radiance versus ordinary light [d8]

[heather - d2 [mylee]]

S  H  E  L  B  Y

Same motions from a different point of view, I think, the small bodies of people on the screen moving in such a way that I can’t bring myself to believe that they’re real, much less just minutes from where I find myself shut away from the usual crowd. I’m supposed to make an appearance, I’d argued, but I’d just been nodded at empathetically, this day a one-strike day, and I’d used it saying something nasty and unseemly to the escort, something mean and bitter that I can’t even manage to remember now, though I’m allocating every ounce of memory toward it.

When I give up on the task, the names have been called and the two almost-people people are standing there limply, their arms swinging ever so slightly that I chuckle and eventually decide I must be too high or imagining it—the cameras aren’t focused enough, the scope set too wide—and even in this state I know there must be a limit to what can feel possible.

They’ll be here soon enough. Here, I mean, as in here, beside me on the train, in this quarter. They’ve isolated me from everyone whose feelings matter, but they’ll have no remorse about throwing these two in with me for the trip. I still don’t know how long it takes. On the years that are kind, it’s short, but the venture hasn’t felt like that in the last of the fifteen years that I can remember. Last year was all silence, my initial offers rejected and my pride dented in such a way that I’d excused myself and smoked the remaining cigarettes—the cigarettes I had offered to give away—and saved the butts, placed them in a cup that I set down roughly in the middle of the table like a goddamn centerpiece.

I’m generous, I’d spent the rest of the night repeating to myself, pacing hallways and cursing when the dinner delivered to Mekhi and I hadn’t been cooked nearly to my liking, blood seeping from the meat across the plates we hadn’t used in a year. I’d barraged Mekhi’s ears then with the rants I seem to have become fond of. Incompetent cooks. Shitty food. I killed six goddamn people and I still can’t get a fucking meal that doesn’t make me want to vomit. We’d looked at each other for a long time then, though it could have only been seconds, his gentle, knowing look reading then as pity, and we both knew it was about the steak and it most certainly was not about the steak and so I’d collapsed forward onto folded arms and sobbed, violent and unrhythmic, until he led me away from the table and settled me in our bed.

I’m thinking of the slab of meat again, fat rippling deep through the muscle like water, the body elemental and visible, when the door slides open and they both step in. I don’t get up, but point to the chairs on either side of me as a welcoming gesture. Neither of them seems keen on pleasantries, but they could be, and it’s wrong of me to not ask. But instead my focus locks on the boy, the familiar and unpleasant feeling of coming down apparent on his face. I can’t help the smirk that follows, or the offer I hear in my voice before the awareness that I’m saying it, I can get you anything you might want, but you should consider being sober for what’s to come.

I can nearly see it through the present haze that isn’t really haze so much as confusion—or the hybridity of fear and anger and grief, for what has and is yet to be lost, that we call confusion—that has settled around the three of us. And I don’t want to be here but know that I must be in order to get where I would rather be, the small apartment in the Capitol that Mekhi and I share during these months, our bodies pressed against each other’s in the near dark, the ink on his skin illuminated only by the light of the television mounted on the wall opposite the bed and how, when I squint my eyes against the blue light and high, it seems the shapes on his body lift just above the skin, ever so slightly, and it’s when I reach out through the dark to touch them that Niles falls and a cannon sounds—or maybe it’s Alex—I wouldn’t know. I’m laughing now, my fingers grazing down the length of his forearm to his fingers, the space between each one suddenly a whole planet’s worth of distance so vast I’ll never be able to see it all.

It’s instantaneous and so, so long, that inevitable future I am convinced will occur just as I’ve imagined it now. And I barely stop myself from saying it, outright and ugly, I won’t be sober when you die.

Instead, with a half-smile and half-grimace, I tell him, You shouldn’t take my advice—or that advice, maybe. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good. I mean that, sincerely, I think. But I don’t mention the guilt, the blue light, how all the bodies fall the same when you’re watching them across the dark.

[ table: pogue ]