Three Tales
Verbal Assaults against the Old
It didn’t seem so long ago that I was one of these school kids, these 9- 12 year old kids that I was trapped on a 10 minute bus ride to
The little blonde girl to the right of me, she was screaming obscenities like she was reciting the alphabet. Understandably, the nasal-voiced snot-nosed boy sitting behind me was getting on her nerves – “You like Nick, Nick likes you why don’t you sit next to Nick?” he teased her. Nick was presumably the fat kid sitting in front of me. You always need one of those to transfer all your insecurities upon. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!! I don’t fucking like him, alright!!!” yelled little blond girl. “The fuck you don’t,” said nasal voiced snot nosed boy. “I fucking don’t you fucking bastard!” said little blonde girl.
“You shouldn’t swear.” Fat Kid finally spoke up.
“Yeah, you shouldn’t fucking swear,” said Nasal Voiced Snot Nosed Boy.
“Fuck YOU! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! What’s the big fucking deal? Who the fuck cares???!” questioned Little Blonde Girl.
“Well the old people might,” Fat Kid said, cocking his head towards me.
Fuck you, kid. I am NOT old.
Midway between having an epiphany and being hit on the head with an anvil is a blackout, that precious experience where everything you see is fused into a single bright stadium light, you’re sweating in 10◦C weather, your legs… wait, you have no legs but is in fact, one giant lead-filled head and since heads don’t have lungs, you can’t breathe and yet your head seems to have retained a heart and it’s doing the Riverdance through your ear drums and you think you’re about to die which makes you think of new, novel, better ways to live that you should’ve thought of before.
Then the lights go out… along with pretty much everything else.
A minute later, you wake up with your face on the floor of a gas station kiosk. Your legs, arms, torso are there too – all in the right place but not upright. You can feel water trickling down your throat and air filling up your lungs. A stream of swear words flow into your ear at increasing volume, courtesy of your panic-stricken friend and you can actually make out the individual features of her face and those of passing strangers giving you looks you wish Botox would rob them off. And you just know you’re alive because only the living could feel such intense embarrassment.
As for the aforementioned thoughts of living a better life – well, you just know you’ll live now that you don’t have them anymore.
Melancholonely
Your mobile phone is possibly buried under 2 month’s worth of laundry which is buried under the suitcase you never properly unpacked but haphazardly emptied out of day to day necessity. After four months, there’s nothing left in it.
Your mobile phone battery has been dead for three days and you see no urgency to charge it. You mistook its dying beep for a ring.
The TV in the living room isn’t working so you spend 96 hours illegally downloading a movie starring your favorite actor of the moment onto your laptop. Your favorite actor dies in the first 20 minutes of the movie.
It’ll be four months next week. Four months since you left and never completely arrived. You know the names of the streets now -Cavill,
This is a place built upon the holiday expense accounts of strangers.
This is a place where the streets have names; it’s just the people who don’t.
You can learn those street names all you want. You’ll always be a stranger in this town.
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* Note: If you haven't already, visit my sis, Kere's blog. She's much more amusing as a depressive git than I am.
