Trigger

One day, your whole life is as clear as glass. Nothing’s hard. Nobody wishes you were dead. And then something happens. Turns your life inside-out.

Nobody ever touched me before like he did. Fingers tracing over bones jutting out behind skin and freckles. Shirt pulled over a chest slowly, nervous, shy. Clothes ending up on the floor like dead bodies that got eaten away by birds for so long, that only the hollow interiors of abandoned shirts and shoes were left. His lips burning stains onto my back. Windows fogged up from all the heat we produced.

It’s not my fault. It wasn’t my idea. Nobody asks for something like this.

I can’t stop walking. I don’t know if I’m even going in the right direction or not, but I know if I stop, I’ll shatter into a million pieces of jagged glass. Cutting open the earth.

Guitar on my back, strap across my chest, digging into my neck like a seatbelt. Dirt underneath my feet, crickets yelling. Seeds fall from the sky, get stepped on by people, stomped into the dirt until trees grow everywhere, towering above the whole world. Seeds dropped by God, or whoever.

When you’re this far out into the middle of nowhere, all you hear is the wind whispering.

Where I live now makes me feel like I’ve gone colorblind. Cement blankets drape across the entire universe overhead, covering up the sun. Leaves on bare trees die without the sun, shriveling into ashy-brown paper. Dead, paper leaves fall to the ground, covering up the green grass. The green grass suffocates underneath all the dead, paper leaves.

Dirt, sticks, leaves, rocks, underneath my shoes. Pebbles poking up onto the bottom of my feet through the tear on the sole.

I’m getting somewhere.

I can’t tell anyone how it feels. That feeling of having your own rib cage torn open, your heart yanked out, but still attached by veins, human electrical wires, forced to see your own heart pumping outside of your body, forced to watch your own life beating away. I can’t tell anyone. Everyone already wishes that I’d died before anything could happen anyway.

Because I’m sorry. Because no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop these things from coming into my head. Because I can’t filter what I think. Because nobody plans on ending up on that grimy stage, white lights streaming down on your face, wailing into a microphone, fingers stinging from steel strings, a thousand faces staring into your brain, nobody plans on it. Because they never allowed me to call him back. Because I’d never mean to hurt anyone on purpose, not in a million years. Because, because, because, I’m sorry.

Something sharp stabbing into the bottom of my foot. A pebble stuck inside my shoe. My feet hurt from walking, but I feel like my brain is tuned into a lost radio station, static blurring voices in the background, the most terrible sound in the world, and I’m not stopping until I figure it all out.

Metal in my pocket. If I ever paused, stopped even for a second, I could feel it on my fingertips, heavy and cold. Then the second I feel it, I have to get going again. Feet moving, stamping onto the dead leaves. The faster I walk, the heavier it feels, hitting up against my leg. If I stop walking, I can feel it in my palm, the handle, the indents of its shape, the barrel. If I stop walking, somebody’s going to get killed.

Dead, naked trees reach out a thousand witch-claw arms towards the sky for what feels like hours, before I can see the gate, a long, winding driveway, a broken down Cadillac, then one giant haunted house.

The place I live in, the way it looks now, inhabited by ghosts, whispers without a voice that it used to be pretty. A big home, three floors, a hundred bedrooms and thousand places to get lost in. Wallpaper from a million years ago, peeling off the walls and falling to the floor like shriveled up flower petals. Grime growing in place of the absent wallpaper, in the cracks in the ceiling, in the kitchen sink. Grime eating away at the house, crumbling it away into dust. Dust billows around in the wind, burying the people, the furniture, trophies.

We didn’t deserve them.

It wasn’t my idea to hang up all the awards. We didn’t deserve anything. Trophies like record players, boom boxes, astronauts holding up MTV flags, all tossed up on top of mantel pieces, coffee tables, bookshelves. Special Achievement Award. Album of the Year. Best Video.

I would have burned all the certificates and thrown the trophies into the river, if it was my decision.

A hundred million naked trees tangle around the haunted house. A whole forest hiding everything. Guitar thumping against my spine as my shoes connect with the wood floor, wallpaper curls up into dead rose petals in every direction. Bugs and the hook-like hands of monsters with long, sharp, curling fingernails poke up through the cracks in the wood floor. Ghost faces fade in and fade out into the dirty windows.

Welcome home, son.

Metal in my pocket. I could hurt somebody. If I wanted to.

My feet on the stairwell, climbing, guitar in my hand, strangling its neck. My hand on the railing, fingers running over the dents in the wood, drawing over dents that feel like the curvatures of bones. A spine.

You don’t ever forget anyone once you fuck them. You could do anything with them, meet them, go to the movies, go out to dinner, kiss, hold hands. But you could still forget them at the end of the day. Fucking was different. You fucked somebody and it stayed inside of you. Carved out a tally mark in your rib cage. Made their faces haunt you in your dreams.

A curved back, vertebrae jutting out. I traced my fingers over his spine, the skin on the back of his neck, ran my fingers behind his ears. But he never squirmed. Never danced or shivered. Just smiled.

Because, because, because, I never meant to leave him behind.

My feet on the stairwell, guitar slipping slightly in my fingers, making the strings screech. My hand on the dying wallpaper, felt like his skin.

People will hate anything that they don’t fully understand.

His smile didn’t look like a smile at first. Wasn’t a frown either, but something in between, some kind of invisible happiness that only he could see and know. A party after a show, somebody’s house somewhere, the bathroom. It was always the bathroom.

One day there was a boy who didn’t fit in anywhere. Even after he left high school before even graduating, escaping every terrifying monster face that terrorized him since middle school, even after he went on to pick up a guitar and actually get somewhere with it, the boy didn’t fit in anywhere. He wandered around aimlessly, through a maze clusters of friends, never fitting into any of them. When he was in school, he always escaped to the library, went to the nurse’s office to get out of gym class. Now when things were different, he escaped into bathrooms.

Butt on the toilet seat, staring into the wall, smoke foaming up from a cigarette between my fingers, when the door opened. I could feel the cigarette jump in my hand, my head jerking up like a chicken. His face appeared in the doorway and my stomach flew up into my throat.

“Oh--Jesus.” He opened up his mouth and words tumbled out, embarrassed. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

The boy who didn’t fit in couldn’t ever talk to anyone beautiful. Whenever he saw somebody who looked like a creature carved out by God, sculpted out of clouds in the sky and angel teardrops and all the light of the stars , he closed up, so intimidated that he just crawled up into a ball and snuck into a corner. Anyone so beautiful made him look even uglier by comparison. He couldn’t be around them.

But he wouldn’t go away. His head lolled down, looking at his feet for a moment, before his eyes inched back upward, catching onto mine, pinning me there.

“Are you okay?”

I don’t know how to tell anymore if I was drunk. A hundred thousand centuries ago. Can’t remember anymore.

Most people stop breathing when they’re around me, afraid to inhale whatever disease I am. I must have looked like something dead; it was enough for him to stop, and still be hanging around me. Concerned or something. Still breathing.

He stepped inside. Got even closer to me. Like he didn’t know who I was, like he didn’t know that I was the worst person alive.

Or like he did know, but didn’t care.

“I saw you downstairs,” he kept talking. “You looked really…lonely.”

Eyes caught onto mine again, pinned me down, reeled me toward him.

“Aren’t you supposed to be hanging out with your band?” He came even closer to me, touched his hand to the countertop next to the toilet. Then his face changed, tilted sideways suddenly. Then he was at my level, crouched down, staring up at me.

“Are you okay?” He asked me again. His voice suddenly changing.

The boy could never speak. He saw somebody beautiful and he choked up, stood there in awe, suddenly understanding their purpose, how beautiful people were sculpted out individually then placed in the middle of disasters, wreckage, and terror, just to spark a hint of beauty in between it all. Just to make the world a little bit nicer. He sputtered out his words, stuttered, turned his head down, wanting to fall into a hole in the earth and be buried alive forever to hide from all the embarrassment.

“Why are you in here, anyway?” His voice turned into something soft, an almost-whisper.

Voices. Voices of people I knew, people who hate me. They follow me around in my dreams at night. Voices just over my shoulder. Whispering things they’ve whispered a million times before. When I walk around in my dreams, his voice is behind me, always asking me if I’m okay. And then he appears and he’s more than just his voice. He puts a hand on my shoulder, makes me stop walking, turns me around, and then his voice saying, “Are you okay?…I like writing stories, let me write you something. Might make you feel better.”

He never frowned. Just gave off this half-smile like he knew something I didn’t. He always knew things I didn’t, thought strange little beautiful things inside of his head, and whenever I tried to ask what was on his mind, he never answered. Just took his green eyes and averted them back at me, stared into my brain, like he could read all my thoughts. Half-smiling.

When a guitar drops onto the floor, it doesn’t break, but creates the worst sound in the world. A hollow, wooden interior thrumming with the noise of the impact, a sound of something breaking, but not really breaking. Then the strings vibrate, pitching out notes that create no melody at all, but a drone, the sound of a dying animal or something worse.

The darkest room in the house. No windows. A fireplace that nobody ever uses. Furniture from the 1800s. And in between all that cold nothing, we practiced. A drum kit in the corner, more guitars left strewn across chairs, their chords worming back to the turned-off amps like dead snakes.

I leave the guitar on the floor, listen to that awful not-really-broken sound until I can’t stand it anymore and have to pick it back up again. The chair I use is always empty, left empty since nobody else wants whatever disease I have crawling on my skin to rub off on them. When I fall back into the chair, the bottom of the guitar thumps against the armrest, vibrating the strings, creating an echo in the room that bounces off of the walls, making the wallpaper peel off, the grime bleed down from behind it.

It’s not my fault.

Nobody believes me, but it’s not. I said a lot of stupid things about wanting to be successful, wanting to be somebody, wanting to get out of the dead ghost town that I was forcefully born into against my will. But I swear to god, I don’t think I meant it.

Because I said a lot of stupid things but he never stopped me, just stared and listened. And I kept talking. Because nobody had ever actually, truly listened to my words before.

When somebody kisses you for the first time, you force yourself to cherish it. It comes out of nowhere. Him staring at you with his half-smile, green eyes staring into your brain, reading all your thoughts, your ideas, your desires, your fears, listening to everything you’re saying, never interrupting you because he knows that nobody’s ever actually listened to you before. And then when you’re finally done talking, telling him about your whole stupid life, he blinks and opens his lips and murmurs, “Your ideas aren’t stupid, they’re different.” And you stare back into him, thinking that you’ll never understand him, asking him what he means, before he says, “Don’t you get it?…That’s what makes it so great. Because it’s different.”

And then he stares into your brain, looks into your past, then leans forward slowly, inch by inch, and touches his lips to yours. And you never forget any part of it. You never forget all wonderful things in your childhood that it suddenly reminds you of, what it tastes like, and just then you realize how special it is and how you can’t ever lose it. So when he finally leaves, you take it off of your lips more careful than anything since it’s the most delicate thing you’ve ever touched and store it inside of the shoebox you keep all of his gifts inside of, so you can take it out every night before you go to sleep and stare at it, smiling secretly to yourself, like it’s a piece a star that melted down from the sky, just for you to keep.

He kissed me once and I kept it. He kissed me a second time and it led to something. He sat across from me and touched his hand to my knee. Slid it up to my thigh. Clothes fell off like the bodies that stood inside them had suddenly disappeared into thin air, letting them fall lightly to the ground.

Green eyes that always made me think of the summer before the world turned black and white. Black scraggly hair that tangled in on itself like vines growing up the wall of this old, crumbling house. Turned-up rabbit nose that kept making me smile, choke up my own words, let him do all the talking.

His fingers touched my skin, and every hair on my body raised up. He traced his fingertips across everything, examined it all with a look on his face like I was this amazing fossil he’d discovered out in the desert. Made my clothes fall to the floor before he made the space between us become smaller and smaller until there was no space between us anymore. Changed something. Took something away. Made a dent.

Naked skin. I wanted to draw him. I wanted somebody to make a statue out of him.

People didn’t understand us. They saw us out on the streets with each other. Said they hated us. Because they didn’t understand.

Metal in my pocket. I drop the guitar to the floor again and hold the metal in my hands instead. The sense of power that shoots through your veins like injected drugs is overwhelming. So overpowering that I have to set it down, face it away from me. Facing the wall.

Because, because, because I don’t care if I want to die.

I can’t talk about it. I can’t describe it in anyway that anyone else would understand. In my head, fucked-up things happen. Green eyes, black hair, and a smile that I can’t stop seeing whenever I close my eyes. I don’t know what happened. Something changed underneath my skin. Made my heart flutter every time I saw that smile. Made me hear his voice behind my shoulder in my sleep, whispering stories about this boy who once met this other boy, and even though this other boy was quiet and weird and looked retarded, he still gave off a light that attracted the first boy towards him so much that he never wanted to leave. And even though the boy couldn’t ever speak his mind out loud, he could on paper, so he scrawled out lyrics to songs and poems and notes and letters, wrote everything out like a deaf-mute, instead of talking. And the boy loved it so much, that he couldn’t help but stay and watch the boy write and write. And then he’d convince the boy to pick up the guitar off from the floor and sing, just to be able to hear his voice once in a while. And when the boy finally heard the other boy’s voice, he was so in awe of it that he needed to hear it all the time. Singing poetry.

And that’s how they both lived with each other. The second boy wrote and the first boy sang, and they created lyrics, filled up with journals with songs that nobody else was allowed to hear but them, because it was their own special thing that they had to store safely inside of their shoeboxes.

If that was falling in love that I felt underneath my skin, I’d have no way of knowing. Nobody ever told me how it feels. Nobody ever told me anything.

Nobody ever plans on this. Nobody ever expects it to happen. To get big. To actually go somewhere.

It caught me off guard. Nobody told me beforehand, this was what was supposed to happen. You pick up a guitar, you get into a bus, and then you travel across the entire world, screaming into the faces of a million strangers, bleeding open your fingers on steel strings. Headlines pop up. You get given awards. You fill more journals with the fucked-up words that spew from your head, only once they’re sung to a million faces you’ll never see again after one night, they lose their meaning. Dead metaphors. Wasted symbolism.

If I wanted to be honest with everyone, I’d tell them I want to go home.

I am on top of the world. I have so much power over these millions of eyes staring back at me. But I want to go home. Stagelights burning into my retinas, burning holes into my skin.

The saddest part is though, you eventually get used to it.

You go to a different city every night, a different hotel room becoming your home, until eventually you forget what your real home was, where it used to be. If it was ever there to begin with.

There are too many faces to remember. A thousand eyes looking up at me, crowding up your memory until old faces have to become erased to make room.

I don’t want anyone to believe me. I say things I know I don’t mean.

When the boy was little, rocketship pajamas, short bowl haircut, pudgy baby fat, he watched channels on the evil that was television, the channels that his mother told him to never, ever watch. Violence flashed in front of his eyes, drugs, adult television dramas. And then music videos. Poetry he’d never heard before amazed him so much that he had to sit down in front of the television every morning, watching it all flash in front of him. Men dressed so strangely, strapped on guitars and wailed into microphones, telling stories of sex or suicide or love or a complex combination of all three. The boy decided after that, that he wanted to be exactly like that. A rock star. Flashing wildly on the television screen.

Because it’s so fucking dumb and I can’t tell anyone because there’s nobody on this earth anymore who doesn’t hate me, but I don’t want this anymore.

I don’t fucking want this anymore.

Eventually your brain becomes so scrambled with the faces of the creeps who watch you, and the words that appear on the covers of magazines, and the way people talk about the way you dress, that you start to forget who you are.

My name is Frank Iero.
My name is Faggot.
My name is Lie.
My name is Zero.

Before the boy picked up a guitar and got noticed for it, the first boy whispered him another story to make him go to sleep at night. About a cat who was owned by a perfect family, a mom, dad, and one little girl. Only the cat got bored with such a lifestyle after a while, so it went out looking for adventure. It decided to run away so it wandered the streets until another cat fucked it. The cat came back a couple of months later and had a bunch of kittens. The little girl begged her parents to keep them all, but the sight revolted them enough to kick the cat out completely. They took all the kittens and stuck them in a cardboard box and left the cardboard box outside of a grocery store, offering them up for free. Almost every cat got taken, because all the cats were beautiful. Except for one that looked retarded, since a bit of one of its ears was missing, its tail was crooked, it was blind in one eye and it limped since the muscles in one of its back legs didn’t develop enough, made it shorter than the other legs. The cat got left behind in the box, since no little girls wanted a kitten that looked so ugly. Right up until one particular little kid came along and took the cat in. Thought it was beautiful, because it was ugly. And the kid loved the cat until the day it died, because no one else would.

I am the cat. I am the retarded cat that Gerard still loved.

Because I’m sorry that I get distracted so easily. Because I’m the most selfish person in the entire world.

It’s never fun, but it’s all you think about. Shows. Gigs. Arenas. Guitars attached to amps plugged into walls of stages that you climb around on, tripping over wires, falling flat on your face, still sticking the microphone up to your lips, desperate to get the words out of your head and out into the air so they can dissipate so you never have to think about them or hear them or say them ever again. Numbers. Big math-class-sized numbers. Three-thousand albums sold. Ninety-thousand albums sold. Two million records sold worldwide. You’re not allowed to focus on anything else. If you do, the thousands of eyes staring into your skull come after you. Use words as their weapons because words always end up hurting more than violence.

You don’t care about your music.
Phony.
Sellout.

Sometimes I dream of going home. Stuck on a bus, watching the United States fly by at seventy miles and hour out the window, I doze off and dream of waking up back in his apartment, journals littering the floor. And then I actually wake up. On a stage. Sweating.

It’s not my fault. I swear to god, I tried to call back.

A letter handed to me one day, before a show. Written on lined paper, ripped out of a notebook sloppily. Another story. Because he said he’d read somewhere in some magazine that the drummer did an interview with. Somebody said I had problems getting to sleep at night.

He reads about me now. Not to me. Not anymore. About me.

One day the boy went outside with his guitar. He went out onto the street, left the case open for people to drop change into while he played out to anyone who was passing by. Eventually somebody noticed that underneath all the quietness, talent squirmed to be noticed, underneath his bones. The somebody who noticed him was a drummer in a band, who said he heard his singing from afar and had to follow the path to the noise to figure out who was producing it. Because it was exactly what he had been looking for. The boy didn’t know what to do at first, how to react. But he followed the drummer anyway, to their garage, where he soon showed them how he could talk well, only when he was singing, and how beautiful that was. And they formed a band that everyone liked.

Eventually the boy became a rock star. He was known around the world, thousands of people he’d never met before suddenly knew who he was. And the band went around the world, singing and playing to make everyone happy, until the boy lost sight of what made himself happy. Eventually the boy stopped writing songs about the strange but fantastic things he used to be able to think of when he had the other boy by his side, and the songs became boring, but people still liked them for some reason. The boy became so focused on what other people thought of them, that he forgot everything else back at home. He even forgot his own first name. And eventually the first boy started to wonder where he had gone. If he was still filling up journals. He found it hard to even write letters to him, since the boy was always moving around from place to place, with no clear address. When the first boy managed to finally get a letter to the right place, he only wanted to ask one question. Did the boy not talk to the first boy because he hated him now, just as much as the first boy hated who the boy has become?

The handwriting was scraggly. It took me a while to figure out who it was writing, because the return address was even scraggly, almost unreadable.

And then something happened. Something fell down inside of me. My stomach churning up into my throat. The dent in my ribcage that he made started to hurt, started to make my other ribs hurt until my whole chest was a ball of pain.

I didn’t even recognize his fucking handwriting.

That’s what happens when you fuck someone. The dent they make in you doesn’t hurt until it has to.

This house is not a home. I will inhabit and breathe and sleep and scream and dream about fucking and touching and keeping kisses in safe places, in this house, but I do not live here anymore.

A interviewer once stuffed a microphone into the boy’s face, demanding to know, Who are your major influences?
The boy was lost. Scatter-brained from the chaos of everything that ever happened to him since the day he was born. He couldn’t focus right, couldn’t remember. So he blurted out a band that he’d heard some other band on MTV talking about.

Um. The Clash.
Weezer.
I don’t know.

And then he walked away. And then suddenly voices came back to his head. His voice in the back of the boy’s mind, singing the poetry that he’d written onto the crumpled journal pages. Then realizing what a terrible mistake he made, he wished more than anything that he could go back and change his answer. Pray that the first boy never picked up that magazine and read that interview and saw the second boy who he’d gotten so into with, didn’t even think to mention his name. Not even once.

I needed a phone.

I needed to apologize.

I need to make a call, I told them. I needed to talk to someone.

I need to make a call, I’m telling to anyone who’s willing to listen. My manager. Our drummer. Our bassist. Nobody’s listening.

I need to talking to somebody. I need to talk to somebody before they hate me forever like the rest of the world.

“We’re on in one minute,” the backstage guy said. “You don’t have time to make a fuckin’ call.”

I couldn’t stop picturing blood. Splattered. All over the place. On people’s faces. Staining their clothes. In their hair.

When a dog becomes angry it bites and snarls and barks to tell others to just leave it alone. When a child becomes angry, it cries, throws its toys at walls and demands that things be fair. When an adult becomes angry, they suppress it and go to therapy.

I don’t know what I am.

I became angry. So I destroyed things.

A million faces lit up in an arena, when the lights were finally rigged. A hundred-million ripped jeans, strange haircuts, homemade T-shirts, and faces of people who had lost themselves years before, but won’t ever realize it.

Something building up in my chest. The dent in my rib cage burning a hole through my flesh. A building, expanding ball of pain in my chest suddenly exploding outward, spreading out in all directions, prickling right into my fingertips. Fifty-million screams in my ears, stage lights blinding down on me. Guitar in my hands. Using all my strength to start swinging it around. Screams only amplified. They thought it was a part of the show.

I swung the guitar around until my arms felt they were going to fall off, then let go. A guitar flying through the air, chord snaking back to the amp ripped out. The guitar landed somewhere on the stage. One giant, terrible sound of a guitar being dropped. The screams kept going. The music kept going. A drummer and a bassist gave me strange looks, started moving their mouths to mime messages over to me. Asking me what I was doing.

I found the guitar on the stage, pain in my fingertips. My head exploding, bits of my skull and brains all over the place as I’m screaming.

I don’t even realize I’m screaming until my throat gives in.

So many screams coming from all directions. Raking the inside of my head.

Shut the fuck up.

I found the guitar and tossed it again, only looking at it long enough to see too strings broken and one of the knobs coming halfway off. I threw it. Somewhere. I don’t where. I couldn’t see anymore. Splotches of purple wormed around the shell of my vision, out of the corners of my eyes, a headache suddenly starting in the front of my skull and nearly blinding me.

Shouts from security guards. If I threw something in the wrong direction, I could hurt someone in the audience. I could kill somebody. Cut it out.

I want to go home.

Don’t you understand that?

I forgot his own handwriting. I forgot my childhood home address.

Nobody else loved the cat, except for Gerard, but the cat left even that behind.

Because, because, because.

The world was ending. I was going to explode into a million jagged splinters of glass, slicing up the earth until we were all dead and gone.

When I finally managed to opened my eyes, a small amp was broken. Fallen off the stage with all its insides fallen out when I kicked it. Chords ripped. A cymbal not a part of the drum kit anymore. Blood running down my arms. A million screams still scraping the insides of my brain.

I got dragged out at one point. I think. Feels like ninety years ago, I don’t every remember every little detail.

Because no one had ever been nice to me before. Not my mother, who says she had never planned on me happening. Not my father, who crawled into the basement of our house, pushed himself into a corner and eventually melted into the cement walls, to never talk to me ever again. Not my band, my friends, people I see passing me by everyday, who all wish that my mother had gone with the decision of aborting me before I could crawl out into this black and white world.

I am not a star.

This paper house I live in is blowing away in the wind.

I have never felt so alone in my entire stupid fucking life. The guitar has fallen to the floor again, but the noise has since gone away. Metal on the side table. Metal in my fingers, on my sweating palm. Barrel up against my skull.

I found a pen. Somehow. I don’t remember looking for one, but I found one somewhere. I turned the paper over, water in my eyes, leaking out. Scribbled something on the back of it. Blood from my arm dribbled over the paper and let a dime-sized stain on the bottom right hand corner.

I scribbled that I am terrified of you hating me just as much as everyone else.
I scribbled that I would find every goddamn letter that I never received.
I scribbled a number.

Find me.

The phone ringing in my house only emphasizes how empty everything is. The ring makes an echo that travels slowly through all the halls, makes dust that’s been collecting on everything fall off and sprinkle to the ground.

Barrel in my mouth. On my tongue. The metal tasting of car door handles, bicycle tire frames, burnt tin foil.

I thought, pull the trigger. A bullet will go through my brain at six-hundred miles and hour.
I thought, my brain will explode. And wondering whether or not I’d be able to actually feel it exploding. For at least one split second.
I thought, phony. Sellout. I’m wondering if Holden Caulfield knew me, would he think I was a phony, too?

Every time the phone rings, that shrill, screaming noise makes me jump. Makes my finger move on the trigger. Makes me flinch, thinking I’ll pull the trigger before I’m ready.

I can’t stand it. Too fucking terrifying. I need to be ready first.

I never pick up my phone. People getting my number somehow, asking me if I can fuck them. People calling, exploding over the phone with their hatred of my music. People calling, asking questions about my personal life. People calling. In general.

I pick up my phone, just this one time. Just to have an excuse to take the barrel away from my tongue.

“Frank?” A voice comes through the holes in the speakers, as I feel the barrel slide up my cheek. Up to the side of my head again. Pressing against my brains.

“Frank?”

When I close my eyes, the purple splotches come back. Barrel against the side of my head. My heart beating like a jack rabbit.

“Okay, whatever,” the voices keeps going. “I don’t know what the hell your deal is, you know….You never pick up your phone and when you finally do, you don’t even fuckin’ say hello.”

My back against the wall. Barrel against my skull, circular end pushing into my scalp.

Everything dies eventually. Birds, dogs, bugs, everything. If we don’t take it upon ourselves, we are forced to wait until we are too old to move, bones brittle with age, miserable and long deaths.

I just wanted somebody to listen.

Because, because, because he actually listened. Stayed awake in the night to lay there next to me when nightmares ripped me up from sleep. Stayed awake next to me to stare up at the ceiling, wishing there wasn’t any ceiling so we could see the stars and collect the ones that came raining down on top of us.

“Dude, I know you’re there,” the voice kept going on. And on.

I can’t get rid of this pain in my chest.
I can’t get rid of this lump in my throat.
I can’t get rid of these puddles in my eyes.

I am not a rock star.
I am not a beautiful creature.

“Look, I just need an answer,” the voice. Voices inside my dreams. “Are you going to do this tour or not?…We are ready for this, man. Do you get me? Do you get what I’m saying? We are ready, but all we need is a yes or no from you.”

I have forgotten my name.
Twenty million years ago. I can remember journals, the two boys, his stories.
But not my own name. Not my own face.

A sigh on the other side of the phone line.

“Look, this situation’s bad enough. What, with all the fucking equipment you broke. You know how much that shit costs? I got another guy on here--”

“You know how much these fuckin’ things cost?” Suddenly, there’s a second voice. I can’t recognize either.

“We just need a yes or no…Do you want to keep going with this or not?”

They never should have brought me to their garage. Never should have made me tag along.

“I came up this morning, but you weren’t fuckin’ there. Where’d you go? What were you doing, practicing outside? You don’t still do that, do you?”

I can’t stand voices anymore. I take the phone away and set it down on the floor next to me. Voices still squeak through. But I’m not even listening.

Somewhere off. Noises. The sound of a car pulling up the long, winding driveway.

I have nothing now.

Because I’ve sold it all.

In this empty haunted house, everything echoes. The front door being knocked on. Booms fade in and out of every room.

I’m not opening the door. I’m not letting myself get sucked into the same game all over again, to die and shrivel up into a dead papery body like the fucking wallpaper in this ugly fucking house.

I can’t go to sleep. There aren’t any stars to count, I’ll be awake for hours.

Barrel against my skull. My shoebox of gifts…I think I lost it. Somewhere in the world. I’ll never be able to find it again.

Warm water running down my face, on my lips, my chin, dripping down to stain my shirt. If I pull the trigger, I can finally get some sleep. I can stop everything.

Another voice in my house.

“Is anyone here?”

I’m thinking, get it over with. Before someone sees.

But I can’t. I’m not ready yet.

I haven’t counted all the stars in the universe yet. I haven’t said I’m sorry, I’m sorry a million times until I pass out. I’ve lost my shoebox. I’ve the lost the boy.

There are so many things I still need to do, but every time they zoom past in my head I realize that I can’t do them either way. That I had my chance. And then I lost it. Somewhere.

Feet on the stairwell.

This house is falling apart underneath the weight of its own hideous appearance. The wallpaper is curling up into balls around me as it falls off, grime bleeding down everywhere, the wallpaper drying up and crumbling to dust, blowing away all over this land, dust in my eyelashes.

Because, because, because--

You’re here.

A gun suddenly feeling a hundred times heavier in my hand. My head even feels heavier. My eyelashes are wet and weighted down with rain droplets.

Green summer eyes, black, vining hair falling over his eyes, tall in the doorway, crumpled letter still scrunched up in his palm. Eyes wide.

I wrote down my address like I wrote down lottery numbers. Not expecting to ever win. Not expecting him to ever come back.

Twenty-thousand years ago. And he still looks the same.

He steps forward. Puts hand out. Like he doesn’t care that I’m infected, waste, garbage paper flower petal of the world that can’t grow back but only fall down and turn into dirt, for all these black and white trees to spindle their roots down into, and grow into towers that stab the sky.

He steps closer
And closer.
Until the gun falls from my hand, slips from the sweat, too heavy to grip anymore. Lands on the floor.
The sound of it hitting the ground is worse than a guitar.
It isn’t hollow.
It just thuds.

I have sold everything. There is nothing left but the gun and wallpaper now.

His head at my level, his face close to mine. Crouching down to my level. Looking down at me. Face to face.

“I have…a car.”

People didn’t understand us. When they saw us walking with each other, their minds filled with hatred. Because they never stopped to think about what might have been. Because they didn’t fully understand.

“And I have…a full tank of gas.”

My hand is still in the same position it was when the gun was in it. I can’t move. My brain is frozen.

“I want you to come with me…I want you to leave this place.”

I don’t notice my hand is lowered until I feel his fingers on my palm, moving my arm down for me.

A pen he found somewhere. He finds a piece of paper inside on of the drawers in the coffee table and writes out my future. Says that I am leaving. Forever.

An arm around my shoulder. My empty house passing by, then behind me.

You shouldn’t ever forgive me.

He doesn’t do anything, but shush me, putting me in the passenger seat. He ducks his body downward and ends up in the driver’s seat. Silence surrounded by black trees surrounded by my ugly monster house. A gap between us, becoming smaller and smaller until there isn’t a gap at all.

His lips on mine. For longest, longest time. Giving me another kiss to keep safe. Safe in some place, wherever we’re going.

I know I will die if I lose this one, this time. Truly shatter into a million splinters, breaking open the world.

But not now. Wherever we’re heading.

We’ll keep each other safe this time. Under each other’s skin.