A Song in Your Head

Gerard is woken up by the sound of a hissing teapot.

It would be inappropriate to say ‘woken up’ really, as he was awake fifteen minutes ago when he put said teapot on the stove. He’s been very tired lately. He’ll fall asleep anywhere, including, apparently, the kitchen counter with a drawing he was working on stuck to his face.

Gerard groans, peeling the paper off of his face, and he frowns again when he sees that he drooled a little bit on the paper. That makes his preliminary sketch pretty much ruined, because the ink now looks blotchy from dribble.

Coffee addiction is a real thing, or so Gerard will enthuse to anyone unlucky enough to hear him start a rant about it. It’s real, it’s life ruining, and it’s very serious.

Gerard is incapable of functioning without coffee in his system. He cannot stay awake, be productive, or function at all whatsoever without coffee. But that codependency is a little unnerving and he is trying to break it. Tea just really isn’t the same though. It’s leafy, and it’s bitter, and there’s no purpose. Gerard wants coffee. That’s all he wants in life. Coffee and maybe a couple mints to get rid of his ever-present coffee breath.

For the life of him, he doesn’t know why he’s trying to quit the coffee addiction, he just is. Maybe it’s because every second thought through his head is “oh I need coffee.”

It’s not even like Gerard really likes coffee. He doesn’t actually care about it individually, but his brain is so wrapped around the concept of drinking coffee four to five times a day, that it cannot fathom being without it.

Gerard would have thought it improbable to experience withdrawal symptoms from a coffee addiction, but the panging headache in his temple would beg to differ. This is all a really dumb idea. Tea just isn’t the same. He should stop this whole idea before he gets too far and can’t turn back.

He doesn’t do this though, and instead, stands up and walks over to the stove to take the boiling water off the burner. It doesn’t stop screaming at him until he removes it from the heat, and then he hears a ringing in his ears taking over the absence of the sound before it.

Gerard bangs at his head a moment, regretting that decision almost instantly, and then resumes his task of trying to get the water from the pot into a cup. This seems entirely too difficult. Nevertheless, Gerard walks over to the other side of the kitchen, grabs a mug from the cupboard above the sink, and walks back. He pours an amount of liquid that he would if this were coffee, and, really, he’s not entirely positive why he didn’t just microwave the damn water. That’s all he’s really trying to do, warm it up some, but his mother gave him a tea kettle when he moved out of the house five years ago, and this is the very first time he has ever used it. There’s something more traditional about doing it this way.

Gerard then grabs the plastic grocery bag on the counter because he still hasn’t put the groceries away from yesterday, and he grabs the box of earl grey. He takes a tea bag from the box, looks at it disdainfully and then leaves it in the mug of hot water.

Gerard then turns around and tries to remember what he was about to do. He looks around, unsure of his next steps, and then remembers Seymour.

Gerard never in his life thought he would be a clingy parent, and he never in his life thought he would be the weird guy who talks to plants, but now he is both. Seymour is a special plant, and Gerard is his parent. Seymour does nothing. He sits in the front room window looking outside at the street directly outside, and he sits, and he waits, and he does literally nothing at all. Sometimes Gerard thinks that he might dance around and do head stands when Gerard turns his back, but no, all Seymour does is sit still and look out of place in the home of a man who draws cartoons for a living. He’s just a four year old Chinese evergreen who does literally fucking nothing because he’s a plant.

“How’s it going, Seymour?” Gerard asks when he looks at the plant. It says nothing, because, and this cannot be emphasized enough, it is a fucking plant.

“Are you even aware of your own existence?” Gerard asks him. “Like, do you ever have the crippling fear that you exist and then fall into an existential panic that you’re alive? No, probably not. All you do is photosynthesize because you are a fucking plant,” Gerard says, walking over to him and watering him as normal. He’s a very unappreciative houseguest when it comes down to it. He never thanks Gerard for keeping him alive, and he never acknowledges that he gets the best seat there is, right next to the window. It’s quite rude, actually. But Seymour is a fucking plant.

Gerard looks at him for a few seconds more, before turning back on his heels and he walks to go retrieve his lonely little cup of tea. He takes the teabag out, not knowing how strong he really wants it, as he’s never actually had earl grey tea before, and does not know what it’s even remotely like. The internet said it had caffeine, so this is the only thing that he could think of that may successfully keep him awake.

Gerard’s life is uninteresting at best. Since moving out, he’s had very little success in really becoming anyone. He has successfully bought a house, and that is probably his biggest accomplishment. It’s an almost hour train ride from where he works however, which is not as big an accomplishment. Gerard is accustomed to a certain way of living, and an apartment would not fill that criteria, so, he settles with the long commute as long as he gets to listen to music extremely loudly and air guitar with Jimi Hendrix.

The best thing that can be said of his job is that he at least, does not have to come into work every day, because much of the work he needs to do can easily be done at home. Another good thing that should be stated is that he also has a salary that’s nothing to complain about. He still hates it though. Gerard had thought that maybe when he signed on for this job, he would have an actual impact in the world of animation, but no. Instead, he’s the guy who draws the most basic of action shots for TV shows about nonsensical characters that have included talking staplers, an armadillo with a severe bout of manic depression, and of course, the ever popular, faceless cereal box which required no skill whatsoever to draw, but an unbelievable amount of stress to try to give emotion. How do you give a cereal box emotion when it has no face, arms, legs, or voice, and all it does is hop around? The answer is that you cannot do this at all, and the two months you spent storyboarding it all go to waste when the project is scrapped.

Gerard could be called somewhat pessimistic. He could also be called a very bad optimist. Either would be true, because he’s sort of on the middle ground of the two. While he is the kind of person who’s constantly hoping it’s going to rain buckets, he still considers the glass to be half full, because there’s way too much damn liquid there and he doesn’t want to be the guy who has to pee four hundred times a day.

Gerard grabs his mug, looks down at the murky liquid reluctantly, and takes a sip. His first response is that this shit is disgusting. His second response is that it tastes like tree bark and a ground up flower, which makes him think about Seymour and this feels like cannibalism before he realizes that he’s a human.

“Seymour, I think I just drank your cousin,” Gerard says, looking over the breakfast bar at his plant. Seymour says nothing in response, doesn’t even scoff by telling Gerard that they’re of a different genus of plants, he just sits there as always.

“I’m sorry if that offends you,” Gerard shrugs, taking another sip of the tea, and then cringing because he’d forgotten momentarily what it tasted like. He’s not sure if this is really worth it. He’s just not a tea person, but he’s so unbelievably codependent on coffee that it’s almost like they’re in a relationship.

“See, this is why I wish we could switch places sometimes, man. All you have to do is sit there and look nice, while I’ve got to put up with drinking this teenage hipster shit,” Gerard says, staring at the window. There’s a vent behind the couch which is almost up against the wall where the window is, and the ledge is just big enough to house the pot where Seymour lives. What this means is that sometimes the air coming from the vent makes it look like he’s waving or nodding, and that’s probably why Gerard doesn’t feel as insane as he should when he talks to him. And he does talk to the plant too much, he knows that, but he doesn’t get out enough.

Gerard is bad at maintain friendships. He’s bad at maintaining things altogether. The only thing he’s done a good job at taking care of is his plant, and that’s because he considers Seymour to be a close personal friend. He has regularly used the excuse “I’m hanging out with my friend Seymour” so as not to have to interact with other human beings. His brother claims that this is socially depraving, and it’s probably incredibly unhealthy, and Gerard very much agrees, but he does not care. He’s just afraid of being caught in the middle of social situations.

He’s very bad at making friends as well, mostly in part because he’s incredibly shy, but the other part is because people can tell there’s something off about him. This isn’t actually true though, because there’s several things off about him, and there’s nothing that’s all that easy to focus on.

For one, Gerard regularly talks to a plant. For another, he collects toy laser guns and has them on display in the spare bedroom upstairs which he uses as an office. Another odd thing is that he took a pole dancing class last year, just out of curiosity, before he found out that he’s not nearly talented enough. Quite possibly his strangest trait is his obsession with origami. He thought that making balloon animals might be similar to origami until he actually attempted that, and ended up screaming so loud after balloons would pop in his hands that the police were called to investigate if someone was being tortured.

Gerard pinches his nose and takes a long swig of the tea, burning his mouth considerably as he does so, and screwing up his sinuses for a few seconds at the strength of the herbs in there.

“Whoa, now there’s a kicker,” Gerard says, mostly to himself, as he looks around and shakes his head to alleviate the watering in his eyes.

Gerard hums to himself as he returns to the kitchen, dumps out the remainder of the tea, and puts the mug on top of the gigantic stack of dishes that need to be washed. He’ll take care of them eventually if someone holds a gun to his head and tells him to do the dishes, but if not for that, he probably won’t. Gerard is not a clean person. Cleanliness is overrated. As long as you know where everything is within a small scope of options, then everything is okay.

He walks over to the door, throws on his coat, and grabs his wallet which is where he last left it on the end table he bought on the side of the road a year ago. He probably should not make a habit of buying furniture off of mysterious venders in front of their garages, but it was only six bucks.

His favorite thing about living alone, Gerard has found, is that you never have to worry about people judging you if you start to sing spontaneously, and very much out of key. This is good, as Gerard is almost continuously singing whatever song pops into his head at any given moment.

As he pulls on his shoes, Gerard finds himself singing, “All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” He blinks a few times, frowns, and looks over at Seymour. “Do you know any songs more depressing than that one about the lonely people? Don’t even remember the fucking name.”

Seymour doesn’t respond, just blows lightly as a current of air hits it from just below, and Gerard takes that as a yes.

“See you after work, man,” he says, opening the door as his memory of the words gives him the only other bit of lyric he remembers, which he sings much too loudly. But that’s what’s so great about living alone, which then gives him a shuddering feeling because that must be where the lonely people belong. Alone.