oh i just realized there is such a thing as a “read more” break in posts

…..oops LOL.

anyway i just wanted to document something i dreamed about

a city at night with heavy smoke of colour, wide streets, skinny walkways, everyone running with cars, everyone walking by foot. the sky is visible, but it contains nothing. wide-open, lonely feelings.

i prefer crushing tulips

in the hopes of creating the

ubiquitous song that airplanes

sing when they run

away from me.

-

i’m not really sure why i still have tumblarity above zero, but thank you everyone for being interested in the contents of my blog!

I walk in puddles deep enough to be miniature lakes. Umbrellas are pretty damn useless when it comes to keeping your feet dry, take my word for it. If it’s raining heavier than it does in Seattle, you have to wear rain boots to stay dry. You look pretty ridiculous, but does it really matter what other people think? (I want you to say no.)

The rain falls in slow-motion. Drops go in the directions they please. Umbrellas are pretty damn useless when it comes to keeping your side dry when it’s raining and winds are going at twenty-five miles per hour. Just wear a raincoat.

You’re going to go outside now. You’ve got your rain boots and your raincoat, and the rain isn’t going to get you today. Do you see me yet? I’ve got an umbrella, and I’m not wearing a raincoat or rain boots. Are you going to call me a hypocrite? I don’t mind if you do.

I’m standing out here in this gray nothing, all of this dangerous apathy, waiting for something to start. Something will start, right? I can’t just narrate nothing. Nothing is something, though. Everything is something, so is nothing everything? Oh, such semantics. Don’t worry. Every story has high points and low points. Or at least higher and lower points. I’m talking in present tense, but this already happened, and you’re not really standing there watching me in your raincoat and rain boots. Are you experiencing an existential crisis yet?

I stand and wait, fingers sliding in and out of my jacket pocket over a memory. See, I just used a metaphor. No? You’re really a bad sport. Why are you even here? No, I don’t know you.

And finally, it happens. He’s walked over through the puddles and future lakes. Here we are. I wasn’t waiting for him, I thought. But apparently I was? Fate is fickle in that way, and I know I’m being pessimistic. Can you be quiet a little while?

He is nice. Well, he’s always nice. I’m not the only one that notices how nice he is. He has sun-stained hair and lips of a lover, but all I see are his cheekbones, god, oh god. He’s not wearing boots or a raincoat either and he’s got no umbrella, so I make eye contact with him, half-smiling as I do so. His eyes brighten, and he ducks under my pretty damn useless umbrella.

I cough. Not as an awkward conversation starter, but because I’m still recovering from a pretty bad cold. He turns from watching to the road to watching me.

“I broke up with her, you know.” His brow furrows as if he expected me to say something, and I’d completely let him down.

“I haven’t talked to her for over a year now. I wouldn’t know,” I say quietly. I feel strange. Not quite glad, not quite sad. I just made a rhyme.

“Oh.”

He pauses. I sort of expect him to stop talking entirely. What else is there to say? “I dated your best friend and broke up with her because I actually love you”… yeah, right.

“You look pretty today.” Oh. I didn’t expect that.

“…thanks. I didn’t expect that.” I’m so eloquent, right?

He tips my face towards his. We’re close, almost close enough to kiss, except he’s at least half a foot taller than me. Maybe I could do it if I stretched? No, I need to dispel these thoughts.

Somewhere in the middle of my thoughts, I drop my umbrella. No joke. I am busy looking at the cheekbones and the boy that owns them. My umbrella bobs up and down in a little lake. I start laughing when I realize, because, seriously, how the hell did that happen?

So then we’re standing there, getting rained on. I manage to look past his cheekbones though I’ve no idea how, since when I started laughing, he started smiling, and his cheekbones became even more prominent than before. He has water on his thin lashes.

“You’re really pretty today.” Wait. I’m saying that, not him. His faint smile disappears with a blink of my eyes.

“… are you high again?” he asks me.

“No. I’ve been clean since I left here,” I say. It’s true. Too much of getting high reminded me of the two people I realize I am thinking about here, standing in slow rain.

“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.” He smiles a rare, wide smile. I smile back as widely as I can. His teeth are a little crooked, and he’s self-conscious about it, I remember, which is why that smile is so rare. But he’s so cute and so nice and I don’t really care anyway. This is a pretty damn cute moment we’re sharing.

And then the bus arrives at our stop, splashing liberal amounts of water over our raincoat-lacking and rain boot-lacking selves. Needless to say, it effectively ruins the moment.

“Damn,” I mutter. I’m soaked to the bone. He’s mostly dry except for where I wasn’t large enough to shield him from the splash. The shielding was unintentional, of course.

So then we get on board.

—-

the beginnings of a short, short story. fiction.