I was thinking I might write a story about a crew of guys who work as sort of "missing persons detectives" for souls. They'd be hired by mourning folks and have to suit up and trek into the afterlife via some ridiculous method and deal with all of Heaven or Hell's illogical physics and have conflicts and have special weapons and tactics, but I decided against it. I didn't want to write about Heaven or Hell as if I believed it. It seemed like christian fiction. I staunchly believed in death as a final experience and found the idea of afterlife to devalue the one we have. If there turned out that there was one, then that was icing on what we hopefully already thought of as a pretty excellent fucking cake. Also, it seemed like a lot of effort. I'm a lazy writer and if I can't finish a thought by the end of a bottle of wine or whatever record I'm listening to, I'd probably not finish it at all.
The house was dark and everything was vaguely fine at that time. I had a little bit of money in my pocket, and everyone was still on speaking terms. No one had fucked anyone and no one had fought anyone and no one had died yet. I used to watch documentaries about people involved with certain scenes (punk in the seventies for example) and they'd show the people now and they'd all talk about how great things were then and now the people were old and some of them were dead and they spoke of the love and the tragedy and the impact of everything on them forever and I feel like that now. But back, then...
I tapped the pen against my notebook and stared out the window. I was trying to come up with something that was good, sure, but that was also true to me. I was tired of writing the things I wrote. I didn't think I needed to change, just that I needed to grow. I doodled a face on the blank page and a dialogue bubble. I wrote "I wish I was a writer" in it and closed it. I hadn't had a story published in over a year and I wasn't sure if I cared. I certainly didn't put the effort into getting them published anymore. I had been writing for the sake of getting shit off of my chest. My stories had become little more than thinly veiled diary entries. That had its perks though. I was writing true and I could always deny whatever I wanted. Sometimes things were fiction and just enough of them where honest denial was plausible.
The evening was coming and I had finished what little wine I had left. I didn't have a buzz but I had an urge to go out and get another bottle or two. I was on unemployment then and I had time to kill. What difference would it make? I reasoned.
I don't think she was in love with me then. Even then. I had tried to write about that, but I couldn't. It was all speculation and I would always read it back and it always seemed so fabricated and dishonest. Now I think that maybe I couldn't focus on it because I didn't want to focus on it. The passing thought of it made it hard to breathe but I did my best to ignore it or tell myself it wasn't true and pretend everything was fine. I assumed I was being self destructive and looked away. I scribbled another face next to the first one and in the dialogue bubble I wrote "I love you" and under the first dialogue bubble I wrote "I love you too."
I decided I was going to go to the store. Everything was vaguely fine then. I had a little bit of money in my pocket, and everyone was still on speaking terms.
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