Hinterland Who's Who
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 11:31PM When you were younger you'd both ride the swings together, pumping your legs and piercing ears with dares and pop songs. Now, your grade school best friend's dead, you've got the word “hell” painted on your wall with a downward accusing arrow and a hole in the lining of your stomach. Your medication is chalky and induces a vomit that tastes something like regret, something like dust, a little too far north to be between the two. Once upon a time your parents would check under the bed for you, open and root around in the closet for you, draw the blinds and the bath for you, tell you it was just a story or a movie or that the blood was fake, that the broken glass wasn't your fault and it wasn't any cause for alarm. You'll wonder if that's the only reason people sleep in the same bed anymore, to make sure that nothing will get them, or, if when it comes, it makes a decision, that you're woken up by the gnashing and the slobbering burying your lover's screams. Maybe if you take the right sleeping pills it won't even matter.
The concept of the end of the world isn't scary in any sense—what's the point of getting all excited if there's nothing to miss, if anything, being left alone there in that milky white smoky caustic void, floating and bobbing with unbaptized babies and suicides, that would be slightly worse than not taking in another Sheffield breath. At the very least, it'd be hard to see, what with all those floating corpses, all those laughing babies. Your favourite baby, the African American girl with the blue dress, because she doesn't care about convention. Your favourite suicide, the woman, who after drilling five holes in her own skull with a Black and Decker rechargeable ended up driving her car into a brick wall because it didn't work. Your second favourite baby, a redhead from Wales.
I never learned to tie a scarf properly. Everything else I've been taught has stuck, well, that and manual transmission (which always sounded like sex to me), but tying it properly, stylishly, functionally without a second thought always addled me, always switched me out of first person. Whenever I tried, I wasn't myself, I was an artifact and an attraction and a goddamned stumbling, groping piledrived gardener, open and available and willing to dance with an empty hand and glass and broken eardrum. Now, I just toss it on and hope for calm winds. That's not a metaphor. That's a process. That's not an exaggeration, it's a goddamned heartache.
When you were younger, you'd do all the stupid stuff. Bottle rockets and duct tape, toy soldiers soldering irons spinal cord injuries (they call this a green branch fracture, because when you're younger, your bones are soft, they just don't crack, they bend and splinter, like a newborn tree) and joyrides and stolen beers that you would spit out but your friends were watching. There was an alert, a high alert for a blue van around your elementary school, and yes, it was that kind of van. Every time there was a problem and a maintenance crew had to be called, you pictured yourself and your best baseline crew, shooting marbles in the sandpit suddenly transported, contending with hacksaws and supervillians. No one ever died. Your best girl from your baseline crew gives out relationship advice on the radio by examining the placement of the planets in the various houses. Your best boy watches planets from the roof of his house, drinks too much and yells at his dog, shirtless in the front yard, but he'll never hit it, because out of everyone else in his home, he loves it the most, unabashedly and deeper than the blue suffocating glaze of his youngest son's eyes. Your best friend, the gender doesn't even matter, had a rough time the second year of college, and passes time now with others like them, and a never ending legion, of giggling, laughing, smiling, cooing, unnamed babies in the cool hip grey at the end of the world that will never come.
Chris
