Haha, and have tea or hot chocolate! You can't forget those.
I want another dog! My puppy is no longer a puppy and I love him very much and
but I Want more dogs! However, he's super jealous and spoiled and he doesn't
ever want to share his love, which is why I'll just have to keep pestering him with my love.
Thanks! I love it too ;o; But I want to change, but it's sooooo pretty.
ALSO! This is the thing I was going to send in last month. So, have my entry (I'm like 100% sure I sent an entry once with this same character, which makes me mad because I can never tell his god damn story in anything other than snippets and I love him so much he deserves better):
i'll become atlas—because that's all I can do for you.
We’re in the library again; it’s closed and I’m still not sure how he’s gotten a hold of the keys, but I don’t care either way because this is the only way I get to see him nowadays.
His head is on the table and he’s staring out at the sky while I watch the nape of his neck, joining him in that uncomfortably slouched position. Every time I reach out, letting my hand hover above his head, all I can think about are the words that defined our beginning, spoken in a whisper during biology—the wrong answer to my question of what he wrote down on page two—he told me, “let’s start simple, honest, down to the bone true to what we both want and know and—”
“I don’t mind being like this,” he says.
No, you don’t, I do not tell him. I put my hand back under the table instead.
I know what he’s thinking about: birds and air and wind and his body, all as one. He is counting the days until he decides he’s done. He is pretending that the world outside that window is merely an illusion and that we are isolated here in this place, untouched by the words of others but his words, they bribe me into submission, into sitting like this for hours on end, waiting for daylight to see if we can make it that far this time, too. And, somedays, I doubt we will.
I think of him so much that it’s we instead of he.
“Wanna hold a contest? We’ll hold our breaths, set a new world record,” he jokes.
But it’s not funny; it never is.
I don’t know what I’ve done or what has happened but I haven’t seen him in over three years and now we’re here and he speaks like a stranger, like he’s listing off causalities with his tongue smacking against his teeth, spouting things like “let’s find out what a heart really looks like” and “have you ever tasted blood” and—
I feel like crying.
Where’s the guy that ended his sentences with rose petals?
“Jay Jay Jay Jay Jay,” he goes on.
That isn’t my name. It’s not anyone’s name.
He just does this.
He randomly chooses a letter and repeats it if he feels like he’s losing me, which he has ages ago. We do not speak the same language anymore. But it grabs my attention anyway and I go “yes?” like he’s actually calling for me and it makes me feel like I’m the alphabet to him, something he’s been stuck with since childhood, something familiar he’s clinging to.
“We can begin anew, ok?”
We can’t.
I never tell him that, though. But we can’t because I don’t even know what’s wrong. I just know this is what we do ever since I ran into him again three months ago, after he suddenly disappeared and decided it wasn’t wise to contact me in years.
I remember that day so clearly because I slapped him and cried while he just stood there hurt.
“We’ll take a different route,” he goes on.
And I ask him, “Which one this time?” as though we’ve ever even travelled one together.
“We’ll dive this time.”
“Okay.”
“Take a deep breath and let’s go under.”
I take a breath.
I play his game because if this is what it takes for him to feel better then I will do this as often as I possibly can. But Victor, he does not take a breath.
Instead, he starts chanting, “Dive and dive and dive and—we’ll drown.”
And I do not know what prompts me to reach out again, to let my fingers drop into his hair this time, curling around the dark strands like they are some sort of rope I can hold on to, but it happens and then I’m exhaling, nearly shouting, “Don’t sink.”
And I realise he’s too slow to stay alive. For some reason he’s literally drowning in himself.
The lies he’s been spewing smell like the shirt he never seems to change but, god, Victor, keep singing them to me anyway; I’ll bottle that scent and sell it to misunderstood poets spitting agonising limericks and romanticising sadness because you’re making my heart heavy and there’s this gut wrenching feeling that won’t go away and it's exactly like those shitty things they speak of.
“Victor,” I murmur his name into the nape of his neck. “Tell me again how bones feel against your fingertips,” I tell him because I can’t recall the metaphor he used and I’m curious as to how many people broke him open for him to figure that one out. “Go on, tell me.”
But he does not.
He stays silent and I think it’s the silence that’s the hardest thing to bear.
“Jay Jay Jay Jay Jay,” he says through gritted teeth, lifting one of his hands to place it above my own, which is still in his hair because I am afraid to let go. “Let’s stoop low.” His fingernails bite into my skin when he pulls at my arm, and I start to straighten up with him.
“Rewind rewind rewind,” he sings. “Right? right?” he questions me.
And I can’t help but try and free my hand, but he does not let go.
His grip tightens. I can feel my knuckles rub against each other.
“Victor,” I say his name again.
He holds his breath for a moment, and everything about him stills.
The look in his eyes goes blank, cold, like he’s not completely here with me anymore and I wonder how quickly someone can break a person, how long it would be before they completely fall apart right in front of you. I wonder what it took for him to lose his laugh. I wonder how long he’ll keep running down the numbers each day, firing words into space; maybe he’ll shoot a star down one of these days, kill another dream, another breath.
“Pluck flowers, Jay,” he begins, “tear them away from their home and give them to me so they can wilt in the bin next to the sink because that’s just what we do. Destructive little ********, aren’t we?” And while he says this it feels like another one of his nightmares is swelling up in my lungs, and I’ve never even been told any of them, but I know they exist. They’re everywhere on him, and it reeks. “Are you tired just yet?” he asks and looks out the window again.
I place the hand he isn’t holding against his upper arm. “Not yet, Victor.” And that isn’t a lie; I’m really not.
I think he’s a fool if he thinks I would ever become tired of this.
It may be exhausting, but I think it worth it and I’ll give him light-years of distance if that’s what he needs because Victor let the demons in his head become his friends because that’s what they call empathy, so he believes, but apathy sounds better and—
I’m not sure how to reach him otherwise.
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