Thu, 19 May 2005

Come Back To Us Now
He turned thirty-seven on a Thursday and nothing much was different. He stuck out one of the floating factory jobs long enough to get settled in, earn enough to cover the whole apartment himself, a few good staring walls and soft distant city lights out the front bay window. He wasn’t drinking, for now, and was pleased with himself overmuch, half-thinking about fitness regimens he’d never enact. He hadn’t thought about killing himself for years now, not outside of a cheap tinsel way he’d occasionally use to prop up a pointless story with a slight shock, the way other writers use child abuse or gang experience. He was still writing, obviously, as he was still the writer, and files sat on the drive of a computer so old and fucked-with it would have deeply shamed some of his older tech friends, had they still been around. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, he’d mail off manuscripts like messages in a bottle and never hear back, which was okay. In a way he was relieved. He still ate alone, and went to movies alone, and slept alone, as his seemingly foolproof plan of eventually magically ending up with someone hadn’t quite panned out yet. His friends had mostly gone off to switch cities every few years, becoming in the process actual professional adults, and it can be hard to find time for even the truly important things when you’re responsible for things beyond yourself, for your family and your community and your skin color and your way of life. He had said many times that he had put the best part of himself into the things he had written, and after a time his friends saw that was at least mostly true, which left going to visit him in his muttering ill-tempered self-pitying stupor something like eating the shells. He still drove around at night, into the city and out to the endless backroads, some abortive preparation for a final leaving he hadn’t bothered to get around to yet. He still took everything too personally, still imagined slights in every sentence. He still stuck out his tongue when it was snowing and talked to stray animals. He still thought there was time to fufil all the promise he once held. He was thirty-seven now and walked around wondering what the future held.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #