The Lines We Draw

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

>Milo: Ask Gyu-Ri how her family has been coping. 

That seemed appropriate. Of course, the situation was different with her. The family hadn't lost anybody, but the girls had lost countless friends, entire social circles lost to one...thing. You remind yourself that you don't know precisely what happened to them all, the hollow consolation of the unknown showing its face again. You wonder how long it will take for that to run out, for the time to come when things begin to capital-h Happen. It's been basically a month since they went missing.

"So, uh," you begin, "how's your family been coping, with all this?"

Question was good as is. Maybe you phrased it awkwardly, but you're sure that she knows that the question was intended well. It'll be an interesting question, anyway. You haven't really wondered about how Ji-hyun has been dealing with this all. Maybe she's heartbroken over what's happening to her current boyfriend, or maybe she's errantly wondering about your brother. Ah, who are you kidding. She doesn't think about him at all, does she.

[Cicada]

"Not well."

You state it very plainly- your home is in a more subtle way as presently disrupted as Milo's. Your tone is flat, you're stating things very matter of factly.

"Dad's hiding at work like when Mom died, and Jiji's painting all the time." And she plays some earworm that has at present burrowed an entire colony into your head.

And I've been poked and stoked

But again, you're used to the infinitely spiraling mental digressions that are always too loud.

It's all smoke, there's no more fire

"I suppose I'm also coping in my own way." You try to smile, but you've never liked your own smile much. You don't think you wear it well- it typically looks like you're in pain. You wanted to help your friends, that's all you know for sure. Or, whats left of your friends memories.

You're under no illusions that they're ever coming back.

Code: Select all

> _

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Order food and eat it with Homegirl

Maybe it's not quite lunchtime, or even breakfast time, truly, but you think that might be nice. Treat her to some food, for all the hard work that she's done for you and your family. You know your parents aren't really in a good enough place of mind to show and proper care or affection for all that she's done, so it really falls upon you to do that. Maybe you could get some pizza. That would be nice. You're craving some Dominoes for some reason. Once, you went out and got an extra cheese pizza and split it with a friend, just took it out of the store and went to the park and ate it straight out of the box. Then, you walked around with hands full of grease and sauce and cheese and spent the whole night just being disgusting balls of teenage ignorance.

But you've grown up, now. Next time, you'll use a plate.

"How long did you want to stay?" You ask, "Maybe later, I could, uh, order some food, and we could eat it together."

Before she has a chance to answer, your phone buzzes. And then it buzzes again. And again, and again, and again, and again. It's tempting to check it, but that'd be rude, even though it just keeps buzzing. You could check it, if you really wanted to, or if someone told you to, but for right now you're just going to let it buzz. It's 9:05 AM on July 15th, and you're talking to your friend, and you don't really think you have much reason to check your phone just yet.

What will you do?

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Apologize for audible buzzing of phone, continue to not check it.

It is somewhat annoying. It just keeps going, and going, and going. Maybe a celebrity died. Or an artist from one of your favorite bands. That would send people into a frenzy as literally every publication that there is tried to report on it. Was it Henry Rollins? Fuck, if Henry Rollins died, you're going to be really, really sad. Maybe Iggy Pop finally went. You wouldn't be as surprised by that one, but you would still be down. It pales in comparison to what you've been feeling recently, but the compounding of tragedies doesn't make you feel any better, that's for sure.

"Sorry my phone is, uh, going nuts right now," you say to Gyu-Ri, "it's probably something stupid."

That's more likely. Maybe your friends are retweeting some dumb new meme and they're tagging you in it. Maybe someone posted something dumb on Facebook. Bzzt. If it wasn't for the noise, you'd think your thigh was having a spazz attack. Bzzt. The notifications keep rolling in. Could be some YouTube drama. Bzzt. It is 9:07 on July 15th, 2018. Bzzt. Bzzt. You hope it doesn't mean anything serious.

What will you do?

[Cicada]

Code: Select all

> _

For you, whoever you are
For you

"As long as I am needed."

You consciously elect to avoid doing things because you want to do them.

Code: Select all

Gyu-ri: post nudes on reddit

That being something you do not want to do, on top of the avoidance thereof. You have considered it- Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat. Properly adult sites, those remaining nameless. You have not considered it because you wanted to consider it, is the important distinction to be drawn. Some say the body is a temple, and yours is certainly already desecrated and empty, hallowed of all substance and purpose. There would be nothing of value to show.

It does come to mind infrequently enough because it is inevitable. Yours is a ravenous beast of an unwanted sexuality, caged, perhaps with larger teeth on its wicked shadow than actually exist. It distracts as it should, but never in a pleasant or comfortable way. You do recall that you'd been intending to ask Ivy at some point- her advice on how to solicit Jon's attention in such a way as the postmodern art of the naked selfie. It would have been awkward as it would have been a blossoming moment for you, for once taking into your own hands the innumerable odd imagery of ghastly bloody metaphors and erotic men polluting your head in neat crop circle rows.

And of course that is all totally irrelevant.

It may have been a minute since: your awkward silence, ditto Milo's. The phone ceaselessly drilling into your ear until it was an odd rhythm of distortion over the many other noises already competing for attention in the echo chamber of your skull. whoever you are, so on.

Code: Select all

> download tindr

Actually already there on your phone. Like baby shoes: never used.

Code: Select all

> dab

"Answer it if it's bothering you. I don't mind."

The inside of your elbow meets your nose- your wrist did first, so clumsy and intimate was the motion.

You're not sure why you did that? You're aware of the social context, as you are often 'the haters' being dabbed on, but you're rarely the one being hated. Save for you being thoroughly detestable (as in this moment), so on. You suppose it is entirely possible you're losing what is left of your self-control under the general stress and malaise that weight your stomach like rocks slowly sinking into the depths of the sea. As if you could become any more of a gremlin than you already are. You suppose the active quest to find more ways to hold yourself in contempt will busy you in the many quiet moments that you dread are coming.

"Got to do it to them, I guess."

You at least try to pass it off as the most humorless of jokes. Given your monotone you might honestly have sold it by some means of midnight ink black comedy.

Code: Select all

> _

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Dab Back at Gyu-Ri

It's almost instant, the way your arms snap up reflexively when you see her dabbing at you. You hit the dab. You hit it hard. It makes you feel deeply ashamed of how your mind operates, but it doesn't really take much for that to happen to you, starting down that spiral path of finding little ways to pick and prod at yourself until you fall apart, but you won't fall apart in front of somebody, so you stop. You instead find it in yourself to smile at Gyu-ri. Her joke wasn't very good, but she was able to find something to joke about. That's what's important, in these times.

"You're always needed, or, uh, welcome," you say, fumbling with your words. Let's say that the dabbing jostled your brain around a little, alright? You think that's an explanation for that gaffe that you can take home and hang on your wall and look at and think that you're satisfied with for the two months you tolerate it until you throw it out because you want to hang something else in the same spot, something useful, like a television or a mirror. They're the same thing.

Code: Select all

Milo: Now that you have been given permission and it would be more awkward not to, check the phone I guess. 

Okay, you guess.

You reach into your pocket and pull out your phone. It feels lighter in your hand than it did the last time you checked it, for some reason. Maybe the battery is almost dead. Could there have been so many notifications that they drained the life of your phone that significantly? It can't be, you think to yourself. It must just be your imagination.

You press the button on the side of the phone and the screen lights up.

You stare at it for a few moments.

And a few more.






And then you lose your grip on the phone and it falls to the ground.

[Cicada]

You appreciate, at least, that he 'gottem. As the kids nowadays (you are one of the kids nowadays, you remind yourself) like to say. It wasn't funny, and you're sure the smile he treats you with is falsified. You don't know of course, because you don't know how to read faces or at least if you know you also know that you could never satisfactorily comprehend your own knowledge, arcane as the workings of your own brain are to yourself. Angry monkeys banging away at a typewriter in pursuit of Shakespeare, so on.

But you appreciate it, all the same. You almost manage to relax.

Code: Select all

>do a barrel roll

No time to, of course.

The falling of the phone actually moves in multiple frames of reference for you all at once. It'd be like somebody opening multiple showings of the same movie in the movie theater that is your head (every damn seat is sticky with uncleaned soda spills, continuing a completely different self-flagellating metaphor) with the tempos for each different showing changed ever so slightly in an infinity infuriating way. You can see the phone before it hits the ground, as it hits the ground, in pieces of brittle plastic case crystals after the fact. All at once, simultaneously, predicting the future even as you have the time to stop it.

You feel your shoulders erupting, a taffy forward stretch, the bend in your knees, the clap of your rear against your heels as you run, zero to sixty, some stupid looking skeleton shape spring. 0/10 for the swan dive. One arm flies forward.

The way your standing momentum collapsed you have a bit of sideways spin in you. Like a particularly defect-filled football.

Thus you catch the phone, hit the kitchen tile with the knob of your shoulder, hit a cabinet sprouting out of the ground with the back of your head, hit a lick, so on. You skid a bit. Crumple into an undignified heap at Milo's feet.

By instinct you cradle the captured phone to your collarbone. You still haven't caught up enough with the stream of time to understand what you're even divebombing the ground for, but you know it is safe in your rickety arms.

Code: Select all

> _

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Grab Your Phone

You lean down to grab the phone, your hands shaking. Your whole arm is shaking, actually. Gyu-ri's dive was unexpected and even slightly impressive, but it did nothing to diffuse your reaction to what you just saw on your phone screen. Nothing could. This was, of course, something that will change your life from this point on irreversibly. It's not something that anybody has healed from, ever. Nobody gets better after this.

Gyu-ri isn't holding the phone out for you. She just lays there, on the floor, crumpled and folded like a pair of pants. Lucas never got to learn how to do laundry. You would smile at that if you weren't in the middle of a crisis.

"Phone," you say, before falling, suddenly and sharply, to your knees, nearly on top of Gyu-ri. It's like your legs beneath you are as twigs, snapping under the weight of what you will carry for the remainder of your life. You can't imagine that it'll be very long now. You take a few sharp, jagged breaths. No tears come. You've distantly made peace with the possibility of this happening over the last several weeks. It's the shock of it actually coming true that's shaking you to the core right now.

"Just see what's on it," you tell her.

What will you do?

[Cicada]

Code: Select all

> Gyu-ri: Do as directed and just look at the phone.

A phone? A phone.

That's right: you're holding a phone. You're also fallen from heaven like a particularly graceless angel. Shoulder pain. Maybe you yanked something out of place. Fractured a bone in a manner even more unwanted and unwarranted than your usual phantom injuries. You're distracted. There's a burning sensation on the bare part of your calf that slid on the world's worst slip-n-slide worth of tiled floor.

Not that you'd ever use a slip-n-slide.

Milo's presence catches your attention, finally, on an oven timer's worth of delay. You're too cold blooded to be preheated, you guess. He's staring at you like you're dirty laundry. Asking for the phone. You're not handing it to him, at least in the moment. You should be though, but as per usual your mind is the greatest prison of all your thoughts and actions that must be segregated from good society.

You stare at the phone in brief.

Seeing Lucas' face hurts. A maybe image filtered ghost of a past that can only ever exist in that one direction neither of you will ever get to travel in.

'did you see the news yet'
'Dude im so sorry if you need to talk im here'

What was there to say, that CNN and Reuters hadn't already confirmed? You instinctively strike the phone with your thumb. Your intent was to flicker the screen off. You just tick up the volume one level instead.

You hand the phone to Milo, looking right at him, stoic and stiff in upper lip. You remain sprawled out over the ground.

"I tried to believe." Blank face delivery, in your usually soft and pathetically mewling and un-awesome voice. "I really did. But I knew all along. I'm so sorry."

Code: Select all

> _

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Say something in response.

"I knew too," you say. It's all you can say. You knew. You knew this whole time that there was no possible way that he could be alive, but you wished that you didn't need to find out what his actual fate was. You hoped that could stay a distant possibility, knowing. That one day when you were thirty or forty or seventy you'd find out and be ready, that you'd have moved on in the interim and needed not a brother anymore but an exit. That you'd be okay. But you aren't okay, and you aren't ready to move on. You want an exit, though you aren't allowing yourself one. Not with someone around.

Breath escapes from your lips. A hard exhale past the jagged pill stuck in your throat that you're struggling to swallow down.

"What..."

You bring a hand up and press it to your forehead as you look off into the distance.

Code: Select all

"What am I supposed to do now?"

[Cicada]

Code: Select all

> Gyu-ri: Comfort him.

You are confident you do not know how to do that. Comfortably so.

Still welded to the floor, still welded to the phone. Connected physically to too many things, which all remind you insistently of their presence. You wish you could say you've the respect and decency to know when to overcome your compulsions when the situation demands you be anything but yourself. Not something you know how to do. You itch. It's too hot. You're breathing too loudly.

Lucas, you realize, may have drawn his last breath however long ago.

"... Continue on."

You stand. Slowly, awkward, appraisingly. Everything in this kitchen is in the wrong place and wrong time. Lunch remains uncooked.

"Not much choice otherwise."

Life doesn't end, as far as you are aware. But you may have the wrong idea about things. You're used to that in particular.

Code: Select all

> _

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Deny

"How am I supposed to do that?"

Gyu-ri stands, and you remain on the ground. The concept of getting up is foreign to you. The concept of moving is foreign to you. It feels as though the floor tiles have risen and curled over your ankles, keeping you on the ground. The middle distance that you find is the space between your eyes and a spot on the wood floor in the hallway, past Gyu-ri, a swirl in the wood finish. When you were young you could stare at the floor for hours and remain entertained, the scratches and whirls morphing before your eyes into shapes and things, ships on a tumultuous ocean, farmers on a plain of lacquer.

You sit there. Blank.

Awaiting input, but from without.

Left to your own devices you know that you would stay here, withering away, gnawed at by rats and worms.

The only way for you to move

Code: Select all

 is for someone to tell you to. 

[Cicada]

Code: Select all

 > Gyu-ri: 

You refuse to, in the moment, say anything.

It occurs to you that the floor under you is moving, though that may be because someone is busily decomposing atop it. The pattern on the floor is simple. Patterns of any sort have a tendency to mutate and morph when you're not looking, forming strange geometry, menacing, unfriendly, in the corner of your eye. Nauseating as it is difficult to look away from. You stare down, at Milo, at everything that is not him.

Your sister, being the more emotive of the two of you in all the humane and reasonable ways, would occasionally be floored in a way almost literal, slowly sinking through earth and to core, crushed under the weight of her own love of humanity and the varying perversions thereof. You've learned quickly- or at least have incorrectly interpreted your experiences to such an effect- that people do not want to be picked up. They want to be able to pick themselves up.

He lies there, un-moving.

You do what you always do. Work, when there is work to be done. You step away from the bodies of the fallen, even as the guilt of being the girl with the sister still long for this world infiltrates your brain in a thousand different ways. Acupuncture needles on all your pressure points, small memories of the life Milo and Lucas had lived, that you know in the third person, and will now never know of again.

The dishes are in the sink, rotting like corpses left to fester.

Code: Select all

 > _ 

[MethodicalSlacker]

Code: Select all

Milo: Slowly, agonizingly, get up.

You comply.

The words came from the wrong person, however. They came from someone deep within, instead of the person in the room beside you. And that stings. The silence from Gyu-ri cuts deeper than the words on your phone screen. At least those voices, the liars that they are, make an effort to pretend that they truly care about your well-being. There's nobody that really cares about you, Milo. The last person has exited this world years ago.

You put your hand on the butcher's block and lift yourself up, bracing against it for a fall that never comes. You wish for your legs to move, to take you out of the room in a huff, slam the door in Gyu-ri's face, retire to your room for the rest of the day, of the week, of your short life.

But as you stand despondent in the kitchen threshold, reality takes hold.

Code: Select all

You've always needed someone to point you in the right direction.

Now. Before this. And in whatever future there might be for you.

[Cicada]

Code: Select all

> Gyu-ri: You're going to leave him there?

If that's what he wants?

"Your parents shouldn't hear it from the news and from the bystanders."

No, not even then.

"Bad enough that it happens that way to you."

That much is true, anyways. As far as you can tell, which is truly difficult to parse from the general television static that your mind approximates in all the best and all the worst of times- best and worst, they become about the same, when applied through the filter of the innumerable competing thoughts and compulsions that you've become accustomed to entertaining like a bad host. You watch Milo in a particularly cruel form of helpless silence, the color in your eyes as vital as toxic sludge.

You're a bad guest too. Should have gone without saying.

"I can tell them. Not like I'm a bystander anymore."

You're not sure if you know the difference between fact and opinion, or if you ever had. The sink, festering, ignites as you start to busy your hands in a storm of suds that wash the room in a particular squeal of something draining away. You can't help the activity. It's the most important thing to you, along with everything else that this tortured moment has become.

He looks as dead as you can assume Lucas actually is.