Friday

11:35

Am or pm. I don’t know. The time is neon on my bedroom Alexa. The curtains are drawn. The sky could be glowing syrup, the sun could be a hanging tit, the moon could be a tilted jaw, just before apocalypse. I wouldn’t know.

****

Morning. Just confirmed. Had a gut feeling. 

Not an idiot. Just confirmed that, too. Self diagnosis. Credibility, zero. Factability, one thousand. 

***

Today I’m hanging out with an old friend, I had many friends in the city, just like he did, when we were young. He left the city, came back, a few days ago,and found the others had disappeared, found them irresponsible for it. Like he had never left himself.

Don’t be didactic, girl, he says. You must’ve left, too.

I never left, I say, feeling good about it, for the first time. I was always here.

He was supposed to come over for a few drinks or a movie or regenerating an identity through the lens of my domestic otherness, whatever people have in mind when they want to come into somebody’s house, but I couldn’t manage to blackmail my sister into cleaning the house so I had to ask him to meet me outside.

Like a cafe, or a bar?

I was thinking a park.

In this heat?

If it gets too hot, we’ll see. But parks are good. Nature and all that, you know.

Yes, very green. What do you mean by, we’ll see? 

Improvise, find a new place to be stupid.

You wanna get stupid, with me?

My brain registers that as a mild attack. My right boob , however, senses he’s just amicably flirting.

***

It got too hot too fast in the huge city park so we went to a smaller park where we thought the heat would be less because there was just less space for that process but then it was even hotter. The heat gets compressed, i think, it remains the same spirit everywhere and volume can’t even it out.

My joints are falling apart in my hands, the paper wets. The crushed atoms rejoin bonds to make resin again. Energy is looping back into itself. If it stays hot like this maybe everything will follow suit, and the universe will collapse back into a point. And everything will finally be okay.

I pretend everything is fine, still, until a drowsy bead of sweat falls from the top of my forehead all the way down to my chin, then drips down into the small boat between my two kissing collarbones, and stays there and dries quickly into clotted salt.

I think it’s time to improvise, he says. 

I roll my eyes, say fine, get your shit. He has no shit, really, but he still obeys, gathering my smoothmix and base paper from the sweating grass and with an outrageous smile says aye aye captain. 

***

i text my sister to light a few candles around the living room to give the illusion of sortedness. She texts back very quickly:

Suck my dick.

It’s a popular mythical organ between us, she whips it out very often, in metaphysical displays of domination. 

Gay lovers, i call her and her boyfriend. 

***

the gay lovers are perched on the sofa but at least the room is clean and it doesnt smell like candles but somewhere close to the ocean, not the sand part, but somewhere close still, like the market where you can get plastic buckets and spades for retarded children to construct horrid castles out of.

They are the horrid children, the oblong boy she calls baby, and my sister. Their sand castle is the way they hold each other. Already crumbling off each other but pulled together in a sharp, osmotic bond. They don’t need to understand each other. It could be just biological, and that would be enough.

Sometimes i worry my boyfriend makes my sister dumber by the day. I wish there was a scale so i could prove it. The DQ scale. Dildo quotient.

In a series of outrageously stupid questions, it determines how much of a dildo you are under all that showy fluff.

***

then there is the passing of Doritos  and salsa the purple ones which I don’t even like even though it’s everyone’s favourite flavour. Especially because it’s everyone’s favourite flavour. 

I like something without an obvious direction. Like the orange ones. An island taste, don’t know in the middle of where but drenched in salsa you could just put one in your mouth and fall asleep. Or become the movie. Or float away. Or die and be reborn in tiny cycles that no one will notice.

And then the ‘number 2 in the country right now’ movie gets so boring that the bad dialogues seep under my skin and I have to raise myself off the sofa and take charge. I need to do something, take the limelight, offend somebody.

***

I make a mic out of a fork and play winehouse, a little tipsy but mostly zooted. I sing like a toad in the pouring rain. And you go back to herrrrr, and I go back to blaaaayyyckkk.

Why are you nosferatu all of a sudden? Ro chirps, and her pet monkey is so amused he might just launch into a standing ovation.

Kea is quiet with his eyes all sparkly, doesn’t know what to do with his hands, reaches for a cigarette from the pack lying seductive on the glass top. He needs a lighter but won’t ask and until he asks I’m not going to give him one. I have one in my butt pocket, one in the CD cabinet, one in the kitchen I think, one in my sock drawer, one in one of my shoes, the pink platforms I think for sporty club nights, hasn’t happened yet but could any day now and I need to be eternally prepared, how can I give up on youth when I was a teenager only a little while ago, only seven years. Whatever. I’m not giving it to him is the point. But god, his eyes. Just ask, mr brown eyes. Don’t manipulate me metaphysically.

God, such sexy pupils.

Im probably just horny from the wine.

This is my friend.

He used to sit behind me in class and attach bits of eraser into my frizzy ponytail. Sometimes he would trace words into my back, words like froggystyle and fuckypants and mistersex. Who’s mistersex, I would ask.

He would point sheepishly at this matted hair Neanderthal who used to sit by the window so he could keep looking out at the world where he really wanted to be. And he stank of death and garbage but he had the most beautiful, deepest eyes, perfect soldering male eyes, and his shirt was always patched with sweat near the armpits. I guess that was sexy to some girls so he had a sort of reputation. I don’t know for what exactly. We were only kids and still adjusting to our bodies. Mistersex, he said, and only he and I got it and we laughed. We were all still cavemen, and through the shaggy recurrence of outdated textbooks, through the drawl of repeated histories given out like stale candy, we managed to see this. We were not evolved at all, for all our showy fluff. underneath, we were still cavemen. 

The sweaty, hairy Mister sex cluelessly inserted a limp finger into his caveman nose. He scratched his caveman crotch in urgent, hairy spasms. He did his cavemen things and we watched, the only two evolved people in the history of repeated codes.

Even back then I felt this is a fresh person. He probably has nice alleles. This is how it happens. Newness. A mutation translates. Instead of catching on, to whatever the tune of the time is, it creates.

I’m probably just deprived and nostalgic and making all this stuff up. Not the eraser in my hair and mister sex bits, but about our friendship being something special back then. Maybe it was just those few memories we really had, my ponytail, his fingers, the tracing. And then we were lost to each other like everybody else. I’m only making it special because we happened to meet again, chance opened an adorable enough avenue, we hopped into it.

****

But then I can’t take his pupils no more and I surrender the lighter, warm from being pressed against my butt in my multipocket yoga pants. I don’t mind sharing cosmetics and clothes but this yoga pant is mine till the end of time.

One time, I caught ro slipping it on for a market run and I told her take it off and when she wouldn’t I pinned her to the floor and choked her with my palm and told her, give me what’s mine, give me what’s mine right now. Then she said, okay, okay, and was very submissive but did not talk to me for a few days. Which I was totally fine with.

These are my favourite yoga pants in the world. I found them in a dream and I can’t share them. I will happily be lonely for them.

***

And then im singing like the world is ending and all my final rage foams to the surface and i am giving in to the decay. I am singing like the loneliest girl in the world, badly, shamelessly, and deliberately fucking up the lyrics. I wish i could cry on cue, thats the only kind of manipulation i havent yet mastered. 

Im screaming love is a loser’s game instead of love is a losing game, and my throat hurts, and i dont remember when the glass of wine slipped out of my hand and i was given this big bottle of bacardi limon. 

I just want someone to say something. Make it stop. Make me stop. I am staring into vee’s eyes who looks so uncomfortable under his preppy boy smile and i am imploring him, in neural signals, to speak up, to make it stop.

How much abuse will he take on his soul?

Ro is drunk so she doesnt care but vee and kea just keep enduring. How much? How much abuse on your soul, boys?

***

I am singing like its the apocalypse and i am the cause and the target and i am the thing that needs to be erased and the thing that will remain once it is over. 

Vee is at the brink of tears. I dont break eye contact. I look right at him and croak. I am moving my body erratic. Like i am made of screws and fluff and carpenting scraps. Like nothing beautiful ever flowed through me. I will ruin pop for him forever. And jazz for him forever. And any time a song will play at a party he will scan the room like anxious prey, praying there are no bitches like me around. Bitches who repurpose cutlery into a mic and sing till their tar-filled lungs start flapping. 

I wonder what it takes to break a richter scale. 

Tonight, in our flat, i think we came very close.

I was the destructive force but the boys, they were my accomplices. I went wild and they watched. No protest.

God, how much abuse will you take on your soul?

***

Just ask, just ask, just ask. I am drunk and on a roll and praying secretly for a chance to stop.

How much?

Just ask.

***

Vee just sort of collapses spiritually, exits the scene, and only his crusty flesh remains calcified on our handmedown leather couch, courtesy of our beautiful, loving parents.

Why dont you come all over, valerie?

Valereeeee-ye-ayyy, i go.

Kea finally takes the cue. Not to come all over, just to make it stop.

No more.

“You’ve got a beautiful voice,” he says. For a second i take him serious. 

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, it’s extremely, um, female.”

I snort.

I was waiting for you to say something, i almost say.

I take the cigarette from his hand and make pretty curls of smoke. The way you pucker your lips in release, that encodes how blue or sinuous or yummy the smoke will come out.

I pucker my mouth into a little heart. The smoke comes wayward, without form or direction.

It breaks in a bad rhythm. No continuous beats.

***

 Later we are watching fight club (kea suggested it, i was compliant, ro was wasted, and vee was a buttkiss). I like the taste of violence, it doesn’t make me squirm or look away. I watch, amused. Vee looks confused. Ro is liquor napping. Kea is tender, and every once in a while, he will look at me, trying to catch my eye when a scene feels like a mutual moment. You know when you’re watching a romcom with a friend and the pre-transformation rude jock hero says something outrageous to the clueless heroine, and your friend looks at you, because in your history of rude boys it feels like something like this must have been said to you, at some point.

Your pimples are blocking my line of sight, your love handles are too much to handle, its never the exact thing, but i catch the vibe.

Except now kea is trying to resonate with me when tyler durden goes mental around his creaky house like a new age prophet for scum and lovers and scrubbers and suckers, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

We are all the same decaying organic matter.

We are the all dancing, all singing crap of the world.

I give him a smirk every time, trying not to give away that these were the exact lines that gutted me when i first watched the movie. But his eyes are so innocent when he wants me to feel, the same as he feels, he wants to know, do you? Do you feel, what i feel? I can’t tell him i’ve already seen it, already felt the way he expects me to, it’s a long finished, to never be continued, gone girl tale.

Except instead of disappearing from somebody else i tend to just disappear from myself. You don’t need as much planning, and you can still lurk around the house, you don’t even have to care that you can still see your body.

***

So what did everyone think? Vee says once the movie is over. His underage girlfriend is drooling all over his deeply meaningful graphic tee. Okay, fine. Shes not actually underage. It’s just that vee gives off major pedo.

Kea and i look at each other, then at him, he says it slipped over his head, and i say, they must have worked really hard to make brad pitt look that off putting.

I think it was extremely intelligent social commentary, vee goes, bobbing his head like a deranged pigeon trying to make a point.

I wouldn’t say EXTREMELY, i say, enunciating. Would you say extremely, kea?

He nods, wisely, perhaps, but not too EXTREME.

I think, vee begins.

I feel it- both of us at the same time, kea and me, checking out, staying in place but not there anymore.

Only when vee goes quiet we return and kea tells me he has to go because he has to get his room sorted, he’s got so much stuff and he doesn’t know where to start, moving places is so frustrating, etc. 

i say, things you own end up owning you.

He smiles, leaning in for an awkward sideways hug while still on the couch. He could’ve waited till the door. Did he think i wouldn’t come?

Maybe i give off that vibe. EXTREME lazy.

but before he goes, he says, he has to tell me something. He leans in, not super awkward this time. His scruffy beard tickles the side of my neck, he is soap and cigarettes by my ear, and he says, very softly, i think tyler durden is pretty fucking sexy.

***