So, I havent been on tumblr since high school, which was almost a year ago now. At least a full human gestation period ago. Soooo…how ya doin, bloggers? I was nudged by Kelly to start tumbling again, so I’ve decided to post a narrative. I’ve just stayed up all night writing this from scratch (it’s about 7am New York time) because its due in a couple hours. I have several more drafts to do on it and several more pages of content to add and frankly at this time I’m not sure if it’s the best or the worst thing I’ve ever written. Im not sure if I even know colors or arabic numerals anymore, that’s how tired I am. For a while tonight I thought I was a lemon. This story has absolutely no basis in anything (for most of you know I don’t have a brother). I truly have no idea where it came from, and I suppose that makes it much more true to me than anything Ive written in a while. So tell me what you think if you like.
It was, undeniably, that sort of night. It was the sort of night that fills your lungs in icy swirls and leaves in streams of heat. It was the sort of night to think far too deeply and talk for far too long. It was a Wednesday. It was nearing 4 am and we were lying on the hood of a car, she and I, drinking iced tea and peering into endless black. She had driven us to a spot where we could have a real conversation, as we’d promised we would have; this spot was under an enormous tree in a city park, just beyond the reaches of the glowing signs that said “Made Fresh” and “Open Late” and “Girls! Girls! Girls!”
“Eventually you’re gonna have to pee if you keep drinking that,” she warned.
“Eventually I’ll have to pee, regardless. What’s the harm in speeding things up?” I enjoyed being a dick.
“Why do you do that?” she asked, not for the first time.
“I enjoy being a dick.” I responded, truthfully.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
She was a quiet girl but something about pure cynicism provoked her, made her argumentative and frustrated and, by extension, ridiculously attractive. She had long aeneous hair that fell into slight curls, and sunken eyes that were too old for a twenty-one year old. Her thin eyebrows were set just a bit too far apart, and her nose rounded off at the tip, like that of a small animal. Her glasses reflected pinpoints of starlight that caused me to squint and sink further into exhaustion as I took in a deep lungful of the heavy night.
“Getting tired yet?” she asked, determined to prove she was a later sleeper than me.
“Not even a little. You ever think about goals?”
“You are so gay.”
“I’m serious. I do, I think about them a lot.”
“Sorry, can’t say I do. Do you get anything out of it?”
“I would say so. I like to set little ones: discover a good band, learn to do an impression, hit a hacky sack ten times without screwing up, that sorta thing. It makes me feel like I’m constantly in motion, ya know? Like progress is being made, even in the most stagnant of times.”
“Yep, definitely gay.”
“Fine, write me off. Pass up the most interesting conversation of your life.” I was, if nothing else, a dick that was good at baiting.
“You don’t think very much of me, do you? How could you assume that would be the most interesting—”
“I couldn’t possibly. But how could you assume it wouldn’t be? You have no idea where that discussion would have gone. It could have ended three hours from now on the subject of crossbow hunting, Buddy Holly, pig genitals, anything. Any conversation with any person—with me, my brother, hell, with yourself—has the potential to change your life, so why pass up any of them up? People just get distracted to easily: they run out of time, or so they think; they opt to make a shitty joke instead of an insightful comment; for all we know the meaning of life could have been found in a hundred-ninety different ways by now if only people would stop saying ‘that’s what she said.’ Think about it.”
“You’re really sensitive about the whole gay thing, aren’t you?”
“I fuckin‘ hate you.”
“Im sorry, you’re just quite the rambler. And I feel like you’re making this a bigger deal than it needs to be.”
“Of course I am, that’s the point. That’s how you achieve shit. You’ve never noticed that? Anything seems easier to handle once you make it a bigger deal than it is. We all do it and there’s no shame in it, if you ask me…”
“I didn’t.”
“…because I can guarantee you this: your issues are easy. They are simple. Your entire life is simple, relatively. Unless you’ve dissolved nations or beheaded children or you’ve been caught with your dick out it public…”
“I haven’t.”
“…your issues are simple. Millions of people have done the same exact shit.”
“Do you ever get sick of hearing yourself talk?”
“It’s just thinking, but out loud. It’s just what everyone else does, but without the filter. That’s what this hour of the day does to you: it frees you. And that’s another thing, did you know that—fuuuuuuck.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I really have to pee.”
“Then pee. I’ll just sleep now, you win.” She rolled over, facing her back to me.
“No. This is more important dammit.” I rolled her back over by the shoulder and swept my arms out wide, grandly presenting the atmosphere. “This is the stuff we’ve waited ages for. This is why we endure the tedium of meals and commuting and brushing our teeth—for these eight minutes before we fall comatose and hallucinate vividly. I want to hallucinate consciously.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I will pee all over you.”
She gave me a look that was hard to interpret—the sort I take mental images of and analyze later, because they’re too much to handle in one moment; the sort I’d draw, if I could draw; the sort that make me wonder why I don’t ever get laid by quiet girls. She’d earned an apology.
“Sorry,” I conceded.
“You don’t apologize too often.”
“I figured you’d earned it.”
We sat in silence for a moment, her contented, me, out of breath.
“You are the only person I know who would abuse their bladder for—” she gave the look again. “For god knows why.”
“I just told you why.”
“Yeah, you did. And for the record, I think you’re full of shit. You commute so you can be places. You brush your teeth so your mouth doesn’t fall off your bullshitty face. You don’t even think when you say things like that, do you? You just spew words, and you think it impresses people but it doesn’t.” She turned away from me onto her back, leaving her words dancing in the air before us, permeating my ego in rhythm, throwing their weight around in a smug echoic waltz that made her suppress a grin when she’d realized their effect. I grabbed her by the jaw and kissed her hard, upsetting the choreographed tos and fros as I pressed her body against a frigid glass window. The car rocked in an embarrassingly audible way, and the tree that loomed above us shook, and clouds disseminated in an orchestrated beat, flooding our moment with pale yellow; the night had noticed our sudden fervor and was cooperating. She bit my lower lip and smiled, tugging at a handful of hair and exhaling hard. She was cocaine on my gums. I absorbed the heat from her palms as they ran down my chest, and the sting of the nails that chased them. Just as quickly as I had begun it, I broke the kiss and lingered, nose brushing nose in the slightest of ways. “That’s exactly why I do it: I’m sick of thinking.” I rolled back to my side of the hood and chuckled. “And I don’t care about impressing you, I already know you like me.”
“So shouldn’t you care more about impressing me?”
“I said I’m sick of thinking.”
“I’m sick of you thinking too.”
So we sat there and watched the world slip, and tried to decide how to tell my brother about all of this. After all, her boyfriend deserved to know if he was about to be replaced.
