lostpunk5545
Bluelighter
“I’m leaving”.
The two words had reverberated throughout his mind like a shotgun blast. The message inherent in the words had spread through his neurons, much like the comparative shotgun blast would have echoed through their apartment, the sound waves moving outwards. And suddenly, meaning was applied to the words as his brain pieced the information it had just received together.
It would have been easier if she had shot him. That way the mess in his brain would have been someone else’s to clean up. The disjointed flow of thought no longer an issue; the required equipment needed spread across the apartment they had shared for the last five years. A clump of brain and bone maybe here, a cluster of emancipated hair maybe there. All presented in their own uniquely shaped pools of blood, like expensive meals accentuated by a flavoursome sauce at a fancy restaurant.
And now he stared around the apartment, three weeks later, his vision slightly distorted, impaired by the half a bottle of Johnnie Walker already consumed. The lounge room, kitchen and dining room were all contained in one big room, the kitchen separated by a bench. From every object his eyes barely focused on memories came jumping out at him.
The couch he was sitting on; so many nights spent encased in her beauty, her thoughts and words enveloping him as he sat beside her. It hadn’t mattered what she had been talking about, even news of her day at work had been enthralling to him. The most uninteresting aspects of the realities of working daily in a laboratory, constantly repeating and amending experiments, gleaning information along the way.
The kitchen sink; washing up together, playfully hitting each other with tea towels, even the most mundane of household duties made more endearing by her presence. Her brown eyes laughing, and long brown hair swirling as she parried his mock blows. A boring kitchen transformed suddenly into a place he would not replace with anywhere else he could choose.
The coat rack; looking conspicuously bland with her jackets missing, his one lone coat hardly seeming to make an impact on the space it provided for storage.
It was easy to romanticise their relationship slumped on the couch, an alcohol induced fog not exactly the fertile grounds for sowing the seeds of rational thought. The truth was that over the last year they had been growing increasingly distant and absent from each other. The fact that they were both scientists in different fields meant that they were often bringing home separate workloads, complicated work that was not easy to push to the back of one’s mind in order to turn into the kind of spouse that was a stereotype of domestic bliss.
It was hard to pin point an exact time when things were not as they had been. For four years they had been deeply in love, every moment spent together had made him feel complemented and in some ways more complete than he had been before they had met in their graduate year at university. A sidelong glance while drinking at the university bar, a slight smile, a coy blush, and life had suddenly become much more interesting. After finishing university they had moved in together, into the apartment he now sat in. They had an atheist wedding eight months later.
It was hard now to think of himself as a single entity. Mr and Mrs Emery. Joel and Melinda. Names that for so long had been linked now separate. It was this he was thinking about when suddenly it seemed like a good idea to get out of the apartment for a while. The emptiness that exuded from every corner now that it was a one person dwelling was starting to get to him. Feeling like another minute here would involve him finding something sharp to cut at his wrists with, he stood up.
After a shower and a shave he took time to look in the mirror at his reflection. “You look like a million bucks Joel,” he laughingly thought as he stared at his drastically changed profile. While he had never been overweight his face now had an extra edge of haggardness, his features somewhat withdrawn, hazel eyes bloodshot. “Oh well” he thought “lots of people dream of losing weight, here you are getting a crash diet for free, just add one destroyed heart, fantastic results in only three weeks”. The words echoed emptily around his skull, not so funny really, when he thought about it. His sarcastic internal monologue just seemed to be twisting the knife he could almost picture embedded in his stomach.
For an instant he was almost angry with her. He seemed lately to be alternating between depression and anger. Not the healthiest of emotional sets but unavoidable nonetheless. “No” he thought, an equal portion of the blame to be doled out rested with him. They had both gotten so caught up in work, him in testing a new pharmaceutical his company had been working on which was actually showing results in cancer remission. Her in her works on communication within colonies of bacteria. It was somewhat humourous he thought on reflection that the very thing that had affected their relationship so much, now was engulfed in the abyss he seemed to have fallen into. His work had suffered so much in the last few weeks that his boss had told him to take some time off. A hangover really didn’t mix well with work that required so much concentration and insight.
He made a brief effort at combing his blonde hair. He really needed to get it cut again; it was starting to look scruffy. “Definitely at the bottom of the list of things to care about old mate” he thought with a taint of bitterness.
Breaking the hypnotic hold the mirror was starting to have on him, he walked to his bedroom and changed into some casual dress clothes. The wrinkles in his blue button-up shirt and black pants were testament to the fact that they had until quite recently been lying on the floor.
After finding some clean socks and putting his shoes on he took a quick, burning, gasping swig from the bottle of Johnnie Black resting on the coffee table and exited stage left. The closed apartment door had an immediate effect; his mood lightening considerably with the apartment full of memories locked up shut behind him. Already the decision to get out was paying off and he whistled a few notes of a song he had heard recently, some disposable pop rubbish that had been echoing down the communal hallway on a previous brief foray to obtain the essentials - a small amount of food and a large amount of alcohol.
His heightened mood did not last very long. It lasted as long as the walk down the hallway to the elevator and the brief trip to the lobby. Hitting the street had a dampening effect on the brief respite in his depression of moments before. The night was fairly windy and the illumination provided by the streetlights was barely adequate. This coupled with the clouded moon played his emotions into a more serious stage.
As he started walking he found himself heading in the direction of the harbour, one of the spots in the city he knew would be much more alive at this time of night, the so called witching hour, than the subdued surrounds of his apartment. Ahead of him, sitting propped against a building was a man-sized shadow, which became more apparent as that of a homeless person as the distance between them closed. It was not so much the scrawled, misspelled sign that was important in his decision to throw ten dollars into the receptacle at the mans feet. It was the weariness in the man’s bearded face, a face that said it would much rather be anywhere else than where it was currently situated. “Get yourself something to drink” Joel said as he walked onwards. No one deserved to be sober on a night like this. The beggar, perhaps predictably, did not reply.
Traversing the city streets that lay between him and the harbour his thoughts turned to the race riots that had taken place only just over a week ago in this area. “Deplorable” and “disgusting” were two words that took the forefront of his brain as he conceptualised his thinking into something more solid. It shamed him to think that after a hundred and twenty thousand years of natural human evolution that this was the supposed great pinnacle of mankind rising up out of the darkness of animalism. Little boys, not yet ready to share the sandpit, apes still throwing shit, the modern human, with the sharpened animal bone holding Neanderthal lurking barely below the surface.
Just registerable beneath his conscious thoughts on the riots there were lines of an Elvis Costello song making a fitting soundtrack to his pensive musing;
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity.
There's one thing I wanna know
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?
He laughed quietly as he realised the song repeating in his head. The human mind, such a fantastic machine, and so much potential that in most cases remained untapped, and ruled by primal emotional outbursts.
The distant sound of pumping club music and the view of the harbour spread out below him interrupted his thoughts as he topped a hill. At night, from where he was standing, the view was breathtaking. The mammoth body of water dominated the scenery, which was bordered by high-rises. There were lights everywhere - boats, clubs, apartments, shops, and a myriad of other triumphs of humanity over nature. The people themselves could be seen scurrying between pools of light as whims took them from one place to another. From this distance it was all very reminiscent of watching a colony of ants partaking in their day-to-day endeavours.
Some more walking and the illusion of beauty shattered like a painting put to the microscope. Up close it was possible to see the impact humanity’s habitat had on the natural world. The water reflected much of the light from the surrounding buildings, which would have seemed a kind of beauty in and of itself, had not the reflections been broken up by floating rubbish. The people which from far away had seemed like part of a collective were merely a thousand lost souls, some grouped, many of them staggering around drunk. Scaffolding on the buildings indicated that there could never be anything static in the human environment. The city would never be complete, its transitionary nature marring any aesthetics it could have as a monument.
Joel decided that it was time to find a pub or club to continue drinking in before his thoughts were dragged any further down into depression. The harbour had been one of Melinda’s favourite places, he could see her standing there now looking at the reflections in the water, her shiny brunette hair playing its own part in reflecting the lights. And besides which, he was sobering up, a prospect that was unappealing to him at this time.
Having spent much of the previous weeks drinking alone, in the apartment, and not having had much use for pubs and clubs in his former life, he was unsure where to head to continue drinking a toast to his melancholy state. Deciding to wing it he chose a club that was a street off the harbour, The Palladium. The blue light over the sidewalk cast the two black clad security guards in an eerie glow, making them seem slightly unfriendlier than they would usually have seemed. Black. Authority. SECURITY.
He entered after a quick I.D. check, probably more from policy than necessity, he may not have looked all of his thirty-one years but he definitely looked like he had more behind him than eighteen. The dancing area of the club must have been located on another level, leaving the bottom floor with a pub-like atmosphere. However, the numerous patrons of the club, like himself, were hardly cheaply dressed.
A brief conversation with the female bartender…
“Hey sunshine, what’d you like?”
“Just a Johnnie Black on the rocks thanks”
“Sure thing”
…an exchange of money for beverage, and he was looking for somewhere out of the way to sit, undisturbed.
His quest for a seat was cut short when while taking a fiery sip from his glass he ran into the back of a slightly shorter, stockier man who was engaged in conversation with a tall blonde woman. Joel was just taking in the profile of her body under her slim green dress when a force hit him hard in the chest. The force belonged to the outstretched arms of the man whom he had bumped into, obviously taking offence to having his conversation interrupted, and the contents of his glass relocated to the space occupied by his shoes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” spouted the man, his now withdrawn arms showing a considerable bulge of muscle under his red shirt.
For one of the few times in Joel’s life his brain somewhat short-circuited. Rather than articulate a response that would get him out of trouble, he simply paused momentarily, and then threw two quick successive right hand punches into the man’s jaw, who reeled backwards. Quickly regaining more stable footing, the red-shirted man had just time enough to return a blow catching Joel high on the jawbone when zealous security guards tackled them both hard.
Experiencing a chokehold briefly for the first time in his life Joel was bundled out of the door and pushed out into the street, being released at the same time as the red-shirted man who now stood beside him.
“Why don’t you two cunts fuck off and take your shit elsewhere?” emerged from one of the security guards.
Rage coursed through Joel as he faced the three security guards making a wall in front of the club, “Gladly if it means never having to hear automatons such as yourselves ever talk again”.
“Fuck off.”
Joel turned to face the red-shirted man who ignoring the security guards was sizing him up. Still feeling pushed to the limits of his capacity to hold back his anger he looked at the man, waiting to see if the conflict was to continue in the street. The man, who looked to be around the same age as Joel, visibly relaxed, smiled, and then extended his hand after running it briefly through his short black hair, and rubbing his jaw.
“Hey lad, the name’s Jadon and it looks like we’re being made to move on here. You’d better be more interesting company than the blonde I was talking to before you so rudely interrupted us.”
Joel took time to rub his own bruised face, felt the anger subside, and extended his hand to shake Jadon’s.
“I’m Joel, can’t promise anything about company but anything has to be better than this cesspool. Ideas?”
“Finding somewhere else to drink is high on the agenda, and then…” pausing “we’ll paint this town fucking red.”
***
Consciousness attacked him sometime late in the morning. He came awake with his eyes closed and head pounding. The texture of his sheets assured him that he had made it home, but that particular memory eluded him, dangling just out of grasp. His cheek ached. Jadon. A smile tried to make its way onto his face but was interrupted by the queasiness he became aware of in his stomach, which quickly overtook the pounding in his head as the precipitating symptom in spurring him into action for the day.
He won the brief race against his stomach, charging into the en suite and vomiting a fluorescent yellow stream into the toilet. This was made easier by the fact that the toilet seat was already in the up position. No Melinda to set him right on that account. In fact the whole bathroom, like the rest of the house had suffered from her absence. The whole system was lacking a valuable input and the consequences were there to be witnessed by any semi-keen observer. Pulling back from the toilet, the vision of the toothbrush holder in the shower containing a single toothbrush in the holder, a holder designed for more, nearly brought emotive tears to his eyes to join the tears already present due to projectile vomiting.
Alcohol. Humanity’s drug of choice. There were cures for this feeling and pulling himself back from the toilet, leaving the bathroom, and hitting the hallway he headed towards the kitchen to find some. Raiding the pantry provided him with Berocca and Aspro-clear. He chucked one of the former and two of the latter into a glass, added water, and walked to the lounge room and sat down to consume the concoction.
His mind hazily presented him with fractured memories of the night before. He and Jadon had hit a succession of bars, becoming progressively drunker and spiraling more out of control after each one. The fight he had with Jadon at the beginning of the night played on his mind the most. He realised that in a way it made him no better than the race rioters he had been so quick to condemn earlier in the previous evening and in the preceding week. Just acting on emotion, intellect pushed aside. Angry at himself he picked up the half consumed scotch bottle from the night before and hurled it at the kitchen wall. Traveling over the dining table and kitchen bench it hit, exploding and sending glass into every corner of the kitchen. The white wall now had a considerable amount of brown scotch running down it.
As he was trying to reconcile his actions he realised he was having a personal epiphany. His whole life he had assumed a somewhat passive stance. Denying valid human emotions such as anger did not make him intellectually stronger; it in fact denied him a useful tool. Harnessing anger with his mind, instead of denying himself of it could be used in his day-to-day life, in his work. A bit of internal fire could spur his brain into new avenues, give him a renewed enthusiasm in his research.
He needed something to remember this lesson by and it came to him a few seconds later. He would get a tattoo, something symbolic, an impulsive action to remind him of a side of himself he would never have learned about without recent situations in life he had never been presented with before.
Thoughts of a snake he had once found fascinating as a child recurred to him. The Death Adder. A snake that would passively lie in wait until disturbed, and then would react with lightning-fast reflexes ensnaring its prey. It was the perfect metaphor for his newfound revelation. He grabbed a notepad, which was used for recording telephone messages, and started to sketch out a design. It was a little rough, but it would be perfect with a little revision.
Staring at the image of the snake, he became aware that he was sick of this self-pitying bullshit. It was unlike him, and he didn’t want to become a broken wreck, a little cracked, sure that was natural, but not stopped in his tracks.
He remembered that Jadon had told that he was a member of a local rock-climbing gym and that if he wanted to come down and have a go to ring his mobile. Apparently there were a few single women climbers, who would probably be delighted to meet him, if he was interested in taking a step towards getting over Melinda. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that, but for the first time in weeks the sunlight streaming through his curtains did not seem to be mocking him. The world once again looked to contain possibilities that were not to be found in the bottom of a bottle.
It was time to clean up. His act, his life. Get back to work. Figure things out. But first…
The kitchen.
I haven't really written anything since high school, and I used to love writing all throughout my school life. Recently, jealousy of my housemate's artistic ability spurred me to write this. It's not great, the small amount of dialogue sucks, but I had fun writing it anyways.
The two words had reverberated throughout his mind like a shotgun blast. The message inherent in the words had spread through his neurons, much like the comparative shotgun blast would have echoed through their apartment, the sound waves moving outwards. And suddenly, meaning was applied to the words as his brain pieced the information it had just received together.
It would have been easier if she had shot him. That way the mess in his brain would have been someone else’s to clean up. The disjointed flow of thought no longer an issue; the required equipment needed spread across the apartment they had shared for the last five years. A clump of brain and bone maybe here, a cluster of emancipated hair maybe there. All presented in their own uniquely shaped pools of blood, like expensive meals accentuated by a flavoursome sauce at a fancy restaurant.
And now he stared around the apartment, three weeks later, his vision slightly distorted, impaired by the half a bottle of Johnnie Walker already consumed. The lounge room, kitchen and dining room were all contained in one big room, the kitchen separated by a bench. From every object his eyes barely focused on memories came jumping out at him.
The couch he was sitting on; so many nights spent encased in her beauty, her thoughts and words enveloping him as he sat beside her. It hadn’t mattered what she had been talking about, even news of her day at work had been enthralling to him. The most uninteresting aspects of the realities of working daily in a laboratory, constantly repeating and amending experiments, gleaning information along the way.
The kitchen sink; washing up together, playfully hitting each other with tea towels, even the most mundane of household duties made more endearing by her presence. Her brown eyes laughing, and long brown hair swirling as she parried his mock blows. A boring kitchen transformed suddenly into a place he would not replace with anywhere else he could choose.
The coat rack; looking conspicuously bland with her jackets missing, his one lone coat hardly seeming to make an impact on the space it provided for storage.
It was easy to romanticise their relationship slumped on the couch, an alcohol induced fog not exactly the fertile grounds for sowing the seeds of rational thought. The truth was that over the last year they had been growing increasingly distant and absent from each other. The fact that they were both scientists in different fields meant that they were often bringing home separate workloads, complicated work that was not easy to push to the back of one’s mind in order to turn into the kind of spouse that was a stereotype of domestic bliss.
It was hard to pin point an exact time when things were not as they had been. For four years they had been deeply in love, every moment spent together had made him feel complemented and in some ways more complete than he had been before they had met in their graduate year at university. A sidelong glance while drinking at the university bar, a slight smile, a coy blush, and life had suddenly become much more interesting. After finishing university they had moved in together, into the apartment he now sat in. They had an atheist wedding eight months later.
It was hard now to think of himself as a single entity. Mr and Mrs Emery. Joel and Melinda. Names that for so long had been linked now separate. It was this he was thinking about when suddenly it seemed like a good idea to get out of the apartment for a while. The emptiness that exuded from every corner now that it was a one person dwelling was starting to get to him. Feeling like another minute here would involve him finding something sharp to cut at his wrists with, he stood up.
After a shower and a shave he took time to look in the mirror at his reflection. “You look like a million bucks Joel,” he laughingly thought as he stared at his drastically changed profile. While he had never been overweight his face now had an extra edge of haggardness, his features somewhat withdrawn, hazel eyes bloodshot. “Oh well” he thought “lots of people dream of losing weight, here you are getting a crash diet for free, just add one destroyed heart, fantastic results in only three weeks”. The words echoed emptily around his skull, not so funny really, when he thought about it. His sarcastic internal monologue just seemed to be twisting the knife he could almost picture embedded in his stomach.
For an instant he was almost angry with her. He seemed lately to be alternating between depression and anger. Not the healthiest of emotional sets but unavoidable nonetheless. “No” he thought, an equal portion of the blame to be doled out rested with him. They had both gotten so caught up in work, him in testing a new pharmaceutical his company had been working on which was actually showing results in cancer remission. Her in her works on communication within colonies of bacteria. It was somewhat humourous he thought on reflection that the very thing that had affected their relationship so much, now was engulfed in the abyss he seemed to have fallen into. His work had suffered so much in the last few weeks that his boss had told him to take some time off. A hangover really didn’t mix well with work that required so much concentration and insight.
He made a brief effort at combing his blonde hair. He really needed to get it cut again; it was starting to look scruffy. “Definitely at the bottom of the list of things to care about old mate” he thought with a taint of bitterness.
Breaking the hypnotic hold the mirror was starting to have on him, he walked to his bedroom and changed into some casual dress clothes. The wrinkles in his blue button-up shirt and black pants were testament to the fact that they had until quite recently been lying on the floor.
After finding some clean socks and putting his shoes on he took a quick, burning, gasping swig from the bottle of Johnnie Black resting on the coffee table and exited stage left. The closed apartment door had an immediate effect; his mood lightening considerably with the apartment full of memories locked up shut behind him. Already the decision to get out was paying off and he whistled a few notes of a song he had heard recently, some disposable pop rubbish that had been echoing down the communal hallway on a previous brief foray to obtain the essentials - a small amount of food and a large amount of alcohol.
His heightened mood did not last very long. It lasted as long as the walk down the hallway to the elevator and the brief trip to the lobby. Hitting the street had a dampening effect on the brief respite in his depression of moments before. The night was fairly windy and the illumination provided by the streetlights was barely adequate. This coupled with the clouded moon played his emotions into a more serious stage.
As he started walking he found himself heading in the direction of the harbour, one of the spots in the city he knew would be much more alive at this time of night, the so called witching hour, than the subdued surrounds of his apartment. Ahead of him, sitting propped against a building was a man-sized shadow, which became more apparent as that of a homeless person as the distance between them closed. It was not so much the scrawled, misspelled sign that was important in his decision to throw ten dollars into the receptacle at the mans feet. It was the weariness in the man’s bearded face, a face that said it would much rather be anywhere else than where it was currently situated. “Get yourself something to drink” Joel said as he walked onwards. No one deserved to be sober on a night like this. The beggar, perhaps predictably, did not reply.
Traversing the city streets that lay between him and the harbour his thoughts turned to the race riots that had taken place only just over a week ago in this area. “Deplorable” and “disgusting” were two words that took the forefront of his brain as he conceptualised his thinking into something more solid. It shamed him to think that after a hundred and twenty thousand years of natural human evolution that this was the supposed great pinnacle of mankind rising up out of the darkness of animalism. Little boys, not yet ready to share the sandpit, apes still throwing shit, the modern human, with the sharpened animal bone holding Neanderthal lurking barely below the surface.
Just registerable beneath his conscious thoughts on the riots there were lines of an Elvis Costello song making a fitting soundtrack to his pensive musing;
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity.
There's one thing I wanna know
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?
He laughed quietly as he realised the song repeating in his head. The human mind, such a fantastic machine, and so much potential that in most cases remained untapped, and ruled by primal emotional outbursts.
The distant sound of pumping club music and the view of the harbour spread out below him interrupted his thoughts as he topped a hill. At night, from where he was standing, the view was breathtaking. The mammoth body of water dominated the scenery, which was bordered by high-rises. There were lights everywhere - boats, clubs, apartments, shops, and a myriad of other triumphs of humanity over nature. The people themselves could be seen scurrying between pools of light as whims took them from one place to another. From this distance it was all very reminiscent of watching a colony of ants partaking in their day-to-day endeavours.
Some more walking and the illusion of beauty shattered like a painting put to the microscope. Up close it was possible to see the impact humanity’s habitat had on the natural world. The water reflected much of the light from the surrounding buildings, which would have seemed a kind of beauty in and of itself, had not the reflections been broken up by floating rubbish. The people which from far away had seemed like part of a collective were merely a thousand lost souls, some grouped, many of them staggering around drunk. Scaffolding on the buildings indicated that there could never be anything static in the human environment. The city would never be complete, its transitionary nature marring any aesthetics it could have as a monument.
Joel decided that it was time to find a pub or club to continue drinking in before his thoughts were dragged any further down into depression. The harbour had been one of Melinda’s favourite places, he could see her standing there now looking at the reflections in the water, her shiny brunette hair playing its own part in reflecting the lights. And besides which, he was sobering up, a prospect that was unappealing to him at this time.
Having spent much of the previous weeks drinking alone, in the apartment, and not having had much use for pubs and clubs in his former life, he was unsure where to head to continue drinking a toast to his melancholy state. Deciding to wing it he chose a club that was a street off the harbour, The Palladium. The blue light over the sidewalk cast the two black clad security guards in an eerie glow, making them seem slightly unfriendlier than they would usually have seemed. Black. Authority. SECURITY.
He entered after a quick I.D. check, probably more from policy than necessity, he may not have looked all of his thirty-one years but he definitely looked like he had more behind him than eighteen. The dancing area of the club must have been located on another level, leaving the bottom floor with a pub-like atmosphere. However, the numerous patrons of the club, like himself, were hardly cheaply dressed.
A brief conversation with the female bartender…
“Hey sunshine, what’d you like?”
“Just a Johnnie Black on the rocks thanks”
“Sure thing”
…an exchange of money for beverage, and he was looking for somewhere out of the way to sit, undisturbed.
His quest for a seat was cut short when while taking a fiery sip from his glass he ran into the back of a slightly shorter, stockier man who was engaged in conversation with a tall blonde woman. Joel was just taking in the profile of her body under her slim green dress when a force hit him hard in the chest. The force belonged to the outstretched arms of the man whom he had bumped into, obviously taking offence to having his conversation interrupted, and the contents of his glass relocated to the space occupied by his shoes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” spouted the man, his now withdrawn arms showing a considerable bulge of muscle under his red shirt.
For one of the few times in Joel’s life his brain somewhat short-circuited. Rather than articulate a response that would get him out of trouble, he simply paused momentarily, and then threw two quick successive right hand punches into the man’s jaw, who reeled backwards. Quickly regaining more stable footing, the red-shirted man had just time enough to return a blow catching Joel high on the jawbone when zealous security guards tackled them both hard.
Experiencing a chokehold briefly for the first time in his life Joel was bundled out of the door and pushed out into the street, being released at the same time as the red-shirted man who now stood beside him.
“Why don’t you two cunts fuck off and take your shit elsewhere?” emerged from one of the security guards.
Rage coursed through Joel as he faced the three security guards making a wall in front of the club, “Gladly if it means never having to hear automatons such as yourselves ever talk again”.
“Fuck off.”
Joel turned to face the red-shirted man who ignoring the security guards was sizing him up. Still feeling pushed to the limits of his capacity to hold back his anger he looked at the man, waiting to see if the conflict was to continue in the street. The man, who looked to be around the same age as Joel, visibly relaxed, smiled, and then extended his hand after running it briefly through his short black hair, and rubbing his jaw.
“Hey lad, the name’s Jadon and it looks like we’re being made to move on here. You’d better be more interesting company than the blonde I was talking to before you so rudely interrupted us.”
Joel took time to rub his own bruised face, felt the anger subside, and extended his hand to shake Jadon’s.
“I’m Joel, can’t promise anything about company but anything has to be better than this cesspool. Ideas?”
“Finding somewhere else to drink is high on the agenda, and then…” pausing “we’ll paint this town fucking red.”
***
Consciousness attacked him sometime late in the morning. He came awake with his eyes closed and head pounding. The texture of his sheets assured him that he had made it home, but that particular memory eluded him, dangling just out of grasp. His cheek ached. Jadon. A smile tried to make its way onto his face but was interrupted by the queasiness he became aware of in his stomach, which quickly overtook the pounding in his head as the precipitating symptom in spurring him into action for the day.
He won the brief race against his stomach, charging into the en suite and vomiting a fluorescent yellow stream into the toilet. This was made easier by the fact that the toilet seat was already in the up position. No Melinda to set him right on that account. In fact the whole bathroom, like the rest of the house had suffered from her absence. The whole system was lacking a valuable input and the consequences were there to be witnessed by any semi-keen observer. Pulling back from the toilet, the vision of the toothbrush holder in the shower containing a single toothbrush in the holder, a holder designed for more, nearly brought emotive tears to his eyes to join the tears already present due to projectile vomiting.
Alcohol. Humanity’s drug of choice. There were cures for this feeling and pulling himself back from the toilet, leaving the bathroom, and hitting the hallway he headed towards the kitchen to find some. Raiding the pantry provided him with Berocca and Aspro-clear. He chucked one of the former and two of the latter into a glass, added water, and walked to the lounge room and sat down to consume the concoction.
His mind hazily presented him with fractured memories of the night before. He and Jadon had hit a succession of bars, becoming progressively drunker and spiraling more out of control after each one. The fight he had with Jadon at the beginning of the night played on his mind the most. He realised that in a way it made him no better than the race rioters he had been so quick to condemn earlier in the previous evening and in the preceding week. Just acting on emotion, intellect pushed aside. Angry at himself he picked up the half consumed scotch bottle from the night before and hurled it at the kitchen wall. Traveling over the dining table and kitchen bench it hit, exploding and sending glass into every corner of the kitchen. The white wall now had a considerable amount of brown scotch running down it.
As he was trying to reconcile his actions he realised he was having a personal epiphany. His whole life he had assumed a somewhat passive stance. Denying valid human emotions such as anger did not make him intellectually stronger; it in fact denied him a useful tool. Harnessing anger with his mind, instead of denying himself of it could be used in his day-to-day life, in his work. A bit of internal fire could spur his brain into new avenues, give him a renewed enthusiasm in his research.
He needed something to remember this lesson by and it came to him a few seconds later. He would get a tattoo, something symbolic, an impulsive action to remind him of a side of himself he would never have learned about without recent situations in life he had never been presented with before.
Thoughts of a snake he had once found fascinating as a child recurred to him. The Death Adder. A snake that would passively lie in wait until disturbed, and then would react with lightning-fast reflexes ensnaring its prey. It was the perfect metaphor for his newfound revelation. He grabbed a notepad, which was used for recording telephone messages, and started to sketch out a design. It was a little rough, but it would be perfect with a little revision.
Staring at the image of the snake, he became aware that he was sick of this self-pitying bullshit. It was unlike him, and he didn’t want to become a broken wreck, a little cracked, sure that was natural, but not stopped in his tracks.
He remembered that Jadon had told that he was a member of a local rock-climbing gym and that if he wanted to come down and have a go to ring his mobile. Apparently there were a few single women climbers, who would probably be delighted to meet him, if he was interested in taking a step towards getting over Melinda. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that, but for the first time in weeks the sunlight streaming through his curtains did not seem to be mocking him. The world once again looked to contain possibilities that were not to be found in the bottom of a bottle.
It was time to clean up. His act, his life. Get back to work. Figure things out. But first…
The kitchen.
I haven't really written anything since high school, and I used to love writing all throughout my school life. Recently, jealousy of my housemate's artistic ability spurred me to write this. It's not great, the small amount of dialogue sucks, but I had fun writing it anyways.
