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Merry’s collapsed among an empty orange crate, his fingertips disappearing into a mélange of gritty gravel and cigarette butts.
“We’re never gonna grow up,” he mumbles, the words garbled on his tongue. “We’re gonna live like Peter Pan.” His eyelids scrape open, his eyes glazed and blank like the pearls we could never afford. No, we could’ve afforded them at one point. We just can’t anymore.
I shake my head at him as I crouch down beside a trash can, hugging my backpack to my chest where my heart beats dully in my chest, sputtering down to a slow crawl. “We might not grow up but we’re gonna die.”
Merry’s lips purse in a puckered wilted rosette as his body slumps down further. “Why do you always have to ruin my fun, Lindy boy?”
I don’t answer even though I have several satisfactory responses like You disgust me. You sicken me. You rankle me. You should just curl up and die back here and no one would find you and if they did, no one would care. A hobo would piss on you, a pimp would sneer at you, and I’d run away and never ever come back.
He does infuriate me. Back before things went sour, our life was a miniature paradise. We were on top of the world, willfully egocentric, wonderfully eccentric, and wildly electric. Back then we used to go through the tedious theatrics of being in love and making love. Back then our fingernails didn’t scrabble over each other’s skin as we shook and we sighed in each other’s arms. Our teeth didn’t bite and our words didn’t sting. We didn’t seek the other’s pain in order to reach our own pleasure. We didn’t fall asleep cold and restless, unsatisfied and unsatisfactory. And then infection swept in, seeped in, crawled beneath our skin and into our veins, reversing the blood flow to collide back into our hearts to make them bubble balloon and finally burst. Back before our life disintegrated, time screamed by on a rollercoaster highway, and now it’s frozen back here in the brick and garbage, and I blame it all on him. He infuriates me.
Merry tips forward onto hands and knees and crawls to my feet, running his grimy hands across the tops of my frayed shoelaces till he grips my ankles, resting his head against my knees.
“Do you still love me, Lind?” he asks my scab stained legs.
“What a stupid question…” I weave my fingers into Merry’s greasy hair and jerk his head back so he can meet my eyes. Bloodshot meets bloodshot. Veins crawl and scrabble to the corners of our tired eyes and he grins at me, his face lit up like moons and stars and bells gleaming in church belfries. “Of course I don’t.” I let him go and his head slumps forward, bumping against my knees and then again and again as his body begins to shake with held in whimpers in sobs. You disgust me.
I want to tell him that it didn’t need to be this way. Our life didn’t need to be this way. But he fucked it up. He fucked us over. We once had everything and what’ve we got to show for it? Nothing. We now have absolutely nothing but each other and that’s not saying much at all.
It’s all his fault all his fault and it’s never mine, I swear it, and so I knee him in the face to push him away from me. He lies on his back, staring at the gaping mouth of the sky above the buildings of our alley, his dirt eyes gleaming blue with the reflection, like a junkie lying overdose comatose still. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him this way, only the last time was so so real.
He is a broken doll. He’s the nonentity who ruined our life. And he likes to blame it all on me but I know whose fault it really is.
Let’s break up. The three words I spoke that night often come back to haunt me but he brought it on himself by saying three words so much worse right before I let mine seep out. I love you. And I knew then as I know now that love is a terrible thing. It impairs the judgment and rots one’s brain and heart and every other throbbing, pulsing organ inside their fragile bodies. Who needs alcohol and drugs when one has love? Or maybe love makes them need even more.
Let’s break up. It was a good plan. I’d go on with my solo career. A good singing voice could get me anywhere but Merry with his clumsy guitar fingers would have to struggle and scrabble to become anything at all. And so he refused to let me go. Instead he tried to let himself go. Was it a handful of pills and a swig of vodka? Was it a syringe full of the sweetest nectar anyone could ever offer us? I don’t remember now. But he did it and I found him. Brokendollcomatoseoverdose and uttered those three goddamned words that have me where I am now.
I love you.
Don’t leave me.
God damn it.
Three word sentences.
Are bad luck.
And bad luck gets you kicked out into the streets because no one wants to pay for suicidal faggot junkies to play on their stages.
We were thrown out into the alley as soon as Merry proved to be well enough to live and avoid lawsuits, and we’ve stayed in frozen time allies ever since, feeding off each other like parasites. I feed of Merry’s pain and he feeds off my breath and heartbeats and anything that he can get his fumbling hands on.
“I want to go somewhere,” Merry whispers. “I want to do something again. Let’s make a time machine, Lind. Let’s go back to when things used to be okay.”
I hate when he gets serious.
I hate when he talks of leaving.
Because I don’t want to grow up and I don’t want time to go on.
Because if it does I know he’ll leave me.
And as much as I hate him I don’t want that to happen because I’ll be stuck here where time goes slow slow slow and I won’t ever be able to catch up to him or anyone at all. He ruined it for the both of us and he needs to stay here to rot and crumble here too.
“Things won’t ever be okay again,” I tell Merry. “You’re wasting your time.”
He glances over to me and smiles. “That’s okay.” And three cursed words.
I shake my head. Four sentence words aren’t bad too, are they?
Don’t try leaving again.
Time would go slower.
Slower than now actually.
And so please don’t.
Because I’ve been thinking.
Maybe I fucked up.
Maybe I…I think…
I love you too.
just an attempt to write something. I picked 10 random words from the dictionary and had to incorporate them into the story. don’t know where the story came from.
the words were (if you’re interested. if someone happens to be actually reading this): mélange, rosette, egocentric, pearl, nonentity, rankle, theatrics, belfry, infection, and overdose.
I hate happy endings and first person.