been looking for. You watch calmly as the cold tap water washes over the blade in your right hand, as it comes out dripping and shiny. You watch as your hand guides it across the skin of your left forearm and the blood comes welling out of the cut.
The pain makes you feel more alive than you have in a long time. The razor drops to the floor as you stand there watching the blood seep out...proof that you are alive and real. It falls in heavy red droplets to the floor of the bathroom, each leaving its perfect round red mark. All you feel is the pain and the euphoria of feeling something – anything – and you know that you won't do anything stupid. The spell of feeling like nothing would hurt, nothing would matter, has been broken.

[continued below] |

 
[Title? part II]

The next day you drag yourself out of bed on time and manage to dig something wearable out of the back of your closet. A simple black pleated skirt, ripped fishnets, high-heeled boots, and a revealing tanktop with a beautiful violet painted on the front. Something about the outfit seems familiar, but you can't remember quite what. You guess that they won't want you back at the office after your pattern of skipping work, so you don't go there. Instead you grab a notebook and walk to the café.
It's a cafe like any other in the neighborhood, slightly run down, with a few tables outside in the sun. You sit at your favorite table and order a chai latte from the waitress with the eyebrow piercing.
Staring absently across the street, you think about the last time you sat at this café. It was with a girl...you realize something and flip open your notebook. There, inside the front cover, is a picture of her, looking exactly as you remember her. Staring sleepily over her cup of coffee, the lip ring glinting in the morning sunlight. You took the picture on that Sunday morning last summer when the entire world stretched ahead of you, just waiting for you to step forward and embrace it. One weekend, the best weekend of your life.
Now you know why the outfit feels familiar. It's the same outfit you wore on Friday, when you first met her. It's what you were wearing... you flip open the notebook to a blank page and start to write. You've never written any of this down before. But suddenly it all seems to come together and your hand darts across the paper, begging to get it all out.
I've been thinking a lot lately of warm march nights in downtown Palo Alto and a kiss, the first. It tasted like mint gum, the mint gum from her bag that we'd both been chewing. 'I'll taste like cigarettes,' she'd warned me months before. 'I don't care,' I said. She didn't though...not that time. It was all mint and her. And around us was nighttime in Palo Alto, the bustle of people walking by, maybe pausing to look at the two girls on the bench in front of the pizza place. But to me...it didn't feel like they were there. I didn't care what they saw and what they thought. I just wanted that moment to last, so beautiful and perfect and right. Maybe it's then that I first felt it. Maybe it was holding hands in the car on the way back that night. But that's the night it started.
I miss that feeling. I miss that kiss.
You are that girl. When I first started talking to you I had no idea it would turn out like that. I refused for months to admit that I liked you and then you came down...I knew it was going to happen, but i wasn't prepared for how it felt. I wasn't prepared to have half of me go with you when you left.
Why did I never respond to your last email? That was a month ago now...it's too late to patch things up. It never hurt, I never cried over the fact that our relationship had fallen by the wayside. Like everything else, it just made me numb. But I miss you. I miss the connection we had. I miss being able to feel you in my head. You shouldn't take me back, I'm the one who threw the whole thing away.
Do you even care anymore?
You close the notebook and drain the cup of chai that arrived while you were writing. Leaving a pile of change on the table, you wander off down the street wondering how you ever let things go this far. It lost you the best thing you ever had, the one person you ever thought you truly loved.

Violet. Her name inadvertently comes out of your mouth. You tingle just thinking of her words, her kisses, every one so soft. For a few months you sacrificed everything for her. Your best friend got annoyed at you two for leaving notes to each other everywhere, for caring so much. You lost her before you lost Violet.
And then you didn't even make it worth it, just threw it away through carelessness. An email went unreplied to. Suddenly you had nothing more to say. It wasn't her specifically, it was that you had nothing to say to anybody. You kick yourself for letting what you had get away like that. She was the only one who cared about you...and now she doesn't care anymore.

Inside, you glance at the calendar on the wall. The fourteenth of February. Valentine's Day. You didn't know what date it was until that moment.
Valentine's Day.
You have no valentine, no friend even to make a joke out of it and run around celebrating Valendoom's Day with.
The thoughts in your mind get blacker and blacker, thinking of how it could have been if you hadn't fucked up your life. You want to get the hell out of this hole your mind has dug.
You want a valentine's day present? I'll give you a fucking present, you think savagely.
In the bathroom you find the razor blade, back in its box from yesterday. Slowly, painstakingly, you carve a V, then an I...the blood is dripping down your arm but you can't feel it. You carve her name into your arm, each cut going deeper. Finally it's all there...the blood is flowing faster, your heart is pounding.
'Violet...' you whisper to yourself, 'I did this for you.' You sit down on the bed, looking out the window. The dull ache in your arm feels good. Staring down at the different heads passing by on the street below, you think you see a familiar one. But it can't be, she's hundreds of miles away living her own life. She doesn't care anymore. You turn away from the window and watch the patterns the curtains cast on the opposite wall.
You'll never send her the letter you wrote her at the coffee shop. You don't want her to know how much you still care about her. You ruined your one chance and you don't want to go pleading back.
Your arm doesn't look like it belongs to you, with the letters of her name carved in deep red on it. This is your valentine's day, alone in your apartment with your blood on the sheets. You wish you could cry, but you're just numb. Staring at your arm.
So is this how the story ends after all? |