literature

The Last Beginning

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Literature Text

This is the beginning. So, naturally, I’m going to start at the end. I told him, “I want to build a fucking family with you”. He laughed. Fuck, he laughed. I love when he laughs. I love when he breathes, and the air that he breathes, and the dirt beneath his feet, and the way his forehead wrinkles when he frowns and he smirks, and the dopey way he adds “huh” to the ends of his sentences when he’s not paying attention. I love when he doesn’t pay attention. The simple way to put it is: I love everything about him. So I said, “I want to build a fucking family with you”. And he laughed.

“In the back of a club somewhere at the bottom of Boston on black nights, after bitter goodbyes, broad smiles, bent-over brushing broken hopes, I reminisce: back aches, pent-up, hauling up your old couches, moth-eaten sweaters, remembering meatloaf dinners, cul-de-sacs, Ice Cream Trucks, “Will the heat ever break?”, buzzing, buzzing, The Archies playing somewhere in the distance. I remembered that. Before I was cut out of the family pictures. Before they severed my pixelated head from my neck and rolled it into thin-wired trash cans, not even recycled. They didn’t recycle me. They said, ‘The colors blend better without him there’. They said, ‘We’ll remember it better that way’. Before the Sharpie crisscrossing over my face sank in like acid on smooth Kodak surfaces. Before the gap where I used to be was screaming out in their funny phony silences. ‘We’ll remember it better that way’.”

“It’s cold at the bottom, you know,” I told him with a smile.
He gave me this wide-eyed look of false shock.
“There could be sharp rocks. There could be, um, a bottom.” He pointed downwards, like I could see said bottom through the paved road, through feet of solid concrete that held up the bridge, through the waters to the murky, sandy river floor. “For fuck if I know, there could be a man eating freshwater salmon, and you’re going to say ‘it’s cold at the bottom’?”

“Freshwater salmon?” I repeated with a laugh. “As opposed to saltwater salmon.”
He gasped, exasperated. “I don’t care about fish, Adrien Rose.”
And I laughed.

“I could sing once. That’s what they said. What they told me. I’ve been told a lot of things. Been talked to, lied to, chanted to. Preached. They chorused, like churches of angels, like songbirds, like pigeons in a dying city, they told me… Who. Someone. Some people. Surrounded, swimming in them, in their singing, in their lying choirs, in their choruses of fake, facades, faces screaming, screaming, stop-and-go, hallway flow. That time of petty, forced facial hair, trying too hard, when our voices were screeching, high-pitched, no vocal practice, car and shower singing, untrained, unguided, false hands and steering wheels and car crashes, voices of reasoning. Drowning. Swimming in a sea of drowning people. We’re all dying. Dying to know, dying to go, getting there, go there, be here, be there. To be someone. To be them, her. I’ll never forget, growing up muddled, muddied in pools of high school charade games. Two words. First word. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“What was it?”

His voice was so beautiful in the night. He cried to me in that voice, when it was dark. No one else heard it, I think. Well, maybe someone. But few, anyways. I was one of those few. The things he said in that voice… They could kill me. He could. I was playing invincible till I met him. Now I break down all over the place. I puddle at his feet, this sopping wet mess of years of being put out and shat on and swallowing everything whole. Then he taught me how to listen to him in that voice and I just…

“Was it a nightmare?”

I hold my head. My fingers raked through the thin, jet-black strands of my bangs as I stared at the pallid oval of moonlight splattered across the ceiling. It was ethereal. He told me I find beauty in spaghetti stains. He means I find beauty in everything. I don’t know if he thinks I’m poetic or romantic or stupid. It’s kind of all the same thing.

“Yeah,” I admitted quietly.
“Another one? Adrien…”
“It’s been strange lately. Maybe I ate something bad.”
“It’s not your diet, it’s your psychology, Stupid.”
I dropped my arm on the pillow and rolled onto my side, watching the way my elbow framed the window panes, and how the stars played light games across the fire escape. I can vaguely make out the shadow of an alley cat rebounding over the weathered red brick.
“Yeah.”
“So, tell me about it.”
“It was an empty chair.”
“Which chair?”
I shifted my eyes over my shoulder, seeing the silhouette of him curled up on his usual perch. “Yours.”
He stared at me, perplexed.
“I dreamt that you were gone. And it was the worst pain. It felt worse than dying.”
“What do you… what do you mean?”
“Can you do something for me?” I asked him, sitting up.
“Anything.”
“Can you remember tonight?”
“Why?” he whispered.
“It’s the night I first told you I loved you.”

“You won’t be any good at it. You’re going to fail. Fail at the only thing you’ve ever had, and never done right. You were a warrior, a soldier boy, you had orders, you couldn’t even follow them right. You couldn’t walk one foot in front of the other. You couldn’t obey. I need you… to forget that you ever existed as a part of something. That you were a piece of a whole, a color that made up a bigger picture. I took your pigment away, you lucid, translucent stain. I am erased.”

“I like what you’ve done to the place. It’s homey.”
“Yeah?” I smiled. “Really class-A stuff. Check this out.” I beckoned him over to the breakfast bar and pointed down at a small ceramic peanut. “It’s a piggy bank. If you’re wondering why it’s so small, it’s because it’s a reflection of my bank account. You know, small and phallic.”
He laughed weakly. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were coming on to me.”
I smiled. “Not yet.”

“I was your friend first. Remember? Promise rings, silver half-hearts on chain links around our necks, spring in tall grasses, smelling, smoking, caught taking pictures on parked cars, drawing lopsided animals in store windows, drawing life, it’s evolution, it’s air, it’s breath, we share it. Fuck it, dripping ice cream cones. Nah. Pinky promises, starry skies, cloud-shapes and up-dos and Kool-aid mouths, milk mustaches, I love your summer sandals, sipping frozen fruit punch freezers so fucked over, so fucking lost, forgotten. They don’t even remember to call our names. So we stay out. We stay out so late. We get caught up. We’re caught up behind hills, in ditches, on the side of empty dirty roads, watching fields span for miles. We touch each other inappropriately while we hum, hum the songs we aren’t allowed to listen to on the radio. You gave me my first kiss. You took my virginity. I mind fucked you while I was a million miles away and you didn’t know my name, didn’t know I existed, but I knew of you. You were out there, and I loved you already. That’s how you know we were meant to be. We were meant to be, baby, and I love you. And I wrote this for you, wrote it to you. Don’t you remember? You were watching me do it while I was sitting on the edge of your bubble bath, running your hands over your knobby little knees, pretty feminine calves, your tiny little ankles. You told me, ‘The scars are never going to fade’. I promised you I was going to wash them off your body with my hands, with my lips. I’d lick them away if that would make you smile. I’d kiss the inches of bruised tissue off your surfaces. I’d clean every crack and crevice of your mind, to make you forget if I wasn’t so fucking afraid you’d change. The truth is, I love your scars and I love your mussed up mess. You’re a mess, a beautiful mess. And in my dreams I’m making you naked and hugging that perfectly fucked, perfectly fucked up body against my own and making you feel beautiful, because baby, you’re beautiful. And if I had known you back then, in the spring, in tall grass, I would have sworn you my life and my heart, and you have them baby, and don’t you ever give them back.”

“Is there something I can get you?”
He looked up at me through these deep blue-green eyes. He was familiar, in a distant, I-never-knew you type way. But he had that air about him. You know, that one.
“I’m alright.”
“On the house.”
“I’m not really here for that.”
“What are you here for then?”

And that’s where I’ll end.
The beginning.
© 2013 - 2024 versailles6
Comments3
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Deathbysquirrels's avatar
Omfg. I'm sorry it's taken me forever to find your deviation stack! I saw it some weeks ago, if I'm being totally honest, and I was going to click it, but then I don't even know what happened, and I forgot. So it got buried under so many new deviations and shit, and I remembered how much I wanted to read the stuff you'd written, the stuff I'd seen because it was new and you hadn't written in such a long time, and it made me excited.

So now I'm here, rambling and a little confused by what I just read but I really liked it too.
I'm so proud of you, bro! Because you wrote something!