yuck

indulgence

Love takes a lot of different shapes, I come to find. Maybe mine isn’t good, or its wrong, ‘cause over the years, its just never looked too good.

There’s some sort of beauty in waking up every morning with sun squinting through the small slits of blinds. There’s this sense of childlike joy that people have to have to be able to get up with that same sun glowing in their homes, turning on creaky faucets and splashing water against their faces, with a big smile, one that makes the room feel like an operating table.

And the best part of it all is the idea that the love of your life looks at you despite all of your erosion and filth, looks at you with such a deep warmth that you’re paralyzed.

In that moment, I would say:
"I’m bleeding. Don’t stain yourself with me."

And he’d say:
"You’ve decorated me red for years. Color me pink."

And I feel hot tears run down my face.

I don’t know. I think if I heard it come out of his mouth to rip apart years of separation, to retcon years of isolation and loneliness - if I could make it happen, he would do it with just saying; "I love you Toro", and everything would be okay.

Maybe somewhere, in some way, there was a method to stop time to make sure that he didn’t stare at me with real wide eyes like I was ready to bludgeon him.

What he didn’t understand is that the rest of the world, every other thing on the planet, is what I want to bludgeon.

Every panda that couldn’t fuck to save its species.

Every deer that tripped across a highway.

Every parent on the world naming their kids something fucking stupid.

I don’t know. I thought about what it would be like to get hit by a meteor. A huge one, like a big meteor coming crashing down from the sky. It’s on fire, and it’s headed towards the ground at such a velocity that I’ve got no idea its coming, and then it hits. I think maybe around 1 million or so people would die within a distance of it on the first day, then a few more, and then the sky would look different - so on and so forth.

I wasn’t even mad. I just didn’t like the fact that the rest of the world got the luxury of passing him, like sprouts from sidewalks and strangers he didn’t think of more than once. Drinks he drank. I don’t know, food he ate, the windows he looked out of. What I didn’t want to admit was that I was deeply jealous of the fact that I didn’t get any of that (probably because God doesn’t like me). I don’t know if it's some sort of psychological response (it probably is) where I’m a deeply troubled guy and I’ve got something wrong with me ‘cause I’ve been through so much, but whatever it is, I feel like it doesn’t matter.

I feel like I've made a stranger out of him.

There’s a moment in time where we look at each other in isolated instances. Sometimes, I’ll deliberately find him at a place we used to go to when we were kids. I managed to get my hands on a bit of black spray paint from my brother (he managed to get it from his friend, and the line goes down), and I told him that I wanted to really know how it felt.

"How.. what feels?"
"Doing bad stuff," I say. "Writing on somethin’ can’t be that bad. We’re jus’ writin’."
"But we’re — you’re writing … on public property."

"And? Ain’t that the fun in it?" I prod him by poking his shoulder. "C’mon. I’ll stand by the wall, you draw horns on me."
"I’m not doing that.."
"Please? It’ll look cool! I’ll put wings on you!"

And with a small smile creeping from the side of his mouth, he puts his hands in his pockets. There’s a sigh that releases from his nostrils as I notice his face grow flat once more — snatching the can from my hands. He gestures for me to face him as my back presses against the wall, and then he freezes, scoffing a little. It’s the closest I could get to a laugh out of him.

"What?" I say, dumbfounded.
"This.. can’t work.. ‘m shorter."
"…"

"Oh. Uh.. should I just kneel down..?"
"Then it’ll be uneven.."
"Shit. Maybe, uhh… we, mmm.."

Then he raises his hands with a sigh. There’s a kick of a pebble from the rocky blacktop he stands on with his stupid white sneakers that have been through so much even though he barely leaves his house. His face— from the angle I saw it, feels like it glows in the pink light of the sunset. Nothing felt like it mattered then. No dark cloud that couldn’t illuminate itself with the absence of the sun. No Sunday cartoon, no cat that pisses outside my house, nothing. Nothing on the fucking planet could rip that memory away from me.

Except for one person.

And this person in particular, antagonistic in nature, is someone I meet down the line. I don’t particularly like this guy because he shouldn’t be able to do anything to me, yet when I visit the places me and ▇ used to go to, that’s when the realization kicks in that he’s trying to invade a part of my life that nobody should be entering. I watch him smoke. He looks drained; like years tore themselves away from him even though we only spent a decade or so away from each other (maybe longer). From where I stand — I begin to recognize just who this is.

I don’t know this stranger at all.

Yet, at the same time, I do.

I viscerally think of him sitting in a room with a few other people, a gun aligned to his temple with a big smile on his face as he holds ▇▇’s hand. They’re happy about this. They’re sitting there, in a beautiful room with delicious food, ready to die for each other.

And this is all that I see when I watch them huddled behind the back of our public school, smoking in silence.

And for whatever reason — I can’t put a finger on why, but I cannot help but feel the need to kill him. I know this stranger doesn’t matter, ultimately, because he’s a nobody. He doesn’t know the gist of me and who I am (and I don’t expect him to), but judging by his appearance, it wouldn’t take a lot to hurt him. He’s scrawny. He smokes, and it looks like a whole fuckton, so he can’t run for very long. Looks to be out of shape. Looks to already be a victim of wear and tear, too, judging by the bandages. The one thing I can’t figure out is how recent they are.

All I’d have to do is hit the back of his head against the wall. It’s just that simple. If I do it hard enough and rip his cap off, then he suffers enough damage to render him dead. The worst circumstance is he comes out alive with brain damage.

But that’d render him good as dead, probably. I imagine him hooked up to twenty different IVs and taking wheezy breaths with the support of a respirator. I also imagine myself being the one to pull the plug.

I don’t even know him.

Blink.

I can’t even forget this one. His miserable silhouette sits like a stamp on my mind. I want to move on — really, I do, but I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to fucking brutalize him.

I want to beat him against the ground until his mouth bleeds.

I want to pry each tooth out of his mouth individually with pliers. I want to give him such severe nerve damage that it doesn’t leave him paralyzed — makes everything I do feel amplified. I want him to cough and sputter blood the same way he does when he smokes all funny-like. I want him to burn in a gigantic bonfire, strapped down by debris. He's fidgeting. I watch.

And what pisses me off the most is that I know he’d laugh during every fucking second of it, or I think so. I'd think he would try to fight back, and somehow in the grand scheme of it all, he wouldn't be mad at me. I'd be pissed out of my mind and he'd forgive me for it.

And I'd hit him

again

and again

and somehow, it wouldn't do anything, because I think even killing him doesn't change the fact that he'd find it mildly entertaining.

So I guess in that regard

I just won't do nothing at all.