K.

In the midst of things, I’ve made up my mind on several sloven ideas that could potentially affect everything moving forward.  Gruesomely speaking, it's for the best, and metaphorically speaking, it’s more beautiful than having to suffer, doncha think?  How can you characterize the idea of suffering in just a few words?  Life on a tree branch; hanging on the edge.  One swift blow from mother nature’s breath, and you’re stuck drifting onto the wrinkly roots of a spruce tree, wondering if your life would amount to a hill of beans, or if a landscaper would pass you over with a leaf blower and you would continue your flight in the air, only to be sat in a pile of other deceased, rotting away into a brown pulp in the ground.  Spring comes along and you’re forgotten; the rebirth of dormancy, but at what extent was this rebirth cradled and brought forth?  I picked up my tab from the little silver tray with a pen, and scribbled a name at the bottom, hoping to sit in the presence of natural sounds for a little while longer.  Dense rain clouds rolled through the moon’s face, showering the streets, enigmatically, with a blistering melancholy, creating distress for the wanderers finding their way home from work.  I dropped the pen on the ground, intentionally, waiting for a response from the beautiful waitress walking by; she noticed me leaning over to reach the pen in the middle of the small aisle separating the row of booths against the wall and the streaky, sticky countertop.  My fingernail scraped the side of it, but I only managed to push it farther away, cursing while I did.  The beautiful waitress—who remained nameless by association with the diner’s policy and her own personal ethics—picked up the pen and handed it to me, making sure to smile and she made sure  I noticed it.

“Thanks,” I said, clicking the pen a few times.

“No worries,” the woman said, looking me up and down.  Before she walked away too far, I touched her sleeve, having a thought and not wanting it to flee.

“Hey, wait,” I said, as she careened across the aisle a little more.  She glanced back, seemingly confused from another interaction.

“Yes?”

I fished out a few coins, dumped them into my left hand, and stuck it out, careful not to let the coins roll out and hit the ground.

“Play your favorite song for me, would you?”

Another confused look and the woman walked back over, pocketed her pad of paper, and took the coins, smiling again.  The jukebox was near the bathrooms about thirty paces away, and I continued to slowly sip my drink until the ice was cracking from the lack of liquid.  The last of the sun was down behind the world, showing a ray of orange and purple like a ruffled flower: I watched the headlights flick on, and the street lamps ignite.  A young girl had slipped stepping off of the sidewalk and onto the crosswalk.  There was blood on her knee and on her fingers where she rubbed it.  Her mother walked off, not hearing her daughter’s cry for help against the blaring engines of the anxious workers leaving their jobs.  She cried and cried for her mother, with sweat forming on her little, round face.  I was rooting for her to get her attention; practically waving a large orange foam finger with a number one painted on it like I was at a football game.  Eventually, there was another man a few steps behind them, headed down, and noticed the girl crying her heart out.  The man’s deep bellow—from what I could comprehend from my seat—got her attention, and the mother sprinted back across the crosswalk, and ripped off the bandana she was wearing to wrap around the bloody knee.  The mother picked the little girl up, holding her head against her chest, and shed a tear at the thought of near negligence.  Even children carry the worth for salvation, it seems.  They live sanguine lifestyles, with little to no worries about a house eviction, or an arrest, or getting addicted to drugs; in the midst of things, a child is innocent to a world of churlish, counter-cultured delirium.  Once the people moved along and any recollection of that ever happening disappeared, I noticed a small blood-stained section of the white-painted crosswalk.

“That’ll Be the Day,” by the great Buddy Holly began playing loudly across the diner; it was swell.  I glanced back at the waitress glancing at me, wondering if I secretly approved of her song choice.  I bobbed my head and mouthed a few lyrics in a response.  I ate the few remaining fries on the side of my plate, barely dipped in ketchup.  They were cold and hard, yet I let them collect some moisture in my mouth in order to not so much as suffocate myself.  Once the song ended, I got up from my booth, left a tip, and went up to the waitress again, hoping to make this conversation seem more innocent and cordial, rather than racketeering a few forced words from her mouth.  I touched her shirt sleeve once more, grazing it like passing my fingers through weeds in a meadow.

“I’ll be back again tomorrow,” I said.  She looked at me oddly, probably hoping that I wouldn’t remember having said that.

“I’ll be here,” she said, making the words come out unnaturally.  I walked off, got my coat from the booth, and popped up the collar to protect from the incoming rain, or hail, or snow, or whatever Illinois felt like performing that night.  Just outside the diner, there was a man sleeping sitting upright on the bench, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.  As if common courtesy was absent from my mind, I walked on, listening to the whistling of factory horns, car wheels, grumbling people, and jingles of bells from doors opening on the strip.  Mt. Delver was a large city, but not quite as large as Decatur.  The street signs were smaller and the sidewalks were thinner and rougher to walk on.  Then again, I’ve only heard harmonic stories about life in Decatur;  I’ve never really set foot in the city.  We populated 70,000 of Illinois’s twelve-and-a-half million.  We had a courthouse, some churches, restaurants, a movie theater, a park, a few high schools, a recreational soccer field and baseball field, a bowling alley, a shooting range, a harbor connecting to the lake, and even a hill where the most expensive houses were built.  I’d only seen one other relatively average sized city like this one before, and it was when I was eleven and I visited my uncle Gary in Tennessee.  He lived on a hill similar to ours, except the land stretched more, and he owned fifty acres rather than my family owning a half acre plot with a house taking up most of the space.  It was the summer, and the sun hit the ground harder in the south.  We’d take trips down to the gas station for a fill up and a Coke, sipping the foam off the top of the bottles.  He smoked nasty old cigars, and I watched him cough a few times.  Whatever change he had left over, he’d always let me buy a Hostess Twinkie or Ding Dong, depending on what they had in stock.  After nine, Uncle Gary showed me how to mow the grass on the (what I called) “Driving Mower.”  It was a Snapper, and had a good kick to it—the engine was older than he was, but the paint job was still clean surprisingly.  He promised to give me a sip of beer if I managed to mow half the land by lunchtime.  I took him to that bet and sweated like a pot-bellied pig, dying of thirst, and managed to mow more than intended.  A few moments where the grass was driest, I had to put my shirt over my nose to protect myself from summer allergies that I tried so hard to avoid.  My mother would have had a clinical fit if she heard me talk with a stuffy nose on the phone.  I had my few sips of beer over a plateful of bologna and mustard sandwiches.  Around two o’clock, Uncle Gary flipped on the TV and we watched the Red Sox play the Orioles at Fenway Park; towards the seventh inning, they were tied, and there were a lot of stolen bases.  Unofficially, there was a selection of Boston fans from eastern Tennessee that never congregated, but secretly liked Boston only when the teams played well.  This was explained to me, and I never fully understood the purpose.  There was a homer and the game was over, with the Sox claiming the win, per the usual as my uncle had said.  It was weeks later that I began mowing regularly and hearing stories about my uncle’s jobs working on trains and in factories throughout his twenties and thirties.  He shuttled around boxcars of things all around the tri-state area, along with some long distances here and there along the Mississippi and other smaller cities up north.  I didn’t care too much when he acted interested in telling me these stories; all I really cared about at the end of the day was going to sleep.  About three years ago, Uncle Gary got cancer in his liver and died a year later.  Mt. Delver was just the same as any other drab city, and it wasn’t really a discussion worth having.

Farrington Road became the intersection of Crouch and 28th; and with it came cars performing an array of rolling stops, blowing horns at pedestrians crossing with the right of way, and at least three curb-hoppers—and all of them women.  I passed by the high school where I attended, and saw their baseball field glowing with large fluorescent lights, as one of the rival team’s basemen struck out and another moved to second when the shortstop hit a sacrifice fly into right field.  A dull cheer erupted over the sounds of clouds rumbling like an empty stomach.

“Hit ’em hard, Devil Dogs!”  I screamed, cupping my mouth with my hands.  One of our basemen saw me walking and gave me a thumbs up, running the bill of his hat through his fingers.  Its purple highlights glistened in the mystifying night.

Once I went inside my house a few blocks later, I was home alone; my mother was out and my father was out working.  When I went upstairs to my room, I saw that I’d left a small notebook on the edge of my desk from the night before with a number written in the top corner of the page open.  That number was:

2,401

That number represented the number of days since I had fallen in love for the first time.  A little under seven years ago…and I was still starstruck enough to keep track of it.  Thus, I began today’s query in my notebook that would be the most difficult thing to write in short detail due to lack of space: my suicide note.  I want to make it clear that I don’t want attention, or sympathy, or therapeutic help, or drugs to compensate for the dreary mindedness.  I am completely well off without the uses of psychological blockades; what matters is getting something like this note right on the first try.  This wasn’t the typical thing that you go to your parents to ask how to do.  You can’t ask for help from anyone except yourself.  You have to make it deep, and powerful, and aggressive, and passive, and full of contradictions that confuse the readers.  That’s the point, right?  What is the point?