January 25, 2014

As some of you know, I have been dabbling in writing a continuous fiction piece in second person. After the first few two entries, Mr. Biped told mentioned that he was impressed by the fact that I had set up the reader for anything to happen. “Aliens could come and I would absolutely accept that.”

Since then, I have been chipping away slowly at the form in order to find the big idea while building the world this character, You, lives in. Today, I am going to continue to develop it by looking back and trying to find any clues that I have left along the way. This ended up being editing and re-writing the last post in second tense.

 

You

***

Prologue

When you were twelve you saw a movie that took place in a not so far away city. You loved this movie. You were enchanted by its characters and the way it made you spit out that giggle your mother light-heartedly made fun of you for. You watched it on VHS more often that you’d now like to admit and each viewing only intensified the wide range of emotions it elicited in you.

 

Upon one of these many viewings – which one, you cannot possibly recall – you sat up from the living room couch, you pushed up your torso from the pillow on the floor, you removed our cheek from the cradle of your hands, you stopped making your cup of instant iced tea, dropped the ice cream scoop on the floor and froze.

 

This place is real. You thought. This place is living and breathing and growing and shrinking right this moment. This place has stray cats and houses not similar to mine. This place is a place and not a figment in my head or a setting in a movie. This place is real and I could live in it and make it mine.

 

As a young kid and into your teens you had many moments like this, where your body stopped moving and your mind took over. Sometimes it took seconds. Other times it took an hour. This was how you figured things out. This is how you became a child that was perceived as troubled. This was why the girls in 8^th grade called you a snob and you cried, “Why?” This action of non-action and need to be nothing but a mind discovering its purpose kept you occupied and developed you from a brainwashed child to an imaginative and curious thinker.

This particular instance that you are remembering now, when you realized that there was in fact life available to you outside your imagination and the contents of a VHS player, expanded a very particular and very helpful part of your brain. It bloomed the desire to leave. To explore. To be on your own and figure out if the places you felt most comfortable in - your bed, your church, the pillow in front of the TV, your mother’s arms - were in fact your true home. It was possible now that your home existed in a place you had never even considered to be real.

After this, you began to notice other actual places that you had previously over looked. Even the ones that took place in the very distant past, those too, were in fact real places that millions of people have lived and have very personal ties to. Even though you couldn't do the math, you estimated that by the time you were 50 and ready to retire, you would have had enough time to have visited every place you’d read about and remembered in the last 12 years of your life and by then, you could decide. Then you would truly know what home was and what home wasn’t yours.

 

1

When you wake up, your last three toes on your right foot are numb. You flex both feet and move your ankles in opposite circles to return the blood flow and regain sensation. The cat, having spent its morning at the edge of the bed, sees this movement and immediately attacks the blanket catching its front nails in the stitching of the quilt and driving its teeth into your toes. You feel nothing physically, but kick him to the ground anyway. He lands loudly on the ancient wood floor and scampers off with contempt leaving a scent of revenge in the air behind him.

You claw at your phone on the windowsill behind your head, refusing to move more than necessary. Once found, it lights up on its own and glaringly welcomes you to your morning. It’s 5:30am. The phone knows this, but doesn’t care. Just like the idiot cat, and anxious you, once it’s awoken from its slumber there is no more sleep mode.

Maybe tea will help. The only good coffee you own needs to be ground and you’re pretty positive that that much intensive labor two hours before sunrise is forbidden by at least one religion. The heat from the gas burner is so comforting you place your face next to it. Why is this smell so alluring? The cat makes three figure eights around your ankles while sounding his alarm. Fine. You dump him his food and tell him nicely to shut up. As you leave the apartment, he looks up at you ready to meow in protest but before he can begin, you point your finger at him sternly and he yawns instead. Good. You say. In the hallway you can hear him licking at something furiously.

***

Three hours into work, you realize that tea was at best, a mediocre choice. In fact, you question if you possibly drank a useless hot liquid in place of a useful one. It doesn’t matter now. You shift your weight from your left leg to your right. Wait. You think. Are my toes still numb? Less concerned about the fact that one’s body parts should not stay numb for such a period of time, you worry that you have just spent six plus hours unaware that they were numb at all. You scan the room for anyone who might notice you and when it’s clear, you thrust the side of your right foot full force to the side of your desk.

Nothing.

You think about the theory that a person cannot willfully inflict harm on itself with the force that they can upon another. This worries you and so you get up to find Whitney in hopes he will be able to help.

2

 

Whitney has never once complained about the fact that when people meet him in person they are startled and more often than not visibly disappointed that he is not female. His lax attitude towards social prejudices such as this has always infuriated and intrigued you. You, who throws a match into your mental fire anytime someone’s glance or vocal implies they are considering you height either way.

 

When you get to Whitney’s floor Brandie (Why must she spell it this way?) looks up and tells you he is not here. You consider making some small time excuse about just passing by or wanting to see how she is doing but you’d both know it was bullshit so you half smirk and half sigh and forget to ask when he will be or where he is.

 

Brandie does this to you. Many women do this to you. Every time this happens, you remind yourself that it may have started out with gender but as time has told, it truly is not so. You are the same. You just carry a terminal disease called disconnect. It is hard for you to explain but you feel like you could draw it on a piece of scrap paper. And if you did, it would be described as such:

Two people with tin cans connected by string.

The person on the dominant (left – because we read from this) side is pressing their mouth to the cavity of their can in full expectation that their voice will be the pre-imminent vibration that begins the conversation. But on the other side of the canvas is a hunched curmudgeon the you, the supposed receiver. Bow backed and sensation heavy – you do not have the rim of your own can to either you mouth or your ear – instead you hold it to your left eye body frozen staring down its barrel. You observe. You do not listen. You do not speak. You watch.   

3

Olivia is pissed. You’re not sure why – you truly don’t care – but you can see it from approx. 72.47ft away. You check each bodily signpost top down.

1)    Head Jutted forward

2)    Top tip of shoulder blades a touch

3)    Right palm pressed firmly into her lower back – the Halfkimbo

And the biggest of all

4)    The right foot moving back and forth like a volatile seesaw – ready to move forward, ready to flee ready to fight.

 

You look down at your own foot (whose own issue still evades you) and move your last three toes clockwise inside your shoe – or at least you think you do.

Olivia slams her mouse on the desk and launches herself forward. You scurry backwards as quickly as your body allows in order to avoid the coming rampage but it’s immediately too late.

On the floor, you seriously wonder how it was possible for Olivia not to see you at all. Naturally she isn’t apologizing for her gaff and unprofessional behavior. Instead she is standing over you moaning about your inability to sense that she was going to be taking a trajectory that could collide with yours which lead to an obviously stale observation that she has had about the fact that you “in general” are an oblivious person who cannot keep their head out of their own ass and do what needs to be done.

You wonder if she is right.

4

Olivia held her hand out just long enough to not help you up. Then unbecomingly stormed off in a ferocious mess, tossing out HR appropriate insults behind her. You place your palms flat against the ground to push yourself off the floor but the icky friction between your skin and the Berber carpeting convinces you to just lay a while. You inhale in a puff of air then exhale out twice as much. Maybe I should stay here. You think. Maybe all day. You calculate how long you could actually get away with this plan. Possibly much longer if I had landed face down and worn grey.

The pattern hot molded into the plastic light cover above you reminds you of the triangular protrusions on a meat tenderizing tool. A meat tenderizing tool reminds you of your nasal voiced sister at 7 stealing your mother’s to smash slugs on the sidewalk in front of the neighborhood boys to instill fear. You imagine you are the slug – lay cold and cut like the meat – adopt the mind of a scared pre-teen boy – and allow the rectangular beast to raise up then plunge down on top of you over and over, manipulated by an omniscient unseen hand. The make-believe violence releases a toxin inside of you and your whole body relaxes until you feel deflated and limp.

The dream is simple. You’re on a train that despite moving forward in space – is not moving equivalently through time. With each check of your watch, your anxiety inflates. You look around the train car, which you realize is comprised of geometric shapes floating in place without being physically molded or connected. You can’t remember if this is normal or not. The people occupying the seats that surround you seem strangely calm in comparison to your mounting anxiety. Looking closer you observe that despite being genetically different, every single one of them has the same expression on their face: an accepting calm. Like sentient mannequins placed intentionally to complete a rouse. A rouse that ends in your slowly unfolding mental breakdown.

-To Be Continued (dream gets better I think)

Classy Biped