[This is based off of a true-ish story, it is not fact nor a re-encounter of my life]
There was that eerie growing flutter of shuffled feet from behind the balcony wall, just tall enough as means of privacy that summer morning. It passed, a syncopation between the intake of breath, and the exhale into the didactic day's warm breeze within an exact expectation of time. The front door to one of the copycat homes came to a adamant close.
He shuffled the cancerous bud between his fingers, the way that gamblers do to assert their dominance over a crowd, and put it out on the stone table with a gentle twist and watched as the opaque fumes swarmed around and around each other, into a dissolve. He dusted his father's pajamas, and stood to dance his way inside through the screen glass door and between the hanging blinds. The apartment felt muggy, and passing through the youthfully cluttered living room, into the short hallway, the thermostat read 83. He felt it in his throat, and it increasingly made it’s way to his stomach as he clenched the bathroom sink handle, and let it run. Balancing his heavy head on his rusty forearms, waiting for the wave to pass, and it does, but the nausea caused him to cough up the black tar that hung in his lung and clinged to the inner pockets of his intestine.
He didn't look himself in the mirror, nor did he brush his teeth, but took the still water and raked it onto his skin and through the mops of greasy hair just thick enough to keep it’s shape off of his forehead. The hum from his silent phone came from the greenly slumped couch in his bedroom, it was The Killer.
"Come pick me up from work," she said, and gave the leeway of time in which she would be off. He looked at his toes, his head a bobber letting it float in neutral disdain.
"Alright, I love you," came from his dusty tongue and let the phone line hang, and at the weakened wrists, let the weight of the phone fall into his front pocket.
He breathed in place, letting his body take him into the split wooden chair, placing his arms on the canyons of the dining table between the hoarded piles of unpaid bills and clippings of coupons and children's drawings. His hands wringed in rhythm with the stagnant breaths like a rusty air conditioner losing faith. His pocket tapped against his flesh, and revealing the screen up against to face, his profile illuminated in whites and blues.
The corner of his mouth curled in his cocked fang-like smile, the one that he despised, but was genetic. That couplet of seconds burned his chapping lips, as he remembered why he fell in love like this as he read over the incoming messages, and let his body grain dissolve into the white noise. Clicking off the screen, he sat in this lapping shore, feeling the thrash of conflicting salts and sands making a murkiness of sea in his gut, but let the tide take him to his room in an effort to shake off the film. Disrobing and manufacturally drowning in the dirty uniform, previously sprawled in a pile behind his bedroom door. He looked in the mirror and desperately searched that foreign face for a means of recollection, that man with the willowy skin and over-grown blades of scruff.
What was this universe, and how mustn't it feel so impermanent? This irrationality fumbling over a reason to feel so isolated, like a stranger trying to make reason of a foreign billboard, was the simplicity of such complex emotion. He pushed at the folded fabric against his sternum, and intaking the sharp rich oakiness, almost savory fragrance that clung to the cotton as he picked up his keys and slipped on one of the pairs of frayed sneakers with the porous soles that crowded around the front door. His medial fingers desperately felt for the comforting cold of the two hanging beads on his left hand that draped from the striated earthy bracelet around his chiseled wrist. He didn’t look back at the apartment number, but simply waltzed down the exterior hall, like a man walking down the bow of a bounding ship. Paradoxically, this was his routine and unfortunately, this was the comfort of reality.
