delusion

IV. This Atmosphere is Not Conducive to Life

Our furniture is pointed at the screens which steal our conversations. We sit & we stare at the screens- together yet alone & worlds apart. He reclines, passively, content to fall into TV's vapid stupor of escapism. I, clumsily persistent wordsmith sit , forever tangled in the labyrinth of metaphor that I unwind.

He laughs & I look up from the screen, remove my fingers from the keyboard. But, television is impatient and I had already missed the joke. All I had was the lazy reverberating memory of his laugh. It hung between us in the air for a moment: 'ha, ha'. so out of context. There was nothing funny in the still and silent room. But the laugh track comisserated with him and they all echoed:' us too, us too, ha, ha'.

Only not me. I light a cigarette. It tastes like tin, like death, like satisfaction. inhale, exhale. "Why do you have to smoke?" he asks, back in the tv's noisy world before I can form the answer to the now rhetorical question.
"I smoke more when I write", I offer anyway.
"You always write"
"I always smoke"
' ha,ha' - that one was mine. no laugh track agrees.
"Why are writers so self destructive?" he ponders.
"I'm not self destructive, I just don't use the tv to distract myself from what I feel. I'm conflicted by choice.I dissect my emotions to create"
"You need to be so fuckin' melodramatic to create?"

I dont answer, he doesn't wait. Two screens, four eyes. clicking keyboard, noisy show.

When did the world tell us that we needed to stop being dramatic? There was a time when we didn't brush away tears and chastise ourselves for producing them. "look at me, i'm being so silly. i'm sorry. this is stupid". We never thought it was stupid before the big fat burden of maturity meant knowing that we are insignificant and nothing is that big of a deal. Being an adult has never meant that I lost the desire to fling myself on the ground & convulse with sobs.

I still want to scream and beat the ground with my fists and hold my breath until you do what I tell you to. But, temper tantrums aren't befitting in a world where other minds are just as alive as yours, where you know that desperation, anger,grief does not make you special or significant. A child is obsessed with the world in their own mind. there is no hopelessness in childhood. there is only "maybe". Maybe if I cry, if I throw myself to floor, maybe if I just...but growing up means running out of maybes.

I have never learned to reconcile myself with the fact that I could rant and rave and pant and crave and vomit and bleed and still the world would spin. The laugh track 'ha.ha'.'s with or without me.

That night we lay in bed, not asleep but trying to fool our bodies into it. closed eyes, stretched limbs & quiet darkness.
I knew he was awake. Night stacked upon night of laying in this bed with this boy became years of us in our bed & I knew without looking or hearing.

"What are you thinking about?" he offers to the silence.
"Metaphor" I say, knowing that its silly though it's true, "How about you?"
"What gerrymandering is doing to the progression of politics in LA" he says.

Then dark and black and only silent thinking. His world is so sensical, so reasonable. He will never understand me, he will forever think my world a foolish childish place. My words that no one reads, my metaphors to lead no one to understanding.

For a TV quick flickering second I need to think that he feels it even though I now he doesn't . This he that makes this girl a we. Politics haunt his should be sleeping night, too big and too adult to be ignored. Tears and rage are gerrymandered away.

I think my only reasonable choice, then, is to run away, live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak. ravishing & dead.

We'd all love to be beautiful or tragic, but, I'd settle for getting the fuck out of here.