The Incompletes

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I woke up this morning only to find out that I was still living the same nightmare that appears in my subconscious.

Blacks and whites and grays shroud my eyes with a filmy haze of 1940s propaganda movies.

For I feel as though I am walking to a destination that will never come.

A future that will see no fruition of the success I wish to garner. 
 
The horizon is ahead of me and I have come to the realization that I will never reach it.

That is how I cope with the ugliness inside and out. Pretend it doesn't exist and press onward.

I know it's a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but it's the best I can do.

And that, I can settle for.
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“You need to run faster,” she begged of me, pulling my arm violently away from my body as we tore through the forest that lay just beyond The Backyard.

The Backyard was the term I coined for the rugged mountain sidescape that my family had built our house on. During the day, the house was hardly noticeable—wooden like the tree trunks—but at night it was a beacon of light that shone through the darkness of the perpetual woodlands.

But I didn’t like that I could see my house on the other side of the valley where I usually sat with Collette—the girl pulling my arm—while we smoked and blew away the world, our words catching the wind and being carried off forever. I always thought that the mountainside should be virgin land, and when you looked over it in the light of the moon and stars, that it looked completely flat—like you could slide down it. Or maybe the moonlight hit it in such a way that you could imagine that some horrendous monster was making his way through the forest, rustling tree limb after tree limb as he moved to wherever it was he was going…

Collette and I would fall into our imaginations on these frequent visits to the opposite side of the valley. It was in these hours that fact and fiction—fantasy and reality—would collide and become their own world.

Think Willy Wonka, add a pack of cigarettes, and take away the green-haired midgets.

That’s what we were though; we were dreamers and doers. And dreamed of doing and in doing we dreamed. We dreamed of what we would be doing with our lives when we were forty, fifty, one hundred. We dreamed of Heaven. We dreamed of Hell. We dreamed of nothing—and felt odd about presuming that nothing lay ahead for those who had led pious or wicked lives. Or those that had led piously wicked lives. Or those who had lived wickedly pious lives. We thought it arrogant to assume nothing was beyond this life, and after coming to that conclusion, continued about our business of dream doing.

Collette came to my high school when we were sixteen. For some reason, I felt I needed to prove myself to my peers by ceaselessly tormenting her since she was new and the school was small enough for me to make a name for myself. I wanted to be cool in front of all the guys, so whenever she’d walk by, I would loudly tell them al of those colloquial teenage phrases that are horribly overused and absurdly misogynistic: “Hot body,” “hot bitch,” “Yeah, I’d hit it,” “She’s got a mouth on her and I’d like to show her how to use it.”

Bitch, not derogatory in the commonplace sense of the word when used as I did. But yeah, those types of phrases. Obnoxious? Yes, it certainly was.

I didn’t find out until later when we were alone on the mountainside that she had had a neighbor in her old town that said the same things. One day she caught the mid-forties man staring at her from his house with his hands folded over his lap. She didn’t hold his gaze long enough to see whether he was clothed or not, but her mind had already imagined the horrors that awaited her. She told her mother the story and her mother, like all mothers, had the upper hand in the persuasion of fathers and forced the family to relocate far away from this filthy man.

As it turns out, they moved just in time. That same neighbor, the filthy man along-the-ways, had been caught touching the little boys in the swimming pool by one of the fathers.

The next day, the man was found blue, bloated, and hog-tied faced down in the pool. Nobody confessed, though no one particularly cared for the life of a child molester.

Anyway, after weeks and weeks of torturing Collette, she turned around to look at me straight in the eye—her eyes burning in anger and mine looking confused and off-guard. Her face muscles relaxed into a smile, so mine relaxed too.

And then she kicked my ass.

And by kicked my ass, I mean she punched me square in the nose, blood showering everywhere. I looked at her in complete shock as I tried not to slip on my own life, and in the most bizarre situation that has ever happened to me thus far, she kissed me on the lips—blood and all—giggled, and told me we were going to be best friends because I needed her and she needed me.

As she was discussing—actually it was more of a monologue—this with me, I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ! This girl has gone mad!”

But, sure enough, the next day with my ego still bruised and my nose following suit, she walked up right next to me, put her arm around mine, and started talking like I had known her since she was born. And the odd thing was, I was so comfortable that it felt like I had.

She had no desire to make other friends, but with the way the world works, they are a necessity in getting anywhere and everywhere in life. You may forget about the countless lives you were in and touched because they were so many over the course of your life, but those sole individuals will remember your kindness—or your hatred—and will play a role somewhere down the road. What role they play though, is solely up to you.

So throughout the day, she and I would smile and talk; her gift was knowing the right thing to say, even if she knew it was bullshit and she knew it. Relationship problems. Fashion advice. You name a social-circle problem, and chances were high that she could fix it.

My gifts were the occasional dabbling in personal/social interactions, but my real passion was politics. The only problem with that is that no one really cared about the issues since no one was old enough to vote and they were too absorbed in their own social status to care. I would have to wait until college to debate the mindless followers who acted as if they knew what it was they were talking about, but once you got them past the day’s talking points, would quickly resort to name-calling and obscenities to get their point across. So I just ended up having it out with the teachers, who seemed to find it refreshing that they had at least one student who wasn’t a self-absorbed idiot like the rest.

High school went by quickly for us and before we knew it, we were receiving our diplomas as we walked across the stage, shaking the headmaster’s hand and smiling pretty for the photo-op that parents display in their house to prove they raised intellectually healthy children. After the socially mandatory graduation parties that we attended following the ceremony, we traversed back to our spot on the opposite side, taking in the view of the monster traipsing through the infinite night. I had been taken a fancy to writing in those last few weeks before we ended an era of our quasi-adulthood and I wanted to share it with her since she seemed to be one of the only few that truly understood what it was I was saying.

For hours, we just sat there with no sound but that of the wind rustling through the trees and the sound of the flint sparking on the inside of our lighters. And that was the beauty of our friendship; we didn’t have to say anything in order to deem our time well spent because sometimes you just didn’t have to say anything
to know what it was that was going on. She broke the silence and asked me to pull out my notebook, the one that only she had read from, and tell her a story.

“Fine, fine, fine,” I said with faked surrender in voice and a grin on my face.

I pulled my bag from behind me in between us and unzipped it with exaggerated effort that we had both grown accustomed to, for we both acted like we carried the weight of the world on our shoulders with every action that we did between us. As I pulled out the book and opened it, the pages crinkled about in the wind and I smoothed them down with my hand to hold them steady.

“I am a sub-genre,” I began.

”That part of the story where you thought you fit in, but didn’t.
The complicated sub-plots and character analysis that seemed to muddle the overall plot, but in the end wove together into completion.
All the letters that turned into words and all the words that turned into phrases and all the phrases that turned into pages—they all had punctuations of questions or exclamations or periods.
And these pages of phrases would be nothing but run-on sentences and grammatical errors without the vital punctuation—the characters that give intonation to the way a sentence is read.
I love you.
I love you!
I love you?
They are harmonious and compliment each other quite nicely. One without the other is like having no sun in the summer or fall with no leaves or winter without snow or spring with no bees.
The plots and thematic elements all fall apart without something to hold them together.
And without punctuation, where would I be?—a sub-genre that is plot-less is pointless indeed. For who would waste their time on something as pointless as a story with no characters—no protagonist, antagonist, or moralistic end. Just letter and word and phrase and page of babbling bullshit heard every other day. Those people that talk and have nothing to say, just senseless banter guiding their way.
Each page of this story needs careful planning; to be cautious to only step slightly out of the literary bounds and to make sure to tie up loose ends with a knot—to keep it from slipping wide open again, to write and to finish each sentence with the dash—the curve—the dot of this pen.
And though you may not fit in where you once thought you did, every book it goes somewhere—on a shelf in a store or between two book ends in the house of a man. You will always have a home, though it may not suit you at first, and this is how you learn that to be labeled a sub-genre is more gift and less curse.
The ability to fit into so many categories and yet have so little in common between them all—save for that question?
That exclamation!
That period (dot dot dot)
And those words.

’The End.’”


        Her eyes began to tear and a smile had crept upon her face as I was reading it, but I hadn’t noticed since I was too focused on accentuating the proper parts and making sure that I didn’t slip up on any of the words so as to make the reading more effective, even though I knew no words would be lost with her listening solely to me.

When I noticed this, I thought to ask why, but I knew that she understood what I was saying, because she too was a “sub-genre” who could fit in anywhere and everywhere and yet felt like she didn’t belong.

She looked at me with her deep blue eyes and questioned, “Why do you think I chose you to be by my side?”

“Well, it couldn’t have been for my good looks,” I said flippantly with a smirk.

“No, you moron. Don’t make me hit you again,” she laughed.

“I made the conscious decision to take you along with me because we were the same. We could have never met, and would have been perfectly fine as we fit in wherever we wanted to. But deep down within us, we would have felt alone and tired. When I saw you, I knew that we were kindred spirits and, when we were tired of being everything else, we could meet here, on these rocks that have been here waiting for us, forming and transforming into the very position that they are now, waiting for us to come along some day and share our fantastical reality together. I knew that when we got tired of being everything else, we would have this time to be ourselves.”

"…This time to be ourselves," I thought. How perfectly put.