City Lights

In the last, most crushing, ominous seconds that could have occurred before he was to collapse to his death, an imaginary dam breaking, allowing the last surge of water to gush into his lungs, flood the last pockets of air he might have desperately clung onto to survive, a sudden, genuinely curious thought occurred in a distant, deep valley of his mind; that the surrounding, suffocating feeling of drowning, the split-second panic as a pang of pain pulsed deep in his chest to beg for air, likewise felt like a death from electrocution.

Keeping his breath hitched still in his throat, his eyes clamped tightly shut until flashing amoeba began to float in front of his vision, and his hands gripped firmly on the edges of the porcelain structure, he could almost ignore the panging, spreading, firework sensation in his chest that itched to be noticed, as the tranquil, cold silence that enclosed all of his senses gradually began to feel soothing; the pain beating faintly in his chest for air resembling his own heartbeat, reminding him he was still alive. It felt like electrocution, he thought again, as the pain in his chest sparked so harshly and loudly it echoed through to his fingertips. Yet he continued to keep his head submerged underneath the surface of the water, feeling as if the claustrophobic silence humming in his ears, the surrounding and warm but suffocating, in utero feeling, was a kind of cryptic, fascinating way to figure out what death physically felt like without having to experience it.

Underneath the fading, blinking fluorescent lights of the station’s bathroom, Gerard stood out, a tall, murky, tangled contour of a man, against the faded aqua tiles of the dilapidated walls, his spine, knees and elbows bent sharply and oddly, his hands firmly gripping the slippery surface of the sink, as his head floated face down, submerged in a shallow pool of graying cold water, his dark hair splaying out across the surface of the water, turning him into a faceless Medusa.

How long would it take for somebody to find me if I died in here? another thought suddenly appeared, gently but clearly in his mind, like a sudden, irrelevant idea that would pop into his head at any random moment of the day, such as trying to remember if he paid his rent or wondering if he should go grocery shopping or not. Through the womblike silence that seemed to clasp around his skull like a snug helmet, he could feel a vague outside motion affecting his hands, as the porcelain of the sink seemed to quiver underneath his bony fingers. Instantaneously, he could feel a soft rumbling beginning in the floor tiles, that seemed to increase in strength with every passing second--

A sharp, twinge of pain flared in his chest again, allowing something inside of him to give up and fall back, his mouth finally slipping open as a torrent of water fell into his mouth and throat.

Abruptly, against the corroded patina of the bathroom’s fluorescently lit interior, Gerard’s hunched silhouette of a frame suddenly jerked straight in its position, his fingers gripping the porcelain edges of the sink as his head burst from the water; a loud, inhaled, desperate gasp for air, followed by a few weak coughs suddenly erupting out and echoing off the wet wall tiles.

At that moment, the rumbling seemed to reach its peak, as the recognizable sound of the subway roaring past on the other side of the wall, rattling and screeching on its rails, drowned out his exhausted pants for breath until it disappeared down its tunnel again, suddenly allowing an even eerier silence to settle all around him.

He stood there as a muddled, still shadow as his eyes connected with his reflection in the cracked mirror. The sounds of water dribbling down the edges of his features and dripping back down into the sink sounded strangely loud against the settled silence, the drip-dropping pattern rebounding off the walls, as he suddenly found his eyes in the mirror and latched onto his own gaze. Through the brown speckled rust stains and jagged cracks in the glass, he caught onto a pair of glistening marble eyes whose dark surrounding circles and faintly thin red rims emitted a distant solemn emotion somewhere inside of him…

It didn’t take long for his eyes to skirt away, a kind of painful ball of what vaguely felt like shame forming in his chest.

With a faint pulse of pain still beating in dimly in his lungs, he brought his arm up to wipe his face somewhat dry and let out a final, slow sigh, picking up his briefcase and jumping on the last subway home.

He could almost ignore the irritating motion of his briefcase bouncing on and off of his hip, knocking against his bones, as he hunched his shoulders closer to himself, lowering his head to hide behind the collar of his jacket in an instinctive way to block out the biting cold around him, as he slowly made it down his street, as soon as his close distance to home reminded him of the coveted last cigarette and drink for the night. He made it up the steps of his stoop and up the several sets of stairs with this on his mind, biting his lip in an excitement he knew was pathetic, but chose to feel regardless. His fingers fumbled as he rushed to unlock his apartment door, overhearing the various sounds of the other tenants’ lives muffling through all the walls as he eventually creaked his door open. Light poured into the small, prewar little home only for a moment before the bleary man slowly stepped in, hauling his briefcase in two hands to kick backwards at the door with his heel, shutting himself inside.

For a moment, he was the blackness. With every light shut off, he stood there, taking in the lukewarm temperature, almost grateful for its dramatic difference to the winter streets outside. His eyes traveled over the nothing that was perceptible in the darkened room, as an invisible arm reached out to touch a light switch on the wall near the door, mechanically knowing the layout of his home. Upon feeling his fingers touch the plastic of the light switch, his palm thumping against the wall, the image of Frank’s smile suddenly flashed somewhere distant in his mind, causing him to stop and think.

This is what Frank sees…

His eyes scanned over the darkness once more, only making out brief darker contours of furniture and the eventual solid squares of soft blue nighttime light that were the two only windows in the tiny studio apartment. He pondered over this for a moment, suddenly trying to imagine a world where it was constantly nighttime, where there was no electricity and people lived by touching and feeling walls. The imagery of it made him smirk, picturing a world with millions of people talking into the darkness, falling in love with the sounds of others’ voices as opposed to their faces--

An itch in his throat and a twitching in his fingers tore him away from this reverie, reminding him what he really wanted and pushing him back into his normal routine. With that, his finger flicked the light switch upward, allowing the apartment in all of its entirety to appear before his eyes, as he began to intuitively drag himself forward.

He tossed his briefcase haphazardly onto his bed before tossing his jacket in as well, as he absentmindedly unbuttoned his shirt, undid his belt and slithered out of his clothes, leaving them in careless puddles on the floor and himself a half naked skeleton against the drabness of the hole he lived in. He stepped across the cold dusty wood flooring, kicking other abandoned clothes and objects out of the way, before swiftly picking up the waiting, crumpled box of cigarettes off of the end of his bed and taking it with him back to the window.

With a final swift kick at a box on the floor blocking his path, Gerard took his usual place at his window sill, leaning against the corner of the frame and resting his foot up on the sill. He twirled the half-empty box of cigarettes in his hand as he bent himself over awkwardly at the waist to grab the spare special lighter on the floor, and finally put the cigarette he’d been waiting for all day between his lips, lit it, then rested back against the sill to take his first drag, finally calm his nerves, and let his eyes wander back to his home.

Growing up and finally being on his own had been something that seemed to feel like it would take eons when he was younger, but now that it had finally happened, it suddenly felt like it happened too fast for him to just barely catch up. Time had a way of eroding away at not only age but dreams, and this fact seemed to materialize in his mind as his eyes passed over the wreck of his home.

It had been a very long time since he was able to wake up to the sounds of family members in the morning, wake up to a bedroom with bookshelves overflowing with collected issues of comic books, horror novels, or art books, walls plastered in his own drawings of superheroes torn out of his tattered sketchbooks or posters of dead musicians or famous painters, carpets stained with various drinks he’d spilled, stale food and dirtied dishes forgotten on his desk, laundry scattered throughout the floor, a radio constantly playing some kind of loud music day and night, to drown out the sounds of his family members, stupid science fiction toys he’d found and kept, or CDs and cassette tapes stacked in disorganized, cluttered columns against each and every wall.

He looked at his apartment and wordlessly stared, observing what was different and what he had never changed. The one light in the apartment was beginning to fade above him, giving the entire room an even duller look than it had when he had moved in. His walls here ceased to be wallpapered in posters or drawings or photographs, and simply stood blank, fading into a dirty brown, cracking and peeling with time. In the center of the room, two mattresses lumped together on the floor, messy with several mismatched bedspreads and flattened pillows, but sat alone without a frame. The fading wood floor was only scarcely visible, underneath the hurricane aftermath of scattered laundry, the occasional sketchbook or novel left on the floor, and several small crates and boxes pushed lazily against the wall, containing the CDs or art supplies or books he couldn’t part with after finally leaving home to be on his own. Against the rumpled jungle of unmade blankets on the mattresses, he spotted the tiny green light that belonged to his laptop, which sat only halfway closed next to the pillows.

His eyes followed the snake path of its cord to the wall, where it tangled up other wires belonging to an old small lamp with a torn shade and the digital alarm clock. All of the objects stood either without tables or on top of a spare crate that was likewise filled with stacked CDs or other objects; the lamp on top of the crate within arm’s reach of the indented groove in the mattress where he recognized his body slept on every night, and the alarm clock initially placed on the mattress, directly next to wear he would place his head, but now slanted, halfway falling off the bed and onto the floor. The room itself, when he did take the time to observe it, almost reminded him of articles he’d read about people who hoarded compulsively; the books he’d collected over the years stacked in short, uneven columns against the walls where spare laundry did not stay. It was hard to tell where one set of paraphernalia started and another ended. He’d observed everything he’d owned, noticing not for the first time, that everything seemed to be organized the same as it had the day he moved in, everything on the floor, waiting to be put on tables or reorganized or cleaned. Only the tables would never be put up and the place would stay like this, a kind of personified mess.

It had been a very long time since he’d lived almost exactly like this, but lived in it comfortably, without worry of the future, without wondering whether or not he would die in this same kind of existence.

He turned his head away and brought the cigarette up to his lips to take a long, quiet drag, unable to look at it anymore. I work too much, I don’t have time to clean, he’d sometimes excused himself on days like this. But in some deep corner of his brain, where the real truths lied to simmer, he knew it was deeper than that. He knew it wasn’t just the mornings he’d sometimes wake up to, with a feeling of such intense emptiness that he found it physically hard to force himself out of bed and go to work and on with life. It was something deeper than the kind of constant wandering through every day, waiting for each day to come to an end so that he could come home and have his last smoke, only to realize that he would get up and do the same routine the next day, and that having one last nice cigarette at the window sill where he could look out at the lights of the city and be tranquilly alone was the only thing he had to look forward to, and knowing that there was not much more than that, was what brought back the emptiness.

In the distance, he could hear an ambulance wailing, people yelling and finally a dog somewhere, howling into the night. Taking the cigarette from his lips, smoke rippled slowly from his mouth as he listened to the howling, suddenly remembering fondly, the stray dog that had come to depend on Frank for care. He could see Frank in his head, a smiling, bouncing face in a bright red hooded sweater, always smirking as if he knew something or could always see something Gerard couldn’t. He thought about the movies and the kiss he’d shared in the darkness of the theater, knowing that the kiss was almost like their own shared little secret, as they had been completely alone in the room. He thought about the train ride that jumpstarted everything, when he finally realized just how interesting his week had been. He thought about all of this and nearly chuckled, smirking inwardly before inadvertently catching his gaze wandering back to the silent clutter of his home.

His smile faded as quickly as it came. His chuckle seemed unusually loud in the silence of his home, so much that it made him shut up in an instant. There was no laugh back as a response or another person’s voice, only his own in the cramped space, and the thought of feeling like he was almost talking to himself suddenly brought back the feeling of loneliness that had been pushed to the back of his mind ever since he’d met Frank. Meeting Frank had been fascinating, kissing him had been divine, but Frank’s infectious charisma was like a drug, whose effects were starting to wear off, and now sitting alone at the window sill, the sadness was finally coming back, crushing and hard.

As if to desperately find a momentary cure-all, a quick last-ditch effort to pretend that that cold feeling wasn’t starting to creep back to him, he brought his cigarette up to his lips and took a deep drag, tasting the menthol and feeling the smoke cool his nerves. He made movements to step away from the window as he felt the cigarette dwindle down to a stub ready to be put out, but stopped abruptly as soon as he turned around to see another pair of little eyes staring back.

A purring sound so soft it almost went unheard came from the wrinkles in the sheets of the bed as a set of two triangle ears attached to a tiny ball of fur suddenly lifted up from beneath the sheets. A meowing that was clearly distressed but was so gentle and high pitched that it could only come from something that was still a baby, sounded as Gerard blinked, stared back, and muttered a swear. He’d forgotten about the cat.

Gerard observed for a moment as the small gray kitten began to unravel itself from underneath the sheets and take slow, complicated strides across the top of the entanglement of the blankets, letting out small cries and whines that shot small bullets of guilt back at him. Blinking and turning his head back to the window, Gerard awkwardly raised himself from the window, lowering his head as he dragged himself towards the bed.

“Sorry…” he’d muttered down at the confused little creature, as he shuffled his feet against the floor, loosely kicking at more objects before slowly lowering himself to take a seat on the edge of the mattress. He felt the cigarette become shorter between his fingers as he crossed his arms and hunched inward, sitting there in the silence with the only company he had. He observed the kitten for as long as it took for the cat to look back, before sluggishly leaning his body over to grab at a small, crumpled bag of nearly empty cat food and one of his own cereal bowls he’d left out for it, setting them on the mattress next to him and pouring the last bits of food and powdered crumbs left for the small animal to finally eat.

“I’m not used to taking care of animals and shit…” he told the kitten as it nearly climbed directly into the bowl to rapidly nibble away at the little flavored bits. He stared down at the kitten, watching it ignore him. A different kind of sadness, something smaller and more tender suddenly formed, before he placed a slow, hesitant hand onto its head, softly stroking the top of the animal’s skull and ears with his fingertips.

“You get to go home tomorrow…Are you excited?” Gerard spoke softly to the cat, only realizing somewhat, the small attachment that had formed. The cat did not belong to him, he knew this, but in the month that the cat had stayed with him, crawling over his sheets and falling asleep on his back as he himself slept, gnawing and batting playfully but weakly at the electrical wires near his bed, and greeting him every night at the door by standing in a certain pose and staring directly at him before scampering away to hide somewhere else, Gerard had formed a kind of fondness for it, finding a small amount of solace somewhere deep inside him when the kitten made it clear that it truly depended on him until his real owner would come back for it.

The kitten responded by continuing to eat until it felt satisfied, awkwardly falling backwards from its grip on the bowl’s rim and then wriggling back underneath the sheets to sleep.

“Bye…” Gerard muttered flatly, his eyes following the kitten as it quickly curled into a semi ball and nodded away under the covers.

Turning his head back, he finally glanced down at his cigarette, twirling it absentmindedly in his fingers as the slow and steady crash from the high Frank brought him began to sink in.

He was about to drop his cigarette to the floor and consider crushing it with his bare toes, when the shrill, electronic ring of the phone echoing throughout the tiny apartment froze him in his place.

He stood like a gargoyle on his mattresses, his knees pulled up closely to his chest with his feet planted on the low ground, a head of shaggy dark hair lowered on his shoulders. His eyes found the phone sitting on the hook on the small countertop in the tiny kitchen on the other side of the room and continued to watch it silently as it rang out another five times. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the cat stir, upset by the noise. He watched the cat lift its tiny head and gaze up at him blankly, completely still, as if to say …You gonna get that?

No, Gerard thought back, before lifting his head fully and placing his hands on the mattress, almost as if he were about to change his mind, stand up and pick up the phone anyway. He listened to it go through two more rings before suddenly hearing a robotic woman’s voice speak in, telling the caller to leave a message, followed by the long soft beep.

“I don’t like talking on the phone,” he muttered down at the cat, lowering his head again, fumbling the cigarette between his fingers, feeling that a small place somewhere inside him somberly enjoyed having someone to talk to, even if it was just a small animal.

“Gerard?…Are you there?…Gerard?”

Gerard’s movements ceased the moment the voice traveled loudly through the speaker, freezing up and keeping quiet as if to listen in as closely as possible to see if he was really hearing who he thought he was.

“Gerard…?…Look, if you’re not even going have the decency to answer me, then how the hell am I supposed to ever…Goddamit…” A depressed sigh sounded through the small speaker, and Gerard’s shoulders seemed to droop even further the moment he heard it.

“Michael…he said he called you the other night but you…you didn’t pick up, or you weren’t there, I don’t know, but…Gerard, I’m calling because…your mother…Ah, Jesus, please, just pick up…”

Gerard lifted his head at once, and in some faraway part of the back of his mind, he could hear a scream so distant it was nearly a whisper, his voice shrieking Mom!…Oh my god, Mom… He heard his father sigh into the phone again, taking a long pause of a crushing silence before speaking up again.

“Your mother….your mother is dead, Gerard…”

For a moment, he had felt like were still underwater at the subway station’s bathroom, his head submerged in a womb of airless warmth, unable to hear, smell, or speak, and stuck in this state of being encased and paused in time, for what felt like a very long while. However, much like before, this didn’t last, and the feeling of being paralyzed, paused in reality, was slowly trickled away by a hollowing feeling in his gut, a feeling emptiness as if a cartoonish hole had been sawed through his torso, leaving a perfect circular prism of blankness that one could fit their head into and see through.

“She died two nights ago…we found her in the kitchen and, well…The whole thing is very complicated.”

The distant shrieking seemed to be moving away, fading into barely a whisper before disappearing completely.

“The funeral is tomorrow…At home…I want to see you there…I lo--” Gerard stared at the phone, feeling the cigarette begin to burn through to his fingers, as his father quickly cut himself off, inhaling through his nose and letting out another forlorn sigh.

“…Goodbye.”

With another long beeping sound, the message ended, and the silence seemed to crush down harder on him than before.

Staying on the bed, he found himself blinking and staring at the phone even long after the call had ended. In his mind, he almost thought he could hear his own voice again, the yelling for help, the sprinting to find a knife to cut the rope…An uncomfortable knot formed in his stomach as the echoes of his father’s voice repeated subconsciously in his head.

The ragged shadow of a man breathed in and out steadily through his nose, before blinking and only somewhat registering in what he had just heard.

Okay, he thought as his response, as only a brief moment of confusing pain passed through him, before floating away, leaving him feeling empty if not numb, all over again.

Time had eroded effectively away at dreams of being a famous painter, someone notorious, but he had only come to terms with this, to a small extent. Holding the stub of the cigarette between his thumb and index finger, he watched it burn weakly for a small while before finally, wordlessly, extinguishing the butt directly into the palm of his hand.

A sudden, stinging, wet sensation behind his eyeballs, a flare of pain on his skin, then through all the muscle tissue in his hand, and a vaguely acrid smell of smoke and burning flesh. Harshly biting his lip and clenching his eyes closed, he sat through this until the butt finally burned out, barely a whimper hiccupping in his own throat. His body resumed the hunched position he held before, his head hung low as he waited for the harshest part of the pain to pass, before emitting a deep sigh through his nose.

Feeling his fingers slowly unclamp and drop the butt to the wooden floor, he let himself collapse back onto the mattress, slowly curl together into half of a fetal position, gripping his burnt palm with his opposite hand as the burn’s ache continued to simmer on his skin.

“Good night…” a hoarse whisper rose from the tangle of Gerard, the cat, and the sheets, as the shadow of a man finally crawled to a troubled sleep.

-

He was a child again, he thought, as he sat on the slush soaked stoop his friend’s brownstone, underneath a dull winter sky, hunched together, while poking and prodding at the pink-yellow blister, just to see how much pressure it would take to pop it, to break the skin or peel it off. The mark sparked and stung against his jabbing and rubbing, yet he continued to push it, just to have skin to peel or rip, like a little boy picking continually at every scab that grew back until, at last, a scar took its place.

He sat on the stoop of the apartment underneath a gray sky and the slightest whisper of a soft snowfall, as a light wind clutched and knotted the ends of his flyaway hair. The sounds of traffic, people laughing as they passed by, honking horns, buses, taxis, and subways below him screeching to stops was heard only vaguely through his trance. Next to him, a small blue kennel sat with several empty pillow cases lining the bottom, a gray, curious kitten occasionally shifting around inside.

He concentrated fully on the blister, almost as if it were the only method he had of ignoring the cold whipping at his cheeks. Squeezing the pudgy mark in his palm, he dug a fingernail underneath it suddenly, breaking through the skin barrier, causing a white hot pain to shoot through his hands and tears to puddle up over his eyelids. Shutting his eyes, he pressed his lips hard together and felt the wind sting his cheeks, as the sound of a taxi coming to a gravelly stop, a door opening and some footsteps onto the sidewalk could be heard.

“Didn’t you mother ever tell you not to pick at yourself?”

Nearly jumping at the sudden voice in front of him, Gerard raised his slumped head to meet the familiar paled, nearly exhausted expression of eyes a shade of blue that resembled the ocean just before nightfall, and neatly cut strawberry blond hair. Seeing him there, finally standing on the sidewalk, a head of fare skin atop a dark outfit of a long coat, black suit, crisp white shirt and tie, and finally a leather briefcase hanging lazily at his side, Gerard observed him for a minute, almost fascinated at how similar they both looked, holding their briefcases and stooping miserably against the harsh winter wind.

“Hey,” Gerard said, the pitch of his voice raising ever so slightly as if he were truly relieved inside to see his friend again after his long business leave. He rose to his feet on the steps, ignoring the burning, wet sensations in his palm, considering coming down the steps to his level and giving him a hug, but abruptly stopped himself, upon seeing the man’s bored, unwelcoming, and vaguely gloomy expression.

“So,” the blond man spoke up as he began to dig into the pockets of his long formal coat, fishing out an expensive brand of cigarettes and a shining quality metal lighter, tapping the cigarette box into the palm of his other hand before taking one out and slipping the stick between his lips, lighting it and then slipping the objects back into his pockets. “where’s my sweetheart?” he muttered with the cigarette between his lips impairing his speech.

Gerard turned around and leaned over the steps to pick up the kennel, feeling the weight of the kitten shift from side to side, tiny meows lifting from behind the cage door. Stepping down onto the sidewalk to be at his friend’s level, he held the kennel hesitantly in his hands for a moment, before forcing himself to smirk kindly and present the kennel back to his friend. He watched his friend’s expression change, a small smile of his own as he set his briefcase down on the sidewalk, took the kennel by the handle and held it up to his face with his other hand, peeking inside at his little cat through the thin metal bars. Letting out what Gerard thought sounded somewhat like a scoff, his friend finally lowered the kennel to his side, looking back at Gerard.

“She’s alive, I’ll give you credit for that,” his friend said. Gerard hardly nodded his head as a response.

“So, um…glad to be back?” Gerard started awkwardly, making small shrugging movements with his shoulders, unsure of what else to say. He watched his friend shrug as well, the dull expression coming back to his features.

“I work…and then I work some more,” his friend responded drably, shrugging again as he took the cigarette from his lips and turned his head to blow smoke over his shoulder. Gerard found himself only nodding in response, unclenching and clenching his fist inside of his pocket as the burn continued to sear at his skin, as he watched his friend switch the kennel to his other hand and begin to lug both his briefcase and the cat up the steps to his brownstone. Gerard thought about the night before, his father’s tired voice, the sadness of coming back home to live in his hole, all of this at once, when the need to communicate, to reach out or at least be with somebody, to drive the loneliness away if only for an hour, came to him so intensely that he had to speak up.

“Bob, wait a minute,” Gerard piped up, turning on his ankles as Bob stopped on the stairs and turned his body at an awkward angle to look back at Gerard and raise and eyebrow. “Do you wanna like…I don’t know…go get some coffee, something to eat?”

Gerard watched as his friend held the same dull expression on his face for a moment, before his eyes averted to the side, thinking it over.

“Yeah, let’s go,” he said, readjusting the kennel and briefcase in both his hands and stepping back down the steps to follow Gerard to their usual place of meeting.

The restaurant held a feeling of calmness and quiet as they stepped in and found their usual table, other patrons talking or eating quietly, with only two waitresses moving back and forth between tables and one lone young girl tending the bar.

“You know, it’s almost unbelievable,” Bob started as they settled into their table, quietly picking at plates of salad and pasta. Gerard kept his fork lodged in a piece of lettuce, twirling it around, examining all the details, the different shades of green and tiny white veins, trying to distract his mind from the irking feeling of loneliness and now confusion as to how he was supposed to react to his father’s words. He raised his head only somewhat, to peek up at Bob from behind his bangs, as his friend leaned back in his chair, elbow propped up with another cigarette sitting in his fingers, one leg crossed leisurely but tiredly over the other.

“When we met each other six years ago, it was like an instant connection. She was…fucking perfect…For me, at least.” his friend droned, his eyes wandering around the room absently. “Usually I can’t stand people, at all. Just anyone, people just annoy me, get in my way…But not her.…And now all of a sudden she’s saying I just give her reasons to hate me…Should’ve known nothing would last.” He ended his plight by setting his cigarette down in an ashtray next to his plate, and taking his fork to take a bite of ravioli.

Gerard’s eyes lowered back down to his food, only halfway listening to his friend’s kind of uncanny heartbreak. Thoughts of Frank wandered back to his mind, trying to imagine himself years from now, trying to imagine himself having the same attititude as Bob, withered down from years of misery after being stuck with the same person he no longer loved. He wondered about Frank and where they would be then, seeing and spending everyday with him; would be become irritated or bored? He could only imagine the sparking feeling of excitement and warmth he had in his gut whenever Frank was around him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gerard suddenly heard his friend’s voice bring him back to their lunch, causing him to blink and look back up at him completely.

“What?” Gerard said, caught off guard. Bob had been staring at him

“You’re moping like Charlie Brown just missed the football again,” his friend said in a slightly sarcastic tone, raising another eyebrow at him. But as Gerard looked back at him, he could see the genuine concern hidden somewhere deep behind the dullness in his features.

Gerard blinked again, looking back down at his fork. “Oh,” he said lightly. “…Nothing.” When he brought his gaze back up to his friend who continued to stare at him strangely, unconvinced. A vague feeling of agitation ran through Gerard as his mood suddenly changed.

“Really,” Gerard said again, more firmly, suddenly wishing he had no longer come here with his friend.

Bob continued his stare for another moment before giving up, making an apathetic shrugging movement with his shoulders before turning his own head down at his food. "Whatever," he responded flatly.

Gerard watched him for a moment, silently observing him as if he were a guinea pig in a lab, trying to discern how much had changed in his friend over the one month he was working on the other side of the country. His monotone voice, his frank and blunt personality Gerard recognized and almost cherished after having gone without it for a month, but his appearance had somehow felt different, like a puzzle of These two pictures look the same, but can you spot the differences? Gerard wanted to say that he was imagining things and that his friend had simply been gone for a month, so perhaps it was possible for him to have forgotten some of the minor details; however, it seemed impossible to deny that Gerard almost felt like he was still staring into the same cracked mirror in the subway station, a face with similarly sunken eyes staring back.

Finally an annoyed sigh emitted from Bob as he lifted his head and put his fork down, a gesture Gerard knew already as a continuation of their argument, that Bob was not quite finished yet in what he had to say.

"Okay, I'm only going to say this once," Bob began in his usual tone, something that Gerard listened to every time he heard it, out of what he knew was a small part of intimidation, but mostly a kind of offbeat loyalty, knowing Bob rarely bothered to physically stick around for other people to converse, let alone argue, as much as he did for Gerard. "because I fucking hate people who do this, but..."

Gerard took his own turn at raising an eyebrow, torn on whether he should allow himself to smirk, or frown, unsure of where Bob was about to go with the conversation.

"You know that you can..." Bob attempted to begin again, but suddenly raised his head until he was craning his neck back to look at the ceiling, very obviously and intentionally avoiding eye contact with Gerard. He let out a sigh as Gerard could tell, even with his head completely faced away, that he was rolling his eyes. "you know you can be a total drag sometimes, so...for the sake of my own fucking blood pressure, you should know that...If you want somebody to... talk to, I guess, instead of holding it all in and then I'm here..."

Gerard stared back at Bob blankly, blinking once before feeling a small, amused smile spread on his face. He watched Bob finally lower his head back down, rolling his eyes once more.

"There, I said it," Bob muttered, picking his fork back up to stab into his food.

A silence grew between them as Gerard continued to stare at Bob. Unsure of how to respond, he simply lowered his head and chewed at the inside of his bottom lip, feeling the blister in his palm vaguely pulse with pain to the beat of his heart. He looked back at Bob through his fallen hair when Bob suddenly spoke up again, the tone of his voice changing to a slightly more lighthearted level.

"What do you even do now, anyway?" Bob asked, multitasking as always, scratching at the blonde stubble on his chin while taking out his touchscreen cellphone and quickly checking through it for messages. "I mean, you know, besides work."

"Work," Gerard answered with a small smirk, his soft chuckle showing the solemnness underneath his voice. "Like you, right?"

Bob responded with a similar scoff, playing along with a smile, but letting the bitterness show through.

"What about the holidays, you seeing anyone for Thanksgiving, or are you gonna sit around alone this year, too?" Bob continued, keeping his eyes on his phone.

"Dunno'," Gerard uttered back, silently, secretly imagining Frank in his mind.

"Wait, where the hell are your parents?" Bob suddenly inquired, finally looking up from his phone. "Aren't they going to at least give you a call?"

Gerard grew silent for a small while, suddenly wishing he could simply ignore the question, so that maybe it would disappear.

"I don't think so..." Gerard answered plainly but lowly, as if he didn't want Bob to really hear him. "They're...not good with the whole...talking...thing."

Turning his head away for a moment, he shifted his gaze to the window to avoid Bob's eyes on him, in a small, hidden embarrassment.

"Oh," he heard Bob respond in a different, clever-sounding tone. "I get it." Gerard turned back to him with a questioning look.

"You're that kid."

Gerard's face distorted into a look of confusion as he looked at Bob for an answer. "What do you mean?"

"You know...the loser one that nobody else in the family likes."

Gerard's stare suddenly turned into a dulled expression similar to Bob's signature look. "Thanks," he responded bitterly, a sigh slipping out from behind his lips.

"Hey, look," Bob began back. "I said I get it."

Gerard watched as Bob continued on, nonchalantly adjusting his tie and running a hand through his hair.

"How's this sound," Bob said. "My sister's flying in for
Thanksgiving. It's just gonna be me and her --my dad's been dead for years and my mom only gives a shit about her new husband, anyway, so Sarah and me are just gonna get together and that's it...You're perfectly welcome to, you know...come over, or whatever..."

Gerard chewed at his lip again, contemplating.

"Thanks...Bob," Gerard responded lowly, feeling his mood lift somewhat, but only for a short while, having since become used to Bob's blunt truthes and genuine openness. "But...I don't think I can." Letting an apologetic smile so small it almost resembled no smile at all, Gerard slid his gaze around to the restaurant, settling on the large windows so he could watch the snow gliding slowly downward. Outside of his peripheral vision he could just barely see Bob lift his head up and stare Gerard down until Gerard finally looked back.

"What?" Gerard said, agitation slipping through the tones of his voice, as he saw Bob's signature glare of a furrowed brow, unpleasant eyes and a flat, plain frown.

"You irritate me," Bob finally stated plainly, before taking the cloth napkin on his lap and tossing in onto his plate, while placing his cigarette box back in the pocket of his coat.

Gerard's expression seemed to flatten in that moment, an aggravating feeling slipping into him that he did not normally feel around Bob. Keeping his burnt hand hidden underneath the table, Gerard flexed his fingers and clenched a fist, trying to ignore the continuous stinging ache radiating underneath his skin, almost making him itch. The phonecall came back to his mind, and with it, the prodding sadness that plagued his mind more often now than it had even when he was younger.

He curled his lips in, passing the idea of telling Bob everything, from the loneliness that haunted him during the nights, to his father's call from the night before, back and forth in his head, before his innate shyness took over, pushing him back down a step. He found himself lowering his head to stare at his hands, unable to think of any good response and stupidly feeling as if he were still in high school, unable to speak up against the namecalling. He looked down at his blister for a moment before reaching over an opposite thumb and pressing his fingernail into the mark, extracting sharp, hot spikes of pain throughout his hand, but continuuing to keep his thumb there, inviting the pain, as he began to almost secretly think some part of him may have deserved it.

Keeping his head lowered, he did not bring his gaze away until he heard Bob's voice again.

"You need to blow, my friend" Gerard heard Bob finally say with a sigh, looking directly at him now.

Gerard stared back at Bob blankly, unsure of what to say, remembering that at the beginning of their friendship Gerard figured out quickly that Bob had a different way of saying some things, a way of cleverly disguising his actions with a particular extent of knowledge and intellectual vocabulary he'd obtained only through being a convincing lawyer, until it became apparent to Gerard that the blonde man he considered to be one of his only friends, may have been very clever, but only to hide something bigger than himself.

"Now if you'll excuse me," Bob suddenly said, pushing his chair out and standing up, straightening his shirt as he did so. "I have to go to visit the little ladies room."

Gerard felt a somewhat humorous smile form on his lips, a place somewhere inside of him glad that his friend was back home. He watched Bob look around the restaurant, rotating his head over both his shoulders in a casual manner that Gerard could see through, before briskly making his way over to the small, quiet restaurant's bathroom, taking another look over his shoulder before stepping in and kicking the door closed behind him.

Gerard sat there in silence for what felt like a very long time, watching the bathroom door. A different kind of sadness had lightly draped over him then, as he lifted up the sheet laid over the tabletop, his eyes quickly glancing down at the kennel Bob had placed down on the floor, beneath the center of the table, cleverly hidden by their legs and the sheet. He could see the kitten stir around inside, it's eyes occasionally appearing through the caged door, staring curiously up at Gerard before disappearing into the darkness again. He tried to imagine how Bob acted when he was only by himself, at home, alone with the small kitten he'd taken in from the streets, in an unusual, un-Bob-like act of kindness months before; he wondered if Bob acted anything like himself, sitting alone at the window, cigarette in between his lips, as he would blankly stare out at the city, the lights of cars zooming by or the people coming into his view and then quickly walking away.

Glancing up at the bathroom again, The memory of his father on the phone, the agitation and subtle hint of disappointment Gerard recognized bitterly, fading in the back of his mind despite the fact that it had only happened the night before, suddenly came back to him in a small, passing-by kind of way. It forced him to remember several moments at once, stained and broken shards of being sixteen years old, nineteen years old, or twenty-one years old; his father reading, his brother scowling, or his mother crying. A strange feeling crackled in his stomach, like a pins and needles sensation running through a hand or foot after it fell asleep. For a moment he sat completely still, blankly staring ahead as he sucked in his stomach, an odd sense of confusion washing over him. He wondered about the phone call, suddenly only remembering his father's voice, the mention of his brother's name, and the distant anger he nearly felt just by hearing his father speaking at all, but couldn't recall the significance of the call. He could remember his father's exact words and what he was technically talking about, but seemed to be unable to register into his mind what the words really meant for him, hearing but not truly listening.

Hearing the bell over the door of the restaurant suddenly tinkle incessantly while a jumble of men loudly laughed in a small corner of the place before continuing to chatter away in French, Gerard almost jumped at all the sudden noise, slowly pulling himself back to the restaurant as an intense need to no longer be alone came to him. He blinked, quickly looked around and then abruptly reached down and grabbed the handle of the kennel in one hand and his briefcase in the other. Standing up, he took on the same role that Bob had, searching over his shoulder for eyes happening to glance over at him or waitresses possibly looking at him before briskly making his way to the bathroom door, setting his briefcase down on the floor to grip the doorknob he knew would be left intentionally unlocked and slowly push the creaky, crooked restroom door inward to step inside.

The temperature around him suddenly changed from a comfortable, interior warmth to a dank, colder, claustrophobic atmosphere, as the single, miniscule bathroom's obnoxious fluorescent light glared down on the two men, turning their skin bright shades of pale white. Gerard's vision averted onto the tall shadow cramped into the room with him, a black-dressed figure standing straight with his head bent backwards, an arm held up high, aiming an eyedropper back down at his face with his other hand touching his cheekbone pulling at the skin to keep his eye pried open. Gerard observed in the same blank stance, seemingly unable to break out of his detached trance, as a wide, clear droplet bulged on the tip of the eyedropper the wobbled before breaking off and dropping down onto Bob's widened eye the second before he couldn't hold back a blink as his eyes suddenly averted in Gerard's direction, instinctively checking to see who had walked in. Gerard watched the droplet miss as a result, trickling slowly down his face in a slow crying dribble.

"Damn it..." Bob muttered out of the side of his mouth, rapidly blinking as he brought a hand up to his face to wipe the running liquid off of his jaw. Gerard tried to closely observe him more in the light as he finally lowered his head, showing his face and allowing the light to throw shadows over his eye sockets and unusually prominent cheekbones.

"You made me miss," Bob said, sniffling lightly, before resuming the same position and swiftly, successfully hitting his target.

"Sorry," Gerard uttered back, his eyes finding the sink and the walls. The bathroom was small, but almost cozy in the same way an old, run-down cottage on a countryside might be, the sink's white porcelain having turned an old yellow with rust stains spotting it, the mirror fogged with dust and grime, the floor tiles cracked and lifting as they stepped on them. The first time Gerard and Bob had shoved themselves together into that same bathroom, Bob observed the prewar ceilings and walls and lack of upkeep and muttered something about it reminding him of his grandmother's house in rural Illinois and being afraid that it was a haunted house as a child. Now every time they snuck in their together, Gerard could not help but think that they were definitely not the only ones who came to this bathroom to do what they only ever really used it for.

Gerard heard Bob scoff in front of him as he raised his own head to wait and observe the detail in the slanted ceiling that was almost giving off the illusion that it was slowly caving in or ready to collapse in on itself. Patterns of tangling flowers and dancing lions threaded across the edges of the ceiling, somehow reminding him of ancient architecture falling apart with time, giving him a sudden, unusual feeling of abandonment or being stuck. The entire city and everyone in it were turning into a mere shadow of their forgotten selves, crumbling into a ruin as the rest if the world continued to march into the future. And there seemed to be no way to escape it.

Just outside if his peripheral vision, Gerard could see Bob moving around, sniffling more as he shuffled around, rotating his head around and patting at the pockets of his coat and pants as if he had lost his car keys, before crouching down to take a seat on the toilet that was missing a lid. Gerard watched him, almost confused, for a moment as he ran a hand through his hair and sniffled once more, then suddenly leaned down and took a hold of his leather shoe, yanking it off and setting it down on his lap.

“So nice of you to take me up on my offer, though,” Bob said in a light but somewhat bored tone. “You should know how lucky you are for me to give you this for free.”

Gerard could begin to feel an odd scratching feeling inside of him, an itching craving for something he either couldn't pinpoint or didn't want to admit to himself, acknowledge, shamefully, that it was even there. He watched as Bob suddenly dove his fingers directly into his shoe and carefully dug a hooked finger to the bottom, peeling up a detached cloth insole with visible imprints of the bottom of his foot stamped into it. He tossed the insole to the floor next to his feet then carefully placed his fingers back into the shoe, shifting them around until he retreated back out with two separate miniscule Ziploc bags, each filled with alternately colored powdered substances that weightlessly shifted around under the motions of Bob's hands.

“But, you know, it’s really not that bad,” Bob suddenly spoke up, observing the small bags in the palms of his hands. “You just…need to know some control.”

Gerard nodded his head absently, only paying attention to a small degree, too distracted by the continuous feeling of emptiness in his stomach and the slowly approaching desire to fill that emptiness with something better, to feel something there, if only for a little while. He watched as Bob lifted his head and raised his eyebrows up at him, as if he were expecting some kind of predetermined response or agreement.

“And you have control…Am I right?” Bob questioned in a vaguely demanding tone, continuing his stare at Gerard, who nodded his head once again in a quicker fashion again, starting to become impatient.

"Alright then," Bob said, bringing himself to his feet, and taking each small baggy in both hands, dangling them at the tips of his index fingers and thumbs, to display them out clearly for Gerard. "Take your pick."

It had been a very long time since Gerard had looked into the future with wonder and excitement, unafraid and free.

He quickly snatched the small bag he knew he wanted over the other and moved quickly and harshly, knowing subconsciously that if he hesitated or had second thoughts like he had in the past, he would turn down the offer and go back home, with a feeling of such downtrodden emptiness that he would be stuck in this hollowed, paralyzing state for an amount of time that was never certain.

Gerard knew the routine, although whether or not this was a good or bad thing was something he still silently wondered about. He separated the zipper of the small baggy in his hands for a moment, staring at the loose powder as it sifted around underneath its malleable container, before shifting his eyes up at Bob to watch him take the other baggy, carefully tear apart the zipper seal, then rummage through his pockets once more to produce his car keys and hold the end of the key carefully with his opposite hand while he held the top of the bag with his other. Gerard continued to stare, not wanting to be the first one to take the dive, as Bob swiftly took his key and dug it into the small bag, shifting it around to scrape up a small amount of the powder onto the end of the flat metal piece, and cautiously, slowly bring the end of the key up to his nose and press it flat up into his nostril, before snorting deeply and loudly, inhaling all of the substance on the end of the key in one try.

“Where’s your razor?” Gerard suddenly asked, wondering about Bob’s unusual method that he had never seen before. He watched as Bob repeated this process, continually snorting three or four more times before moving over to the sink, to hunch down and set the drugs down on the porcelain, so he could have free hands to wipe and flick rapidly at his nostrils, in desperate attempts to make sure no residue was left, still sticking to the moisture on his skin.

“I lost it in…” Bob began to answer, his voice dropping to a nasally gurgle. “I lost it somewhere in Los Angeles.”

“Oh…” Gerard responded emptily, continuing to stare at Bob until he finally slowly lifted his head to meet Gerard’s gaze in the grimy mirror. Gerard stared at the face of a ghost, finally seeing what he could feel was out of place before. Sunken and sallowed eyes held blue irises that were shrinking and disappearing into the empty expanding black holes of his pupils. He looked thinner, almost diseased with the suddenly very yellow-looking hair of his stubble standing out grotesquely against the great paleness of his skin. His friend appeared even more tired than he usually looked before he left, however the fact that it took Gerard a while to realize this, made him wonder just how gradual the changes were.

“You know…you know what’s funny?” Bob spoke up, sniffling and wiggling his nose as he rapidly blinked his eyes, but kept his gaze on Gerard, continuing eye contact and conversation through the cracked, fogging mirror, their shared, ghoulish reflection. “The bigger the city you live in…like, the more people you surround yourself with…the lonelier you feel. You ever think about that?”

Gerard lowered his gaze just as Bob stood back up, fidgetting with his tie to either straighten it or loosen it. He promptly dug his hand into the pocket of his jeans and felt the pointed end of his own car keys stab lightly into the palm of his hand, where the blister had popped, sending a brief but strong knife of searing pain straight through to the top of his hand and through the bones in his fingers, a kind of hissing, hot pain that lingered in needling way, that he was beginning to feel like he possibly deserved.

Working through the stinging sensation, he dragged his keys out from his pocket and held the base of it with the tip of his fingers, taking a second to look at the small bag of drugs dangling in one hand and his car key in the other, before blinknig quickly, forcing himself not to linger. He was careful, he reminded himself, as is trying to persuade himself into thinking what he really didn’t believe. However, he must have been, he continued to muse, merely because he was still functioning, still stable, conscious, and working every day. Upon reminding himself this, he felt his feelings about the entirety of it all lift somewhat, no longer feeling worried or paranoid that things would get out of control. And with that he brought the tip of the key into the baggy and scooped a medium-sized anthill of the powder onto the end of the metal and slowly, very carefully so as not to drop any at all, brought it to his nostril, closed his lips tightly and inhaled as deeply and as quickly as he felt he could.

It took three or four deep snorts before the powder finally felt like it had successfully traveled through his nasal system, as he approached the sink and stood close to Bob, to set his own items down on the edge as well, to test his appearance in the mirror. He wiped at his nostrils with the tops of his fingers, the palm of his hand, the edge of his wrist, until the tip of his nose began to turn red with irritation. The powdered sugar-esque residue left on the tips of his fingers, he promptly dipped into his mouth, licking it off like a child eating messy food with his hands, or wiping it onto saliva-saturated gums and closing his eyes as the the dull, numbing, anesthetic overwhelmed his mouth.

At this point in the routine, he knew he would simply have to wait, and not for a very long time. He stood at the mirror, nearly touching Bob at the hip, rotating his view back and forth between himself and Bob, until the speed of his moving gaze began to quicken before he could notice this, his hearbeat increasing in strength until he could feel it underneath his ribs, in his wrists, and in his ears. Rapidly, he stepped away from the sink, and brought himself against a wall, leaning against it heavily, almost thinking he could start to physically feel blood rushing through his veins, feel every last minicule hair shifting as they raised up on his arms and neck.

His eyes traveled back up towards the ceiling, as his surroundings suddenly felt sharpened, acute. He could hear Bob’s continuous, habitual sniffles, his own heartbeat, the sound of his fingers drumming the wall quickly but only subconsciously, the hum of voices and conversation outside of the thin bathroom door, a myriad of different accents and languages blending together into a colorful blur.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the memory of his father’s voice drifted back to him, but there was something about knowing what he was saying was not good, but not being able to know or remember it anyway, was a good thing, something to be happy about. A slow, eerie smile gripped onto the ends of his lips and gradually pulled at them until he was grinning over the entirety of everything.

Ignorance was bliss, suppression was perfectly fine, his friend had finally returned home--he had true friend, that was progress. The rush of everything, the acute awareness of being able to know exactly what was happening all around him in that exact moment, while being able to block out things he wasn’t sure he could approach yet, the past or the future or both simultaneously, was something he was grateful for. He was content to stay in the present, with the ability to feel the hairs raising on the back of his neck, or the bones in fingers twitching excitedly; when he felt like this the whole was somehow filled, as he could no longer focus on the emptiness, but rather the sensation of being a part of the world around him, inhabiting the air and the noise, feeling like he maybe really was more than just Gerard, the loser, the failure that blended in, he was potentially more than that, maybe something better. Maybe all the things he could vaguely remember in his trance, of his father saying about him, to him, were wrong--

He wasn’t fully aware of the fact that Bob was speaking to him, gibberish running out from between his lips until Gerard blinked and saw Bob looking at him in concentration, somehow waiting patiently for an answer.

“I think my mom is dead,” Gerard suddenly blurted out, being able to somehow vaguely remember the phone call and be acutely aware of the memory of it at the same time. He blinked, looking back at Bob, not quite sure what he had said, until he repeated it in his mind and was then, likewise, aware of Bob’s abrupt cessation of speech, followed by a slightly wide-eyed expression rippling over his features.

A horrible silence bred between them as Gerard continued to repeat what he had said in his head, thinking that it seemed, in that moment, like a logical answer to Bob’s questioning look. However, now he was unsure of why he said it, admitted it to the world. To exhale some small but painful, distant ball grief somewhere inside him? Or to even just acknowledge that had happened, that it was there, to himself?

“…W…when?” Bob finally responded, nervously, uncomfortably, confused and dazed by the same rush and euphoria.

“Last night,” Gerard answered softy, his voice suddenly, weakly dropping to a near whispering level. “No, wait…the day before--no…two…three days ago…” He stumbled on his words, caught up in the auditory photographic memory of just his father’s voice, but not quite interpreting the words he was speaking, what had happened exactly. He watched Bob blink absently, opening and closing his lips to form some sort of response or possibly a typical apology, but came up with none of that.

“When’s the funeral?” he asked, speaking lowly and hesitantly, not knowing what else to say.

Gerard thought for a moment, trying to remember but unable to focus, the need to move around, consistently fidget his fingers against the wall, and the sound of his fingers loudly tapping the wallpaper, all dug into his brain, distracting him. He remembered concretely that the phonecall had occurred the night before, and that his father had said to drive back home the very next day, assuming he had called much earlier that day, so that would have meant that very day, right now.

“Today…” he finally answered, again not quite listening to himself, but upon realizing it again, he suddenly became very aware of the fact that something was wrong.

“To-day?” Bob echoed back firmly, sounding awestruck. The tone of his voice made the panicking, downtrodden feeling of some intense guilt or humiliation in Gerard’s chest materialize and expand. In his mind’s eye, he could see himself somewhere off, bits and pieces of his past, a very young child sitting at a kitchen table with his mother leaning over him, his tiny hands in her larger, bonier ones, following the movements of her fingers as they traced out the simple shapes of dinosaurs into flat cookie dough with a butter knife and carefully placed them onto the baking sheet, the sound of the mother’s voice making amusing animals noises or growls, as if to show the little boy what different sounds each different dinosaur made.

“Yeah,” he finally answered weakly, finding his gaze wander back to the delicate detail of the ceiling, suddenly wishing he did not exist in some way.

“Dude,” Bob continued on, a distorted expression coming onto him that resembled disgust or shock. “You missed you own mom’s funeral…That’s cold.”

He didn’t need to hear Bob say anything related to it, to know exactly what he felt, to be fully aware of the gradually approaching feeling of emptiness again, now combined with a mixture of confusion and worry. It was nearly overwhelming, sensing everything around him at once and then colliding with this. In that moment, he thought he might become ill and vomit, unsure of how to deal with anything or at least, ignore it.

He hadn’t realized that he swiftly shuffled out of the bathroom and out of the restaurant completely, stuffing the small bag into the pocket of his coat, only remembering that he must take his briefcase home with him, as he quickly exited the restaurant, abandoning Bob there, and hurried down into the nearest subway that went back to his neighborhood, desperate to go in the direction of away and out. His mind fogged with small, smeared pieces of his life at different times and stages, suddenly everything coming back to him at once in a way that made him confused and almost angry. He needed to go home, if his apartment could have been called that, so that he could be in a safe, familiar place, but alone to gather his thoughts and register in everything so that maybe he could organize his mind, put everything into a practical category or section of his brain so that he could think over what he would do next.

Entering back into the cluttered, cramped mess of his studio, Gerard slunk down onto his mattress, letting his jacket fall off of him, in an involuntary way to simply quiet his mind and calm him nerves. He looked over at the phone as if observing it would help reiterate everything in a clear, more stable fashion, but was only distracted by the obvious red blinking light on the message machine, showing the two missed calls that Gerard knew was his father’s message and his brother’s alleged call.

With a final faded thump of his heart felt gently in his wrist, Gerard could feel the cocaine finally wear off, with the annoyance of the red blinking light and what it meant, the heaviness of his mind, and the loud silence of his home coming down and crushing him at once. A similar feeling of agonizing sadness, much like the night before swept over him as he looked at his home, the message machine and the dirtiness of everything he was living in. It was thoughts of how hopelessly messy everything in his home had become that led to other tangling thoughts of himself years from now, old, alone, and still living in the rusty warehouse of all of the items of his past that he clung onto.

Would he spend his entire life like this,every day of the year, simply waiting for something to just happen? He tried to think that possibly, this couldn’t be true, because Frank had happened, but maybe Frank wasn’t enough. Because there was still a hole inside of him, that made him confused, always confused as to what he was supposed to do next. It was like being stuck in a dead-end job that he couldn’t quit to survive, but continued to hate it and dread it day after day. But eventually, he would come to hate the job and himself for keeping it to so much that something would have to change, or he might just lose his sanity.

He couldn’t fathom spending literally the rest of his life in the same dead-end existence, couldn’t accept it or come to terms with it. But waiting for change had done nothing for him either, this was something he always knew, yet, until just now continued to use as a method, hoping that maybe it would just work on its own. Something needed to be done, brought back, finally approached.

Before he could realize what he was doing, he had brought himself to his feet and harshly opened the accordian doors to his closet, looking straight past the mountain of unfolded clothes stuffed on top of boxes stacked on the floor and his work clothes, the only clothes he took care of, hung neatly on hangers and stuffed together like sardines on the metal rod, to begin ransacking everything. Throwing shirts and pants over his shoulder, separating the tightly packed row of clothes on hangers to look into the very back of the closet, and kicking over boxes to reach to the bottom of the floor, he looked through every section of the closet, scanning his eyes over the scattered debris of everything before spotting the dark blue duffel bag stuffed in between boxes on the floor.

He packed without thought or any organization, immediately yanking the duffel bag out from between two boxes on the floor, quickly unzipping it and pulling at the sides to keep it open as he grabbed at clothes on the floor and tossed and stuffed them inside with no order or neatness to it. He felt obliged to work fast, to get out, grab at anything that was remotely clean or at least odorless, before he briskly forced himself into his bathroom, slapping the light switch in a harried impatience to bring an obnoxious, buzzing fluorescent light above him to life, as he forced the medicine cabinet behind his bathroom mirror open, and roughly wrapped his arm around a row of bottles of pills or liquid medicines and collectively let them all fall into the duffel bag he held above the sink. He avoided his reflection in the mirror as he grabbed his toothbrush, an old tube of toothpaste and let everything fall into the same crushed pile inside the bag, before zipping it back up, adjusting the strap and hiking it over his head to hang across one shoulder before he promptly moved towards the front door.

He wasn’t thinking thoroughly, he knew this, however he couldn’t seem to stop himself as he moved towards the front door and took his car keys out of his pockets. He had his hand readied on the doorknob, before he suddenly stopped himself dead in his tracks, upon feeling weightlessness of having no jacket on himself. Promptly turning around he grabbed his coat off of the bed and carried it in one hand, suddenly remembering the cocaine still lingering silently in his pocket. Hesitantly, he dug his hand into the coat pocket and fished out the bag, looking at it for a moment, knowing deep down that he desperately wanted to take it with him, but was unsure of whether or not he really should.

Out of the corner of his peripheral vision, Gerard could see the message machine still blinking continually, reminding him of his father, his brother, home. He pondered over it for a moment as an instinctual, habitual feeling of worry or anger came to him when even thinking about them, and with that, he decided that he needed it, and stuffed the bag back into the pocket of his coat. Adjusting the strap of the duffel bag on his shoulder again, he let out a sigh and combed his fingers through his hair, sniffling as his nose began to run.

He may have had a plan, however, it was nothing put together and he was still hesitant about it all, only allowing himself to continue out the door and down the several sets of stairs of his apartment building to dump his duffel bag in the backseat of his car, by thinking about everything that had happened, knowing that something needed to change. He needed to make something happen, even if it was just something small.

Wrenching open his car door with an angular hand, not caring about the frigid snow that had fallen on the top of the door handle hitting his skin and sending a shiver so cold through fingers that it was painful, he fell into his car and abruptly slammed the door, twisting the keys into the ignition and biting his lip in an exhausted tic of nervousness as the car coughed and struggled to a start.

He only had a vague idea of what he wanted to do and it was completely uncertain as to whether it would work nicely or fail miserably. However, there was something exciting about that part, the not knowing, planting the idea in his own head and forcing himself into action, hoping for the best but all the while knowing that the worst was more than possible. A cold feeling of apprehension simmered in his stomach, giving him the familiar thought of whether or not he was making a mistake. He wasn’t sure if he was choosing the best time to do it or the worst possible time to act, but either way, it felt like now, he couldn’t bring himself to turn back.

He knew exactly where he wanted to go, and the distant self-hatred underneath his skin was what kept him going, as he pulled out and began his cold trek to the other side of the snow-buried borough where Frank resided. He would need some help, or at least somebody to stand with him and be there when he failed, and while Frank seemed like the absolute perfect person to fulfill this role, Gerard also felt like maybe Frank needed to join him, if only for them to be together again, for Gerard to see his face and maybe a small piece of hope for the future.

Frank had happened, he suddenly thought again, so not all was lost. If Frank could be there willingly, always there with his almost frightening sense of humor and air of unconditional goodness to keep Gerard up, then maybe he wasn’t as isolated as he thought.

He kept this thought in the front of his mind to keep himself going against the fighting feeling of apprehension about it all, remembering all the while, the bits and pieces of the vivid things he could recall, before promptly remembering that he really shouldn’t or couldn’t make himself turn back at that point. And if that were really so, then he pressed down on the accelerator, speeding up his journey to Frank’s side of the city, secretly comforted by the fact that knew he wouldn’t be going alone.