“Do you know where the word ‘desire’ comes from?” the one time spelling bee champion of Akron, Ohio slurred to numb unlistening ears at the Irish bar not far from Cincinnati.

“It’s from Latin desiderare ‘long for, expect,’ from the phrase de sidere ‘from the stars’, like you’re waiting for what the stars will bring,” he mumbled robotically what his parents taught him decades ago.

Just drunk enough to remember their voices, he exited the bar to the alley, covering himself with newspaper beneath the many smiling eyes in the night sky and swore that he could feel their warmth.

  Sunrays splintered his vision like a flower of needles. Ever since he leased his new apartment with the tall, practically lancet sized windows, the wee morning hours reminded him of waking up in sunny Nagasaki. As the sun always does, great and mighty Helios had gone to bed and roused with a vengeance in the manner typical of deities and high functioning alcoholics. Over the dome shaped apartment building, a yellow warbler flew overhead, entirely ignorant of the current scientific literature which suggested it would not migrate up to upstate New York for at least a few months. This feathery freak had embarrassingly read neither the current literature on its own movement nor the outdated gobbledygook any respectable ornithologist wouldn’t be caught dead with. The scientific aberration would sing its tune not out of defiance but out of an unadulterated and incorruptible need to enjoy its own song whenever and wherever it would like. Meanwhile, a snoozing scientist, resident to the area, would briefly take notice, shrug, and returns to dreams of fairies and unicorns.

David stared out his window and briefly contemplated the world from his bed before letting out a fart which didn’t seem to interrupt the stoic and solemn tone of the room. He felt the buzzing rattle of an incoming text but didn’t feel like looking.

I have to do something different

I should make pancakes

That’s not really different

I should get a selfie stick

Why?

So I have a covert weapon to beat up selfie stick owners

He could see bird shit on the window. He opened the text from his (choose one: romantic interest/burgeoning girlfriend/just friend/or all of the above) to see a single emoji.

Like I get I’m a millennial but honestly what the Hell is this?

I get that every generation has its fads but once upon a time, shooting people in the face for honor was a thing and now it’s gone the way of pogs and snuggies

Alexander Hamilton died by being shot in the face with an emoji

The annoying waspy buzz of another text paralyzed his thoughts. David rolled up the giant wizard sleeves of his Green Bay Packers snuggie to unlock his phone which read, “Hey r u okay?”

Thank God, it’s in English now

I need a Kardashian option on Google Translate

David rose from his down reinforced womb to put on a pot of tea. He picked up his phone and smashed the keys much more indignantly than he intended.

“Why would you think I’m not okay? I’m feeling better than usual”

A few minutes passed.

“U were just sayin lots of things about bank robberies and prisons and stuff and I just wanted to make sure u were Ok since u usually talk about pogs and selfie sticks. Just struck me as weird”

It was true. David had spoken about bank robberies the other night with Alice at considerable length; usually a length only reserved for midlife crisis Dads about their craft beer and autistic savants about trains. He could feel the missing beat of social cues in the way he could hear a song that was off tempo but it didn’t matter. Every word made him more excited. It was barely an idea he had harbored for a few days; more an inkling of a suspicion of a notion. It was the kind of thing mulled over in the head with flashes of vignettes in place of words, the cryptocurrency of thought one used to evade morals or the subconscious, Catholic trademark belief in an all knowing God. He had talked about D.B. Cooper who extorted $200,000 from the FBI by pretending to hold a plane ransom and then disappeared into thin air. He had talked about all the people who tried to repeat the stunt in the years after and were caught, sometimes easily and sometimes not so easily. He talked about how the government spends more on the prison population per person each year than families do for their precious adults at Ivy League institutions. He concluded that you either wind up taking care of yourself or letting the government do it.

The tea began to whistle and play its song as a knock came rapping on the door.

I guess that’s supposed to be opportunity.

The door opened to two Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Hi my name is Joseph and I am in your neighborhood discussing the bible with you and your neighbors. With all the horrible events happening in the world today, many wonder if god really exists or cares what happens to the human race. What do you think about this?”

“Oh he exists and that’s the problem,” David replied.

Before they could respond, David, with much ado, ceremoniously whipped his snuggie around and closed the door.

The day it happened didn’t matter. Neither did the month. The place and time were as relevant as being airdropped into the middle of a train platform situated in an unrecognizable albeit geometrically perfect Midwestern planescape. The life of a twenty something past the time of college could be best described as a pearly purgatorial state of prolonged amnesia; sinners and saints alike culled into their barbed wire senses of security that the trip which issued an origin on their golden ticket would automatically provide them with a destination. With goat horns and tattered monk’s robes, they would shuffle and amble in a semblance of respectably Western queue culture, murmuring inauthentic pastiches of aggression like the dog that growls at the doorbell without knowing why.

From the windowsill of an apartment, one unique and precious snowflake was melting as he occasionally leered at the street; his computer screen projecting an oxygen deprived sky blue onto his pale skin in the darkness. Outside a cat pranced into an alley with a mouse twitching in fangs imperfectly perfected by millions of years of evolution. Under the unrelenting star shine in the Catskills town, a police siren howled into the night as red and blue reflections pulsed against fashionably plain colored minimalist coffee shops, dog boutiques, yarn shops, and the blue collar Fox fanatic pizza shop which provided the town with local color and contained it to appropriate levels like a zoo.

The boy-shaped man in his natural habitat (Fili hominus) gawked at the buildings, vainly looking for where the police cruiser was going or where it was coming from. Born in captivity, the man-child’s trainers had given him the name David. As the sirens grew louder, David clutched his grinder filled with a barely criminal amount of weed.

Would I still have to pay off my student loans if I’m in jail or is it more of a free pass?

Don’t think that! If we know anything, it’s that the universe had a great sense of irony

Drown it out with Smash Mouth

Hey now, you’re an all star, get your…radon?

That’s not right

I bet the rape doesn’t happen as much as TV

It might be like a less rewarding, less expensive grad school

I hate that most of my cultural knowledge comes from TV

Get your gay on, yoplait?

You should be ashamed of yourself

In the clink, people would kill to have the kind of freedom you have

Who calls it “the clink”?

You’d be stabbed in the first five minutes of being there

If I can’t enjoy that freedom, maybe I don’t deserve it

Maybe I need to earn it

It’s get your game on, that’s what it is

In the 2 second marijuana fueled span of panic in which this exchange took place, the siren had wailed sorrowfully into and out of existence as it faded into the distance. His heartrate returned to the standard pace recommended by 4 out of 5 cardiologists for the average American consumer between the ages of 18 and 25. Fully relaxed, David returned to his online forum catered to the needs and wants of white male libertarians between the ages of 18 and 36; a place where he could be accepted and heard if he chose to voice his opinion and it didn’t happen to be already posted.

Why am I so weird?

Why can’t I just be like everybody else?

With another link, David gave another click and into the comments he went. Control-F for “social anxiety.” 75 hits. He deletes what he’s about to post.

Good to see everybody else feels this way

Outside a bottle could be heard shattering, followed by mischievous laughter. It could have been the girl with the sunflower dress and the pin-up girl tattoo but it didn’t matter. Outside a story was happening. Outside one could see in through a warm window the silhouette of a man, outlined only by the search for people in the wrong direction. Around 2 AM, David closed his laptop and locked his door. Proud and ageless, the trees outside would dance and talk as they creaked and swayed. Against the light of the moon, a lattice of shadows would cover David as he shut his eyes.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as TV

I thought it was as close to people as I could get; locker rooms, forbidden gossip. The few friends I told called me invisible. In their asylums, they’d call me a paranoid delusion. I don’t blame them. How many times can you trust the shadows until your sanity breaks? I was always ready for the power. You can’t scale an endless horizon without dethroning the king in the clouds. I never realized it came at the price of loneliness. And we wonder why God listens to the murmurs of mice. I stopped praying to God the first time I walked into a 7-11 and walked off with a fistful of cash. These days I just send him my condolences. I’m a fly on the wall and the walls are closing in.

“So hard to choose,” the car salesman replied.

“There’s manipulation, ego, vanity…”

The sorcerer’s eyes glazed unimpressed.

“But greatest of all is self-delusion because you can’t put on shows without a stage and I aim to sell tickets”

With that, the salesman departed.

“And he thinks tickets matter. Greatest indeed”

Facing the hearth

Fan spins above

Eyes cast upward

Toy tossed skyward

Glass shatters deafeningly

Mother furious definitely

From babes’ mouths

“Brother do’d it”

Unoriginal lies for

An original sin

Come to the place made up of people

Like age old rhyme of churches and steeples

Instead of tiny hands and wide eyed delight

A meeting of minds and an urge to write

One click, two click, three click, more

Keystrokes rapping on imagination’s door

No easy thing exploring cathedrals of catharsis

Which is why I’ll guide you through the digital darkness

Look to the genres for likeminded thinkers

Behold the challenges linking shyest of fingers

Comments, shares and bookmarks in a row

Ways to communicate with those most exposed

Because it’s not enough to write and lock your thoughts away

Like primal appetites to be fed and fought for another day

Prose isn’t your journal to be tightly gird

Your ideas are public and we crave to be heard

We may don the masks of usernames and alter-egos

And we may create pasts and futures as fictional depots

But this community speaks a singular native tongue

And writing is just another breath from our lungs