This is everything I’ve written for ‘Facebook Makes Me Feel Like I Am Looking Down on the Earth From a Space Station’ and all I will ever write. I am giving up on it. It ends a few sentences after the start of chapter 6. Nothing really happens. After the end, at the bottom of this post, I will attempt to explain where I was going with it but it will probably make no sense; this is partially why I quit writing. Even I didn’t understand my plans for it. Okay, whatever, get reading:

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FACEBOOK MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I AM LOOKING DOWN ON THE EARTH FROM A SPACE STATION

1.

Facebook makes me feel like I am looking down on the earth from a space station and I am seeing all these people ‘taking action’ and experiencing things while I am just writing, “I am up in my space station feeling sad and tired; here is a link to some comics I like,” with no discernable facial expression because I am wearing a space helmet with the visor down even though my space station is entirely oxygenated.

~

I close the browser and put my iTunes on random. Blew by Nirvana starts playing.

I think about Kurt Cobain. I think about grunge music. I wasn’t quite two years old when this album came out. I used to wear short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts with holes in the elbows. I used to wear dirty bandanas. I wouldn’t wash my hair for weeks at a time. I don’t think it was because I was trying to be ‘grunge’ though; I was just never any good at being a girl.

I would burn in the sun and let the skin peel like a wall covered in post-it notes.

“Do you think Kurt Cobain washed his clothes regularly?”

“No. It was part of his image. He had to keep up the appearances of his genre. He was a role model to tragically smelly teenagers everywhere.”

“I think grunge may have been the first aesthetic that spent significant time making itself appear physically like it didn’t care how it appeared physically.”

“What about punk? They tried to look like they didn’t give a shit back in the 80’s.”

“Yeah but it was pretty apparent they spent a lot of time looking like garbage. Look at all those studs and spikes and patches on their jackets. That takes time to prepare, let alone find. God knows they had no money.”

“That seems prejudice and ill-informed.”

“Did you know any punks in the 80’s?”

“No, we weren’t alive then.”

“So shut up. I’ll make all the assumptions I want.”

The dialogue goes on like this for some time before I realize I am having a fully realized conversation with an imaginary voice emanating throughout the room, lying face-down on my bed, choking on the pillow. The voice sounds like my older sister Marsha. Marsha was grunge for a while back in the 90’s.

One time she bought a brand new pair of jeans from the mall with the intention of sanding a hole in the knee. She used dad’s power sander and almost lost two of her fingers when her porcelain arms could no longer support the tool’s rusted heft. You could see the bone.

She ruined the jeans beyond wearing, even for someone who was ‘grunge.’ When she got out of the hospital she took the pants outside and shot at it with a potato launcher because we didn’t have any real guns. She was more upset about the wasted money than the permanent chunks of flesh ground off her fingers for the rest of her life. My dad spent the rest of that summer teaching her how to use all of his power tools.

I get up off the bed and go back to my computer. Skype is flashing. It’s Steph, my suitemate.

“these damn walls wont shut up”

“i try to tune it out.”

“i cant. its impossible. i punched the one between our rooms a while ago and i hurt my hand”

‘we are drinking tonight. drink it off”

“drink it off,” Steph repeats. She signs off of Skype. The wall groans and I can hear her throw something. The wall shudders a little.

2.

I leave my laptop open and go sit out in the suite. The window is open and it is cold. The light in my room is still on.

Sydney is sitting on the other couch, drinking a Magic Hat and watching a Red Sox game. She looks at me over the top of her bottle and kind of raises her eyebrows a bit and takes a drink and goes back to watching the television. She has no shoes on.

I get up and go to my fridge and get a beer and sit back on the couch and take a drink, bending the cap in half. It makes me feel powerful even though it’s very easy to do if you twist it while bending it. I learned this trick from my grandfather who was worried I would get picked on for being short and, therefore, weak. Nobody ever really picks on me for anything though. Grampa was pretty short. I think shortness is only directly ‘bad’ for men. Sometimes the shoes I want don’t come in my size though, so that kind of sucks. I bounce the cap off the table and it rolls somewhere.

Me and Sydney drink beer together and watch the Red Sox and Syd yells at the television a few times, at the players.

It is nearly 8pm.

Vlad comes in to the suite and says “The scheduled power outage is in an hour. Let’s get wasted!” with absolute logic.

Syd says “We are already working on it,” in a too-calm way like it was stupid to assume we wouldn’t have been.

“Oh, cool,” Vlad says, looking down at Syd’s bare feet. “Where is everyone else?”

“In their rooms,” I say, “or in the MET lab doing homework. They’ll be back any time now I think.”

Syd nods vaguely and coughs a little.

“Oh, cool,” Vlad says again. He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground. It clinks as he pulls out more beer.

‘There is so much beer in this suite,’ I think to myself. “There is so much beer in this suite,” I say out loud. “There are like five 30 racks between the nine of us. Why do we have so much beer tonight? ” They laugh and keep drinking even though I was kind of asking a real question.

Syd looks over at Steph’s door nervously for a second.

Carrie comes in and starts drinking. She yells “Baseball!” at the TV.

Steph kicks open her door swinging an open bottle of Jägermeister and screams something about her boyfriend. The wall groans loudly and she throws the bottle at it but it doesn’t break.

“What the fuck, calm down kid.” Carrie goes back to drinking. Steph picks up her bottle and drinks it taking alternate sips of Jäger and orange soda and swishing it in her mouth. Vlad comments on how disgusting it is. I pile paper towels over the spill on the floor.

After a while the power cuts out. I realize my laptop was plugged in to the wall and the battery was out, so it will probably be fucked up when I turn it back on. “Shit.”

“Shit YES,” Vlad says, and opens a hard cider.

I pick up a larger bottle of cider and loudly proclaim I am going to drink outside, which is against campus rules, and I don’t care what security says because I am a rebel.

Five seconds later I meet the residence hall director in the stair well.

“Where are you going?”

“Outside.”

“Is that a beer in your hand?”

“No, it’s apple cider.” Vlad says, grinning. You can practically smell the shit on his breath.

“Is it hard cider?”

“Uhm… yeah.”

“You know you can’t have that out here.”

“Oh. I forgot.” I turn around and Vlad is moving his own drink behind his back. We return our alcohol to the suite and say “shit” a few times in varying degrees of embarrassment, then leave. The backup generator hums and emergency stairwell lights glow dim.

Outside, I light up a cigarette and give one to Syd. We stand around in the darkness not saying anything.

You can see the stars.

Someone says, “Guys, we’re like pioneers.”

Someone else says, “Our phones still work, idiot,” and three cell phones flash on, faces all looking down at screens or up at the sky.

I say, “I’m going to go lay down.”

“Inside?”

“Parking lot.”

I walk out about fifty feet and get on my back, working my cigarette to my mouth, trying not to get ash in my eyes. Three more people come lay down next to me. One of them is Steph and something clinks when she sits.

“You got your bottle.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I have some?”

“Yeah.”

Steph’s boyfriend shows up and lies with us and we all just look up.

Someone says, “It is silent as a motherfucker.”

“A motherfucker?”

“Like twelve motherfuckers,” I say.

“I feel like a motherfucker would not be silent. Twelve of them would be deafening.”

“My grandmother calls her neighbor a motherfucker because he mows his lawn at night. I think that means motherfuckers are loud.”

“So being a motherfucker has nothing to do with fucking? Or mothers?”

“It feels really good out right now.”

“My phone says 38 degrees,” I say.

“I feel good as a motherfucker.”

“Hey, it’s Andrew.”

Andrew stumbles towards us with his jacket on inside out, yelling from across the parking lot. “When I woke up I thought I died!”

“What?”

“I passed out while puking in the bathroom before the power went out. I woke up and it was dark and I thought I was dead,” he said.

“That’s funny.”

“How do you wake up dead?”

“I’ll bet David Blaine could do it.”

I am on my third cigarette at this point. I give Syd another one.

The electricity is back on but we lie in the parking lot for a long time talking about nothing. Steph’s Jäger is all gone and we throw the bottle into the giant ditch at the back of the lot and it shatters on something, echoing for a few seconds. Andrew rubs up against me and elbows my breasts lightly, on accident I think, and puts his finger through my belt loop for a second before pulling it away. This is okay. This is normal. I touch him on the small of his back and he shivers slightly with unfocussed eyes.

We walk back towards the building but I stop on the side walk to have another cigarette with Andrew.

“So are you feeling better now?” I ask.

“Yes, I think so. It’s weird, thinking you’re dead.”

“You are incredibly drunk.”

“No I’m not. Wait. Wait, wait, I can be sober, watch.” Andrew straightens his back and looks at me with the sort of exaggerated, unwavering composure only the helplessly inebriated could hope to achieve. “See? I am sober.”

“Try walking. Try sitting.”

Andrew nods slightly and crosses one leg behind the other in an attempt to lower himself to the ground but loses his footing and falls backwards onto his wrist in the gravel.

“Ow. Shit, ow. Fucking…”

“See what lying to your friends does?”

Andrew mumbles, “Yeah, you’ll see what okay help me up please okay please,” and promptly throws up in his mouth a little. “Ow. That hurt.”

I drag him to his feet and he drinks some water and spits and says he feels better. He surreptitiously glances at my body in the elevator. I pretend not to notice.

On our floor he starts to say good night but I grab his arm and pull him back to my room.

I am tugging at his shirt.

He is breathing on my neck.

I am locking the door and turning off the light.

He is pulling me down on him with his eyes.

I am giving in to the college mantra that you only live once and goddamn if that means I’ll pass up a chance for something I would have otherwise decided was just another ‘bad idea.’ A bad idea to whom? Nirvana’s Blew flashes through my brain and I briefly wonder if I am just doing this as a conscious display of appearing as though I don’t care, but the wall sighs and convulses into the bed frame so violently that we slide across the sheets to the sounds of cracking wood.

I am grinding into his body and my head is down and my mouth is open and I vaguely feel concern that my breath smells bad but a subtle, rhythmic swelling in my abdomen reprioritizes these thoughts as I roll off Andrew onto the floor like a damp paper towel.

I am in the bathroom, ringing myself dry. I don’t even hear Andrew leave.

On the way to my door I realize Vlad has been trying to sleep on the couch since we all came in. He doesn’t care. He’ll want to eat out somewhere tomorrow morning.

Steph opens her door and says, “Are you two done? I’m tired as a motherfucker.”

3.

Tell someone you’re God or Jesus and they’ll think you’re insane and walk away. Tell someone you’re the devil and they still think you’re insane, but interesting. People will ask you questions. Some people might even want to be your friend based on this information alone. People don’t want to be friends with Jesus. Jesus makes people uncomfortable. I guess that means people are only comfortable with insanity if it makes them laugh, for whatever reason. I never laugh anymore, not for real.

~

I am standing outside sometime before 10:00am pushing another cigarette into my face when Andrew comes out. He’s on the phone, probably because he doesn’t like to stand out here alone so having a phone up to his ear gives him the sense of being with company.

But I’m out here so he’s only talking to whomever for a few minutes before he hangs up.

“Who were you talking to?”

“My dad. He put more money in my account so I had to thank him.”

“Oh.”

He pulls out a crushed box of cigarettes and grumbles while selecting one, slightly bent. “I paid six-seventy-nine for these yesterday. Now they’re all bent. What the fuck.”

“Don’t sit on them anymore.”

He flicks his lighter with a concentrated facial expression and holds his breath for a few seconds.

He breathes out smoke and for a moment he appears as a dragon to me.

“‘What good is a bird if a bird can’t fly; I’m still stuck here and I don’t know why.’”

Andrew moves his eyes toward me without turning his head. “What?”

“It’s lyrics from a song I like.

Andrew groans and nods a little. “That is some seriously girly shit.”

“Suck my dick.”

“Oh you know I’d love to but I still can’t chew right since last time.”

“Crack your jaw.”

“Baby, it hurts!”

We both laugh and look out at the parking lot. It’s below zero I think. It feels below zero. Most of the snow is the color of shit.

Carrie opens her window behind us and yells Andrew’s name. She is shirtless. She probably just got out of the shower. It seems like Carrie is eternally ‘just coming out of the shower.’

“Looking good, baby girl.” Andrew yells back.

Carrie is gay and everyone knows this. There is an ongoing joke between her and Andrew that they will have sex or something but it usually just ends with them getting drunk, Carrie slapping Andrew in the junk, and everyone going to bed.

I heard they cuddled at a party once. Steph said you could hear Andrew’s balls screaming blue murder for miles.

“You two’re going to the Packer tonight right!?” The Packer is what everyone calls The Packing House, a shitty bar up the hill in town.

“Yeah, of course,” Andrew answers for me.

“But I don’t want to go.”

“Shut up, you’re going.” He knows I won’t really fight back. He thinks if he smiles it will make it okay. It sucks that he’s mostly right. Right enough.

“Okay, cool! I’m going to get dressed now bye!”

“Well that’s a shame.”

Carrie shuts her window as Andrew turns back to me. He does that smile and breathes smoke out his nose and for a second he’s a dragon again and I’m under his stupid, shitty spell. The wall behind us begins humming lightly, my eyeballs vibrating to the frequency. I guess I’m going to the bar tonight.

-

I am lying in bed and staring at the wall while Mineral plays on my laptop. The song Sadder Star makes me want to turn into static. I close my eyes and pretend I am static. I’m not doing a very good job at pretending. I hear something thumping repeatedly.

Lorna is jumping in place just outside my door and chugging a twisted tea.

It is not even 9:00pm yet.

She is already drunk.

Lorna is happy. She is always happy, all the time.

I close my laptop and can hear Lady Gaga coming from her room. Everyone is out in the suite in their ‘bar clothes’ and playing drinking games.

I say ‘bar clothes’ because people dress nicer when they go to the Packer. There is nothing to do in this town besides drink or longboard.

I put on a tighter t-shirt and my jeans that don’t have holes in them. My hoodie smells like smoke but I don’t think anyone will notice. I only own two pairs of shoes and they are both old sneakers.

I am the shittiest girl.

One pair has rainbow laces. I tell myself that this counts for something.

“We aren’t leaving for another two hours. We’re pregaming.”

Pregame the bar, where I will go to spend more money on alcohol. I open a hard cider, take a drink and breathe heavily for a few seconds.

I need a cigarette badly.

All I have left are old apple-flavored cigars I was given a few weeks ago. I’m not sure by whom.

“Didn’t you just go out?” nobody in particular asks.

“No.”

“Oh.”

It is probably five degrees outside. I check my phone. It says it is three degrees.

I am pleased with my ability to guess the temperature. I smile just a little.

The apple cigars are okay for how old they are.

The snow has been cleared since earlier today and the concrete is mostly dry. Some longboarders come down the path and one of them falls into some snow and says “shit” very loudly and gets back up and pushes off again. He looks past me towards Andrew and Jeff. They are laughing as they come out of the building.

Andrew and Jeff live in a suite on the other side of the building but on the same floor as mine. I think they are best friends. Maybe they’re just really good regular friends. Steph is my best friend. I realize I haven’t seen her all day.

Jeff gives Andrew a cigarette and says my cigar smells good. He says girls who smoke cigars are ‘classy bitches.’ Then turns to the parking lot and stares out into the middle distance for a significant amount of time without talking. Andrew’s phone plays the ringtone that means he has a text.

“Celebrity,” I say without looking up at him.

“It’s my brother. He’s got himself another girlfriend I guess. Always rubbing it in my face.”

“Oh.”

“It’s really funny though,” Andrew says with a nondescript facial expression. “He makes me laugh.”

Some bricks make slight grinding noises in the wall behind us. Jeff clears the snow off the curb with his foot and sits down and coughs a little. “Haven’t seen Stephanie all day.”

“She’s been with her boyfriend over in Stonehenge,” Andrew says between sneezes.

Stonehenge is the other set of dorms on campus. The shitty ones. They’re big brick obelisks arranged in a circle around a pitiful excuse for a ‘courtyard.’ Nobody wants to live there but they do anyway because they probably don’t have any other choice. At night you can always hear at least one couple fucking and doing a poor job of it.

I lived there for a year and once when I came back from Christmas break, the toilets had overflowed and, because the floor was angled just slightly, it all flowed into my room and soaked into my carpet. The janitors were still gone so I cleaned it up with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water by myself, followed by the hottest shower of my life.

It turned out the fat girl down the fall had caused the clog and she apologized to me for essentially shitting all over my floor but she didn’t really mean it.

Later that week, the people from next door snuck into her room and smeared chocolate pudding on her ass while she was sleeping.

She woke up in the middle of it and I could hear the sounds of someone being choked all the way from my room. A body slammed into my door around 3:00am and everything screamed so loudly. I pulled the covers over my head and sang very quietly with my fingers in my ears.

“Oh. I guess that explains it.”

“Guess they got sick of locking themselves in her room and making the walls cry all day,” I say. “His room might be a nice change.”

It’s been humid lately with all the snow fall, which makes the smoke heavy and cling to your clothing with white knuckles. I push up my glasses and rub my eyes slowly and exhale thick from the depths of my lungs. My mouth is a burning orchard.

“Is that what you’re wearing tonight?” Jeff asks me.

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. Figured you’d have something classier to choose from. Something white. You look good in white.”

“I’d just spill beer all over it or get sick on myself. At least I can kind of hide that with a dark shirt. Not like guys are even going to look at me anyway. Not like I’d even want them to.”

“Point taken.”

“So negative! You’re too hard on yourself,” Andrew says.

“And you’re just too hard.” I slap Andrew in the dick and he folds over on himself. “Don’t make me go all Al Pacino and put this cigar out in your eye.”

“More like ‘Alison Pussy-no.’”

“That was a stretch,” Jeff mumbles from the corner of his mouth.

“Did Al Pacino ever even do that? In a movie I mean. Well, real life too.”

“Does it matter?” I make a hissing sound while pretending to smash my cigar into and imaginary face. “He probably did. I’d like to think he did.”

“That’s funny.”

“What do you mean ‘that’s funny’? I’m funny to you? Funny like a clown? I’m here to make you laugh?”

“Oh god, shut up.”

“Damn.”

Andrew and Jeff get up and leave. I smell the fingers on my right hand and am overwhelmed by apples. Same with my hoodie. Same with my hair. Everything is apples.

“Maybe I should change,” I wonder aloud. “No. I don’t care. I dunno. Maybe. No.”

I finish the entire cigar while having a casual inner conversation with myself about how I would explain the iPhone to someone from fifty years ago if I ever got sent back in time. Then I wonder if I would be able to comprehend technology from fifty years in the future if it was being explained to me by someone from that time period. Then I wonder if this is the sort of thing other people think about when it’s quiet and they’re alone. Then I wonder if other people are as painfully self-aware as I am. I brush some ash off my sleeve and it leaves a smear and then I think about that.

I toss my cigar butt in the bin and look up as everyone comes outside. Andrew says we are leaving and I just say “Oh.” It hasn’t been two hours yet. I smell strongly of smoke and my makeup is kind of shitty and my hair is all greasy and my breath is awful and I don’t have any gum and I don’t have enough money with me to get sufficiently smashed because I didn’t even get to finish that first drink I opened, which is still open on my desk and when I get back I know my whole room is going to smell like shit because of it and I thought maybe Steph was going to come but she’s still gone and where is Steph and why isn’t she here?

I climb into the backseat of Andrew’s car with Syd and I don’t know why Steph isn’t here yet so I put my seatbelt on and keep hoping she’ll come walking over the hill before Andrew starts the car.

We start to pull out of the parking lot. The whole dorm building shrieks and sets off a few car alarms. Carrie says, “Turn the radio up,” and Jeff starts dancing in his seat.

4.

Andrew, Jeff, Syd, Carrie, and I get to the bar about the same time that Lorna, Vlad, and Michael do. Michael is one of my other suitemates and he likes to drink. I feel that this is an important fact about Michael. It describes Michael more than he might be comfortable with.

One time Michael got kicked out of the bar for something relatively innocent like spilling beer on the dance floor or something like he usually does but didn’t have a ride back because his stupid drunken fingers couldn’t figure out his cell phone’s number pad. So he just starts walking.

Twenty minutes later, Vlad notices Michael is gone and calls him.

“Where are you?” Vlad asks.

“I don’t know,” Michael ‘says.’

“What.”

“I see a light.”

“A light.”

“It’s really bright.”

Vlad then announces to the bar that Michael is finally dead and in route to heaven.

One frantic drive later, Vlad and Lorna find Michael under a fluorescent light hanging from a barn door, seven miles from the bar, slumped against the wall in a standing position, asleep and covered in puke. So they threw him in the bed of Vlad’s truck, drove him back to the dorm, and propped him upright in the chair in his room with a bucket, a glass of water and a couple ibuprofen. Michael has no recollection of this ever happening.

The line to the door is long and anxious. Michael is already drunk. We are at the very back of the line when some girls in nice dresses come up behind us. It’s Saturday and since the Packer is the closest thing to a ‘club’ in God-knows-how-far, Saturday means it is “dress like you mean it” night. They are talking about how much they are going to dance tonight. They are talking about how drunk they are going to get tonight. One is talking about how she is not going to go back with Tony because Tony is a jerk and Tony needs to lay off. I don’t know who Tony is but I think Michael does because he laughs. Maybe he just laughs because girls like these are ruining everything for the rest of us. These are the girls who end up with broken bra straps, puking in the bar bathroom alone because their friends are too busy grinding into a stranger’s sweaty crotch on the dance floor to notice. These are the girls who can’t use a flash when taking their MySpace-angle pictures because the shine off their greasy faces oversaturates the picture into a solid white sun flare.

If I roll my eyes any harder, I swear they’re going to fall out of my fucking face.

Regardless, there’s no doubt they look better than me. I remember I have lip gloss in my pocket. I pull my filthy hair back into this half-pony tail thing, which doesn’t help. All the lip gloss and hair ties in the world couldn’t help me at this point.

Michael shivers violently and I pull the box of cigars out of my pocket and one of the girls behind me groans audibly. I lower my arm and flick all my ash behind me, as nonchalant as possible. I’m going to burn a hole her peep-toe shoes if I have to smoke the whole pack.

Goddamnit.

The line is moving at an agonizing pace. Some guy at the front tries to use a fake I.D. which clearly doesn’t fly. In a town this small, it’s pretty hard to pass as an adult when everyone knows you’re still 19 and living in the freshman dorms. The bouncers turn him away and cut up his I.D. right there so everyone can see. Tough break, bro. I decide the bouncer is an okay guy.

But the bouncer is big. He is a very large man. I dig through my pockets for my license but can’t find it. Michael and Syd get their ID’s checked while I search frantically before realizing I left it in my other pair of pants. I can’t say this though; I may as well tell him my dog ate it. I look up from myself with a consciously desperate facial expression but the bouncer is too busy trying to explain to the annoying girls behind me why they can’t bring in their flasks of Gatorade and vodka. I slide past the bouncer and snag an “over 21” bracelet from out of the basket by the door while silently thanking my grandfather for his tiny, tiny genes. I dig into my bra and pull a few singles from under my boob. Steph calls them “brallars.”

The bartender is a male. This money should be worth more to him because it touched a female nipple. I tell him this with a grin and he asks “what” loudly because the music is overbearing and I just ask for the cheapest beer he has because I don’t feel like repeating my mediocre, degrading joke.

I’m nursing a mug of something terrible by the guys playing darts and kind of staring bleakly into the middle distance when one of the guys wins and goes around for high-fives. He comes to me and wants a double-five but I’ve got a mug in my hand but he slaps the mug anyway along with my open palm and beer sloshes all down my arm and onto his hand a little.

“Oh no,” he says.

“It’s fine. Really. It’s a nice change from apples.” This is my attempt at a joke, which makes no sense in this context. At least I’m not wearing white. I subconsciously remind myself to rub this in Jeff’s face.

“I’ll be right back.” He barely spilled any of it. The mug is practically still full.

“Yeah okay.” He heads towards the bar.

He comes back with the same cheap crap I already have and sets it on the table. And they say chivalry is dead.

So now I’m standing by the dart players, double fisting mugs of shit and pretending like I don’t look like a giant alcoholic. Michael meanders his way to my side and says something about music and Andrew wants to dance.

“Then go dance with him you big sexy flamer.”

“Andrew wants to dance with you.”

“I’m not dancing.”

“He says he misses dancing with you.”

Fucking a. I take Andrew dancing in my bed a couple times a week. Why does he need to make this more than it is? We’re buddies. We’ve been over this. We’ve had ‘talks.’ I really HATE ‘talks’ but I had ‘talks’ with him because I respect him and value his feelings. This is where I thought we were at. I thought he was the bone and I was the dog and that’s all the depth there was to it, outside of my status as ‘honorary bro.’ I start pounding one of my beers. Michael immediately forgets what he came over for and chugs his beer too, which gets everyone in the area to hoot rhythmically while any and all dignity I’ve managed to keep a grip on slides down my foaming gullet. I breathe heavily for a few seconds and follow up with the courtesy beer in as much time. My sloppy darts champ puts another beer on the table, which Michael hands to me, and down it goes.

This is so fucked.

Sir Dartsalot keeps bringing more beer.

There is so much beer.

He’s not even trying to hide the fact he’s looking at my tits.

More games of darts. High fives all around.

Where did Michael go?

Something about Andrew.

Still more beer.

I’m dancing with Dart McHandsy now. Next to him? He’s kind of ignoring me but he keeps ‘accidentally’ touching me.

God I’m such a disgusting mess.

I can’t even set down my mug. It keeps coming back to my mouth with more alcohol… than it left with.

This hair tie keeps coming loose. So annoying.

I don’t need it. I can drink with hair in my face.

“Who wants a hair tie?”

“Oh, give it here please,” the broken jukebox says, I think.

“Yeah okay.” I put my hair tie on the jukebox. I pat its glass case.

Something says “thanks.”

Such a polite jukebox.

I need a thing. A smoke.

I leave my empty mug back at the bar and I know the door is over here somewhere.

I see someone tall. It’s Steph! Steph is here! Steph is my friend. “Come outside with me.”

I don’t know what she’s saying so I try to grab her wrist but keep losing my grip. “Where were you all day? I missed you.”

I don’t want a cigar but I have no cigarettes. There is a guy over there with cigarettes. I grab a cigarette out of the open box he’s holding. He is drunk. He doesn’t look. Not menthol. I sigh. Stolen cigarettes are never menthol.

Steph has been talking. Describing her day with her boyfriend, I think. I can’t tell. The cigarette guy is staring at Steph kind of funny now. I like Steph’s boyfriend. He’s funny. They fuck too much though. The walls don’t like it when they fuck. Nobody likes it because that’s all they ever do anymore.

“You fuck,” I stutter with the cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

“What?”

“Too much! You fuck too much. Keep your puzzle pieces in their respective boxes for a FUCKING night! Hey! Hey, I love you okay? You’re so pretty.”

“Wow.”

“You want to go we have a drink with me okay now?”

Goddamnit.

“I missed you today.”

“I missed y-,” and then I throw up all over my shoes. My cigarette is in there somewhere. It smells like apples and then everything kind of vignettes into flickering nothing.

-

I’m lying in the bed of Vlad’s truck with Lorna, who is singing a ‘Ke$ha’ song and stroking my hair. She’s dancing a little and the truck hits a bump and it’s making my head bounce and I feel like I’m floating for a second.

“What’s going on? Where are we going?”

“We’re going back, sweetheart. You had too much.”

“Oh shit. Did I dance with that guy anymore?”

“What guy?”

“The guy.”

“Don’t worry; we’ll be back in a second.”

Vlad hears me talking from the cab, yells my name, and accelerates up the hill to the dorms. The wind pushes my hair all in my eyes and mouth and everything is blurred and somehow I feel like I’ve been here before, in this specific moment in time.

We get out and I make my way over to the snow bank where I attempt to clean some of the dried puke off my shoes. Vlad is laughing and slaps me on the back. “You’re okay. We’ll go get something to eat tomorrow.”

“Oh Jesus, don’t talk about food please.”

“I can taste the eggs now!”

I make a gagging sound and Vlad laugh hysterically, in a short burst, like a shotgun.

Steph gets out of the passenger side of Vlad’s truck. I didn’t even see her in there. I think she’s mad.

“Bro-gina!”

No, she’s just as drunk as I am. “Brolva!”

“Brovaries!”

“Clit-bro-is?”

“You lose I win,” she stammers and starts laughing uncontrollably. Lorna is laying on her back in a parking space and kind of dancing. Steph lies next to her and dances as best as she can on her side. I throw a snowball at her but miss and it explodes on the concrete next to Lorna’s head.

She yells, “What the fuck,” and throws back as much as she can gather. I feel it brush my neck a little.

My phone makes that noise that means it got a new email, but it doesn’t for some reason. I look at an old one. Something about coupons for a bookstore. “Guys! Bookstore coupons!”

“Bookstore coupons!”

“Bookpons!”

“Coustore!”

“Obtuse cook pornos!”

“What?”

“It’s an anagram.”

“I didn’t know you were satanic.”

Vlad yells that we’re idiots and tells us to come inside because Public Safety is patrolling soon. I go help Lorna and Steph up and we go inside.

Andrew and Jeff are on the couch in my suite, still drinking. Lorna starts playing shitty dance music and I feel like the front of my face and the back of my head are sliding diagonally in opposite directions from each other very slowly.

I lean against the wall. The wall is cold and shifts a little so I sit in a chair. I can barely keep my head up.

I vaguely sense that something is near to me and then something lifts me up. Something takes me into my room and I am being placed on the bed. Something is pulling my clothes off slowly and throwing them towards my hamper. I briefly consider the reality of ‘being taken advantage of’ but the thing lays me down and pulls the covers over me. The thing says, “You always made me go ‘daddy mode’ on you,” and I know it is Andrew.

Instantly he’s gone and the lights are out, my door suddenly closed without a sound.

I didn’t hear him leave.

I stare into the infinite blue-black void behind my eyelids and think about eating eggs over easy in the morning and how gross that sounds right now. I realize I haven’t brushed my teeth all day in the final moments before a warm light washes over my body and the walls hum me gently to sleep.

5.

People under the age of eighteen are incapable of falling in love. I do not believe this to be an ‘opinion’ but, in fact, a fact. High Schoolers tell one another they love each other all the time, sometimes less than a week into a relationship and you can pretty much guess what happens in the next one-month-to-a-year. I am not saying this isn’t a normal part of growing up. I’m not saying this is necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, even though it probably is. I’m just saying that nobody under eighteen knows what they’re saying when they tell someone they love them. As for the people who end up marrying their ‘high school sweetheart,’ well, those people are probably just really boring. Yes, they say they are happy and in love. Love and happiness can be disguised as a lot of things. Like complacency, for one. Or convenience. Or fear of loneliness. Besides, everyone likes a little reliability and what’s more consistent than coming home to the exact same man or woman for your entire life? Yeah, they’ve probably been cheating on each other since early college but my point still stands. It doesn’t matter how many exotic vacation photos you’ve halfheartedly posed in with your partially unbuttoned Hawaiian flower shirts and ugly sun dresses. I don’t care how successful your doctor son is, having somehow flourished in the stale, loveless vacuum that you call a ‘family.’ You. Are. Boooooring.

~

Carrie is cooking curry again. I hate the smell of curry so much.

But she has cooked it every single day for as long as I can remember.

Carrie is happy, I think. She has a girlfriend now. Being in a new relationship kind of means you are automatically happy, even if your life is crap.

That’s how emotions work.

“I always wanted to be a chimney sweeper,” I announce to nobody in particular.

“A chimney sweeper,” Carrie calls from the kitchen.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t they kind of pointless now? I mean, I think they have machines for that or something.”

“They do? That makes sense. I just think it sounds charming though. Maybe I’ve watched Mary Poppins too much.”

“Chimney sweepers didn’t randomly break out in coordinated dance routines. I think most of them probably died young from breathing in too much ash.”

“Thanks for literally killing my dream.”

“I don’t think ‘literally’ works… well, maybe.” She goes back to her curry and starts humming with a vaguely sad facial expression.

Carrie is trying really hard to be happy.

It is exceptionally grey outside.

I go into my room and play some Jejune song without looking at the title, lay face down on my bed and think about how the word “jejune” was probably the single most appropriate name for a band in the 90’s, then get up again.

I walk into Steph’s room. “Get this: hipster prom, nobody dances.”

“That’s funny,” she mutters flatly through a mouth full of cereal.

“What are you doing?”

“Flash animation.”

“On what?”

“Humpty Dumpty dances on a wall, falls, and dies. It’s going to be really funny,” she says with concentration. She turns her head towards me but keep her eyes on the screen and it kind of freaks me out.

I sit on her bed and watch her do animation things I don’t understand. Then I get bored and put my hoodie on and go outside. Walking under the window to her room, I can hear her making funny high-pitched noises to herself. Steph makes noises a lot.

One time she and I were pulling into the parking lot and the spot she wanted in the front row was taken by this kid she didn’t like. She started screaming some incomprehensible complaint about him taking her spot and ended her well-constructed argument by slamming her face on the horn while the kids in the skate park behind us all stopped what they were doing and just stared for an uncomfortable amount of time. It sounded something like:

OHMYGODICAN’TBELIEVETHATFUCKINGFURRYFAGGOTTOOKMYSPOTAGAINIMSO PISSEDICAN’TEVEN*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

So now when Steph is raging she tends to end her tangent by making a long ‘beep’ sound with her mouth. Then she throws something. Then it’s my turn to be mad.

Steph also has the terrible habit of saying the word “faggot” at the absolute worst times possible, but that’s something else entirely.

My lighter has one job: to light. That’s all it needs to do to be a functional object in this plane of existence but instead I’m standing here on the curb with a stale cigarette in my mouth and I’m scraping the shit out of the side of my thumb trying to get my lighter to do its one, single function but it’s basically doing jack! Shit!

Andrew comes out and says “having fun?” like he’s some kind of miraculous joke fairy, doling out smiles and sunshine like they’re scoops of fucking ice cream in a waffle cone made of beautiful lollipop dreams and I tell him this, verbatim, with a consciously neutral facial expression, never quite looking in his direction, but he just says, “harsh,” with a grin and pulls out his own lighter for me to use and I take a deep drag and that about ends the conversation.

Exhaling slowly, my smoke meanders above the horizon and gets lost in the murkiest grey.

A car pulls into the visitor’s parking and idles with its lights on for a few minutes. Jeff and Vlad come out and stand with Andrew and me and we talk about things. The car’s engine and lights go off and I can see now that the car is deep silver and I recognize it. “Garrett is here.”

Garrett Stone is a folk legend, a hero of sorts. Garrett Stone is the Rasputin Quaffer. Garret Stone is the mighty Slayer of Dragons.

In layman’s terms this just means Garrett likes to drink really heavy beer and fuck fat chicks, in no particular order.

Garrett also desperately wants to sleep with me. He swears it is completely unrelated to his ‘dragon slaying’ tendencies but I choose to stay mildly offended if for no other reason than as an excuse for the negative space between our focal points.

Not that I don’t like him; he’s one of my best friends. We just won’t be scratching beards anytime soon.

“Hey Garrett.”

“What’s going oooaawwwhhnn?” He is gripping a 30 rack of beer under each arm and is grinning great big. Garrett is always happy to be here.

While we’re talking, some guy we know walks by in a popped-collar pink polo and dark brown snow pants.

“Wuzzup homies?”

We all give the chin nod simultaneously.

He goes inside and Garrett says, “Whoever said ‘pink is the new black’ should have said ‘pink is the new uncomfortable silence.’”

“I think that phrase was invented by uhh… whatever alternative aesthetic was popular in 2003.”

“Probably the emo scenester goths.”

“Emo scenester goths.”

“All three?”

“Combined.”

“Like Megazord!”

I mumble, “The saddest Megazord,” through a mouth filled with smoke

“Oh my god. ‘Sad Megazord.’ That’s your nickname from now on.”

“Man, that’s a good nickname.”

“Remember when Garrett used to call you ‘Jingles the Christmas Cat’?”

“That was way before…”

“Your left boob can be the tiger.”

“I think the vagina area is probably the tiger, right?”

“Her boobs are probably the mastodon.”

I can see where this is going. “What does that even mean? Are you saying my boobs are hairy?”

“No, it means they’re huge and pretty much nobody alive has seen them.”

“Hey, we all know Andrew has seen them.”

“True. And for the record, they weren’t big; it’s a proportion issue with her height. It’s like an optical illusion… but with tits.”

“So, uhh, then yeah I guess that means we’re saying you got hairy titties.”

“Great. So I have small, hairy tits that I’ll just whip out for this asshole over here anytime he wants. That’s what we have decided, yes?” I accidentally spit and the walls bulge outward for a moment while bricks split and crumble into the grass.

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

I slap three sets of balls in a series of awkward arm movements.

Garrett drops one of his cases of beer and some of the bottles shatter.

“Oh!”

Beer splashes up the side of his leg and quickly streams into the parking lot. He looks at me like the time I made that joke about his dead mom. Pink polo walks by again and asks what the hell happened. Garrett shoots him a dirty look.

“Sorry,” I shrug slightly. “I must have power morphed. I don’t know the strength of my own zord.”

Despite having been offended, I still feel pretty bad. As we head inside, I help him gather the unbroken bottles and say I’ll ‘make it up to him later,’ which is a hollow statement, but I think it distracts him from the loss of precious alcohol.

“Sad Voltron, defender of feelings!” Jeff announces in a dramatic voice.

“It’s ‘Sad Megazord.’ Get it right.”

“Damn.”

6.

“This suite gets filthier every time I see it.”

“I’m honestly surprised you can even see through that cloud of farts you call a soul, Garrett.”

“That was unnecessarily harsh,” I say while rubbing Garrett on his back like a child but he doesn’t seem to notice. His shoulders are bigger than my head.

He puts his beer down by the door to my room and opens a bottle with his forearm, something I’ve yet to master, and flicks the cap at Lorna. She takes it in the face and just laughs because Lorna is always happy.

Lorna is always happy.

-

-

-

That’s it. That’s all there will ever be. I realize it doesn’t even end on a significant note, but I literally could not muster the creativity to get to a ‘significant’ statement before giving up. This is my current state of creative apathy.

So, I know it is impossible to really gather from the small amount I’ve written, but the main character in not actually there. Or anywhere. The book was going to slowly, over the first 3/4ths of the book, begin to imply more and more that the main character does not exist but was in fact the manifestation of dead memories projected into the lives of people currently living in a different yet parallel timeline. The turning point of the book would be when the main character loses her phone and is bending down in a ditch by the woods searching for it. The narraration would suddenly switch to the viewpoint of Steph, whom is doing nothing in particular, and nothing of the main character would be mentioned ever again. Not in memories, not in casual conversation, nothing. The main character would simply not exist anymore after a certain and insignificant point in the book and there would be no direct explanation as to why; it would be left up to the reader to either come up with their own theory or decide the book is fucking stupid and not care (the latter of which seems more likely). The last chapter would end on a Tao Lin-esque note, landing on an insignificant sentence in the middle of a conversation about nothing important. This, I think, leaves more of an impact for the simple fact that it leaves nothing at all.

But I didn’t know how to do all that. And even if I did, it would be a lot of work. And I am very busy now and also kind of lazy anyway so being in a state of work I would consider ‘busy’ is already more than I would like to be doing, therefore leaving less than 0% possibility for me to continue writing this peice of garbage.

But maybe you like what I did with it, for how short it is. Leave a comment, if you would. I’d like to know what you thought of it.