Day 6

I put your playlist into a playlist on YouTube so I can listen to it and cheer up whenever I want. 

I don’t currently want to feel that though. I did some writing today. 639 words about a deadend friendship that hasn’t grown in nine years. My entire life is stagnant. 

I hate twitter. Why are writers the dumbest people on Twitter? Where’s their wit? They just advertise their novels or blogs or other writers or other books. They’ve got 144 characters and all of them are links or hashtags or stupidity. Fuck writers. Fuck twitter. I hate everyone on it. I’m purging everyone that says anything stupid. I only got it to look at tits and then I realized people from my life were finding me and could see my 100 followers, all porn stars or people I wish were porn stars. 

Blaine Gibson commented on something I posted on his RoosterTeeth profile. RoosterTeeth being the internet company that entertains me 20% of my day. He’s one of the recent hires from about a year ago, very fit, buff, like Captain America. I suggested that he propose to the people in charge there making a fitness show led by him, for nerds, featuring bumbling idiots. “I think it'd be a fun community thing to get us off our asses since laughing them off is only figurative, unfortunately.” That’s what I said to end it. Pretty clever. 124 characters, short enough for a tweet, not fucking stupid like everything on Twitter. I hate it. 

Their YouTube channel has over 2.5 billion views and 7 million subscribers and their personal site has like 3 million members and Blaine has 2,500 friends and he saw my comment and told me to message him to bounce ideas off each other. 

I wanted to email you about it but I don’t know what’s going on and we didn’t talk today and I can’t help but listen to The Bleachers but I’m resisting The Smiths because at least The Bleachers have an upbeat sound. If I put on the smiths, I’m just wallowing, I am anyway, but I can lie to myself since it sounds so cheery when they say “So I put a bullet where I should’ve put a helmet.” 

I might go to the library tomorrow.  

Two nights in a row with nightmares, let’s go for a turkey! That’s a bowling term.

I love you. I need to talk soon. 

I didn’t post anything yesterday because it was too depressing for even this.

Day 4

I’m waiting for the video to render, some fancy term for combining two videos to one apparently. Maybe it means other things, but I’m not looking it up just yet. It’s 2 am. I wanted to upload the video tonight but I’m just too damn tired lately. I’m not sleeping well but I’m sleeping a lot. A lot of that half sleep actually where I lie there and don’t think but I don’t get rested either. That’s what I’ve been doing from about 2 till 4 this week then I’m up and checking my email. 

I tried breaking that cycle by going to the library today. I think I’ll become a regular there, which will be nice once the monkeys are back in school, but right now they’re obnoxious. It’s a library. I expected the quiet mumble, but when there are a dozen kids and their teachers and parents, well, the stereotype of the place is just thrown out. Even the kids manning the scanners were talking full volume. 

Maybe I’m just irritable but the library and anywhere with books is meant to be a sanctuary of peace and relaxation and learning. I was studying story structure. It’s one of those things that people want to call art and either you have it or you don’t, a matter of natural talent, mystic babble about the creative process, yadda, yadda, yadda, but it’s not. It’s like anything else. You have to learn the basics. 

I’ve got the basics of style down pat and experiment with them regularly. Composition is the first thing I learned. Economy, simplicity, color, freshness are the four virtues of good style. Economy: saying things in as few as words as needed. It doesn’t mean brevity, but not droning on and cutting words that don’t have purpose. 

Simplicity: writing as you would talk, not elevating your vocabulary to scholarly jargon unless needed. Is he expressing himself or is he pontificating? Is he wasting his money or is he profligating? MS Word doesn’t even recognize the scholarly garbage sometimes. A lot of young writers and students try to impress with vocabulary but it’s the half-educated, those with something to prove generally, who do that and scorn simple language. 

Now there’s strong language that’s simple like he bolted instead of he ran, but that’s a different thing—color to be exact. Color: strong verbs and concrete nouns that create an image in the readers’ minds. “Something moved across the street” is a much weaker sentence than “An Arab woman with luxurious black hair and a purple shawl crossed the bomb-shattered street, hands over her eyes, crying.” Sometimes this is done through many adjectives and adverbs tacked onto weak verbs and abstract nouns, but it’s an awkward way to make sentences colorful. That’s violating the rules of economy. 

And freshness: not using clichés, thinking of original details and characterizing actions or settings. Not reaching for the default language that everyone uses, but going for original combinations of words or images. Originality might be a stretch (the whole nothing-is-original-anymore idea and all), but freshness means relying on creating things and even if it’s a discovery other people have made, you’re not using it because you saw it elsewhere. 

These are what I’ve known and studied for ages and have down well so even this typing, my thoughtless style, is better than what it used to be, but story structure, characterization, how to incorporate themes and settings, and the like are topics I need work on. I wrote down a lot of exercises and skimmed the early garbage on the creative process (something they admit they know little about so why are they writing about it?) and went to characterization chapters. I studied three and made a few pages of notes and did one of the exercises while there.

Then I went for more fast food. These camera angles in my car depress me like hell. It’s not flattering. You’re going to find me ugly eventually if you only see those. They would not be a good first impression. I try not to worry about them but I do and I can’t email you to talk to you and feel less neurotic about these things, even if I don’t approach the topic, talking to you eases me. And what if I have a panic? I can’t email you right now. It fucking sucks. I need you. I need to talk to you. I hate this. I love you. We’ll talk tomorrow I hope, even if just emails. It’s better than nothing. Just please don’t give up. I don’t know what to do if you give up.

I found a few videos that I never uploaded from Korea. I haven’t watched them but I’m guessing they’re depressing so I didn’t upload them before. Maybe I wll now. It’s late so I’m thinking I’ll go to sleep and hope I just go through and only come out with darkness because that’s better than the memories of nightmares. 

I woke up feeling better because I’d gotten to talk to you yesterday and you were the last thing I saw before going to sleep and when I unlocked my phone you were there and it made me really happy briefly. While uploading and processing videos, I watched Pulp Fiction, the Tarantino movie. I got a donut with Lady and it was only a dollar and it was probably the best donut I’ve had in a while. I made some videos for you and one of gameplay in that Civilization game I told you about where China was being a bitch, going to war with me but getting their asses beat and then demanding I give them money as part of peace talks. I said nuh-uh. I kept on fighting you better believe it till they came begging for an end and I got money out of them. Well, this time, I settled some colonies and killed barbarians and talked a lot about this movie Super that I told you about yesterday, but then my computer died because the stupid cord just had to go and get unplugged. Not even from my computer! From the transformer box, that rectangular brick chargers have, usally they have a green light so you know they’re working but who looks at it? Not me. And it’d been charging fine all morning so how did it get unplugged? I must have stepped on it or something. I need a new chair for doing my recordings. That one has a bar right under my ass and after an hour or two of sitting on it, it doesn’t feel so great. After the cable got unplugged and the battery started to die, I lost my game progress because I hadn’t saved. So I had played 20 or 30 minutes and had the recording of it, but the next recording would’ve been the same damn footage as I repeated the process. I deleted the first take and started again, this time with vinegar and a yawn. It wasn’t great commentary. I was tired and not sleeping so well. I hate not being able to email you at any moment. You know I worry. I have things I want to tell you about but I can’t so now every time I want to, it makes me think of everything that’s going on and it reminds me how shit all of this is for you. I love you, Miri. We’ll get to a place where both of us are just constantly relaxed, maybe not always smiling, but not worried or panicked or suffering or missing the other. There’ll be plenty of smiling but I think if we did it 24/7 we’d have stretched out faces. We need the neutral face sometimes to get it back to compressing. I guess the playlist was a stupid idea. It doesn’t help anything now. I can’t do anything now. You’re deleting the emails to be safe so you won’t have the link to the playlist so how are you supposed to get there? No one can remember the heap of numbers and letters in the URL. I know you’re brilliant but it’s just not worth memorizing. You’ll get to see them after all of this settles. I hope it’s soon. I tallied up the duration of the videos, approximately 10 hours. Sometimes I do math for fun. It’s comforting, in a weird way. WE talked a little today, but not much. I hope everything’s okay. I hope you’d tell me if there were something I could do. I’d do anything Miri literally anything for because you need to know someone cares about you and I do.So please try to remember that even when we’re apart. I’m still thinking of dreams to write for you and making plans for them so when we get back to them, they’ll be even better. More planned out than stream of consciousness and on the spot. I have a lot of the other ones backed up too and they’re all somewhere in our emails. I can send you all of them again, if you want. And the photos and the drawings and whatever else you want. I even have our whole skype conversations archived. Nearly 4,000 pages of us talking plus audio and photos and the emails and man, we talk a lot. It might not seem like such a big deal to go 3 days with so little communication to everyone else, but it is. You’re everything to me. You’re whom I talk to. More than Jordan and he’s three blocks away and in person so there’s not the wait between typing. Yet I’ve never been bored and I only ever want more and I miss you miri I really miss you. I love you so much. This is aging me so let’s hope it ends soon or I might end up looking like Clooney and he’s a good looking fella, but I’d like to be youthful a while longer, though I guess I’ve got plenty left if everyone’s asking to see my license when I go to R-rated movies still or what I’m studying in college. This was pre-skype for me, but when I was a senior in college I was visiting home and getting a haircut and the girl, not even a lady, but someone close to my age, 20s, asked me if I had school and how far into it I was. I told her I was a senior and she was like “Oh really, I didn’t think you were that old. So you going to college next?” I was 22 at the time! I couldn’t grow a beard but I looked like my classmates. It’s like being 10 again and everyone assumes the tallest, biggest dudes are the oldest, but nuh-uh. I’m average height and weight so why do I look younger for it? It must be the hair but whatever. My facial hair is a little nuts in the videos I made today. Doesn’t look good in the least. I didn’t notice till after. Sorry but I shaved so the next video should be better. If it doesn’t rain more tomorrow, I’ll take Lady to the park or the bike trail and make another of those vlogs. I’m hesitant to go to the bike trail because it’s narrow so I need both hands for her leash but maybe I can rip the audio so you get an mp3 of it. I have everything on file, everything we ever did or talked about, I think. Most of it at least. I love you. I’ll send you all of it if you’d like. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. 

You talked to me today. Right when I needed it. I spent the morning watching Netflix but I can’t remember what until I got to this ironic Batman-esque movie starring Rain Wilson from the American Office called Super. Frank (Wilson) is a loser and that’s okay with him because he has his wife and he once helped a police officer go after a criminal, his two shining moments in life, until his wife leaves him for a drug dealer, Kevin Bacon. He’s the best part because he plays it cool like they’re all buddies before Frank knows what’s going on. He convinces Frank to make him some eggs and tells him they’re the best eggs in the world and asks if they’re the brown ones. They’re not. His wife leaves, and he finds out why, but explains it as a kidnapping. He tries to steal her back by pounding Bacon’s car till he warns “Don’t touch my car again.” Gingerly, defiantly, Frank puts one finger on it, provoking him to lose it. He doesn’t. “That’s not what I meant. Let’s get out of here.”

It’s the start of many misdirects, but it’s also the best, one of the two funny ones. The other is after Wilson dons a super hero costume and crouches behind a dumpster waiting for crime. A day passes and he notes, “Yesterday, there was no crime.”

After the scene with Bacon, Frank reveals he’s had visions from God. Children revealed as Satan. His wife revealed an angel. One more comes after seeing a cheesy Christian super hero TV show, The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion), and in this vision, God comes in the form of a Japanese tentacle monster (an earlier scene makes it seem like it’s about to penetrate him but instead it just slices the top of his skull so God can finger his skull). It tells him to be a super hero, to fight crime, to dress like an idiot. He does all of these, but starts small so his failures are small. Kids are buying weed from a dealer and Frank, now the Crimson Bolt, tackles him. They wrestle and Frank loses the struggle and flees. After consulting Libby (Ellen Paige), a local comic book shop employee, he realizes he needs a weapon. He chooses a monkey wrench. It matches his outfit. Now he’s taking down crime. In a montage, he beats child molesters, drug dealers, thieves with varying degrees of gratitude from the distressed. Each time he declares, “You do not deal drugs. You do not molest children. You do not steal.” He’s a little too passionate about beating these low-lifes with his wrench, but it’s done with camp and with quick cuts so we only question it a little. But he’s in line waiting for a movie and these two cut in front of some people. Hearing their dismay, he thinks it’s time the real Frank shows his heroism, no wrench. It doesn’t work so he gets his wrench and his costume from his car and cracks the guy’s skull. It’s the first gore beyond a bloody nose or other expected wounds from a super hero flick. It’s probably not realistic, but it’s gruesome. The guy screams. His wife too. Frank tells her she cut too and he whacks her up the side of the face. The crowd, who only thought of the Crimson Bolt as a joke, now fear he’s a psycho. We’re starting to agree.

But Wilson feels bad. He knows he’s in trouble. He knows favor has turned against him and the line cutters realized his identity as did everyone in line (he changed in the car). The Crimson Bolt’s career is going to be short so he has to rescue his wife while he can. He sneaks onto Bacon’s property, sees his wife talking to Bacon and his goons, and breaks a window. Despite his costume, they immediately recognize him as Frank so they pull their guns. None of the other criminals had guns so apparently Frank isn’t ready to deal with this. The Bolt bolts but gets shot.

Libby, who suspected Frank was the Crimson Bolt, nurses him back to health needing only ten minutes and a whole bottle of alcohol dumped in the wound. Ouch! Then she becomes Bolty, his “kid” sidekick. She’s 22. We’ve lost sympathy for Frank and we’ll never have it for Libby. She’s a sex-crazed lunatic living in a comic-fueled fantasy world posing like cheesecake art heroines. She tries to seduce the morally rigorous Frank, who resists. He’s married. The Crimson Bolt isn’t, so she sneaks in and rapes him, which he submits to. On her first mission, more crouching behind a dumpster, she finds a criminal in a kid who keyed her friend’s car a year ago. Frank is content with scaring him, but Libby goes too far. She kills him. While lecturing her on her recklessness and prepared to end their partnership, Frank is assaulted by Bacon’s men. Libby saves him and the partnership. Frank also kills his first man.

A news report tells us that those beaten by the Crimson Bolt had felony backgrounds so public opinion favors him, but for us, hope for redemption is passed. The audience is now positive he’s a psycho and he’s starting to realize that’s who he has to be to be a hero. He gets guns, bomb building materials, Kevlar, sharp weapons. He’s killed once and it didn’t bother him too much so might as well do it again, so long as they’re villains…I hope. The situation doesn’t really come up, but he’d probably judge them as guilt for littering or some other petty crime.

Now prepared for his final assault, he and Libby head to Bacon’s mansion once more. There’s a drug deal with an African warlord so there are extra men to kill. The deaths are gruesome and made worse for by the KABLAM!-style sound effects written behind the gore.

Soon, the armed men are prepared for the attack. The element of surprise apparently lasts one pipe bomb. They return fire and hit Frank’s Kevlar vest, knocking him over. Libby takes one too, but to the face. Exaggerated for effect, a quarter of her face is blown off. Movie-goers probably went expecting a dark comedy, certainly not Ellen Paige’s brain mulching the lawn.

Fueled by the loss, Frank continues the annihilation until he’s inside the compound. All the no-names die. His wife is raped by the warlord with Bacon’s permission because as he observes, if someone assume she’s just another prostitute, it’s probably time to move on. Bacon kills the warlord in front of Frank and proclaims the two must be buddies, both heroes, just misunderstood. Until now, the car, the rape, the killing, nothing’s fazed Bacon, so when his rage surfaces as he shoots Frank several times, it’s the most horrifying of the many misdirects.

Frank survives it. Bacon and his Bacon bits don’t. Frank’s wife leaves him again, but to get married and have children and Frank accepts her happiness. For some reason, he’s happy too. The public loves The Bolt, but we’re happy to see him go.

As hated as Frank becomes for us, it’s not a bad movie. It’s irony. It’s chaos and anarchy and potentially realism for how super heroes would exist in reality. James Gunn, the director of The Guardians of the Galaxy, deserves this to be called an interesting movie. Maybe it’s more art than entertainment, persuasive and informative rather than moving and relatable. But mostly it’s just disturbing.

I tried writing that like Roger Ebert. He was a master at reviewing films and writing out his thoughts. He gives less plot than I did, but his are meant to ready people for a film and I was just analyzing it.

I don’t know if it shows but that was the best part of my day. The rest was a blur. I watched This is 40, which has a scene where Paul Rudd runs away. Made a cookie, felt sick over it and the soda I washed it down with. Made a video for you. Lady knows I’m depressed and she’s trying to cheer me up but she’s also staying away because she knows I’m not in the mood to play or be fun. Then I went upstairs and started to sleep, but couldn’t. I just lay there crying and thinking about running away and then planned tomorrow to go to the park and sit with your notebook until I could write something. My dad came home and yelled up and you know how that normally irritates me but today I was about to scream back, probably some obscenities, and then I got your email.

We talked. And you sent me that beautiful, sexy photo. I love it. I’ve enjoyed it already a few times. Thank you for emailing me.  

My walk with Lady was a lot better than yesterday, though I really craved Burger King or Hardee’s. Fast food and soda are a few other coping mechanisms of mine. Comfort food and all. I’m trying to resist, to keep exercising, and not be a fat, tooth-rotting mess. I know it’s not important to you that I’m fit, but it’s important to me that you find me sexy. 

I related to Woody Allen too much. He’s got all that sexual stuff going on in his past, stuff with his wife and stepdaughter and so on, stuff I’ve got no opinion on, no real knowledge about, but it leaves him with a bad rap, possibly deserved, maybe even probably. I don’t know, but deserved or not, I relate to him too much. He’s a guy that finds a joke in everything and wishes he didn’t. He looks for the loopholes in perfection. Some of these things everyone feels, surely, to some degree, right? But the neurotic whining, the rambling, the tangents, the worried way he carries himself around people because he feels lesser somehow yet how he looks at them and knows he’s smarter, but it doesn’t amount for much confidence. Obviously he’s a more brilliant version of me so he went out and made a career from it. My mom asked me, speaking very softly like she knew I’d just spent a walk through the muggy neighborhood dusk with Lady arguing with a cop. Not a real cop, but one in my head because it’s been a day without you. At that point less than a day actually. Maybe I finished the walk near the last email I got from you, but I sure didn’t start the walk and god it’s dragged and I need to talk to someone. Maybe a professional, like I said I would but I’m cheap and not working and the editors at the barking rain press haven’t gotten back to me if they’ve got work for me. I know I haven’t told you about it because I didn’t want to be disappointed telling everyone about it then not get it but I deserve it. I have too many fantasies about it that I know aren’t real too. It’s like the movie theater drive time. It feels like it’ll take 30 minutes, that’s the crazy talking, realistically I’m thinking it’ll be 20 minutes but it actually takes 15 and I know this and I know that I know but I just can’t help but hedge a little and bump my realistic expectations to longer. Why can’t I just relax for the extra 15 minutes? That’s time to do something. Well with the editing job, I’m expecting to edit a book or two a month, probably realistic if I get 30 pages a day, though surely there’s more to it than just editing, discussion and fighting with the author over the clichés he wants to keep in and his creative voice and vision and all the while not realizing half of that is crap and it’s the story the people want. I’m also expecting to make these little books—have you heard of the barking rain press? It’s tiny. It’s a dot org. They’ve got 10 genres listed, each has 1 to 6 books listed. If that’s all the business they’re doing—I hope it’s just current releases—then I’m screwed. This isn’t a career. I’ll get a book a year and 20% of sales on some no name writer that’s apparently better than me is going to be enough to cover their advances. That’s $50. That’s nothing. Not even a full release game. I’ll have to get jobs at 10 different presses to make this viable and yet I’m expecting to turn these little books into literature that’ll hit audiences. I’m not that good. I won’t get the license to. I won’t get the potential, or make connections and it’ll be back to Korea. So I was thinking since I’m not making any money and won’t be probably maybe I can’t go to a therapist, but Jordan and alcohol might be some instant relief. School starts soon so I’m planning it out a bit. Planning when to break down to my best friend that I don’t get to talk to you for a day. And in this plan, the fantasy world that’s not at all like the real one, the 30 to 15 all over again, Jordan and I are walking with an opened container—past tense, but it’s got a lid—and a cop stops us citing as a warning open container laws, which say you can’t walk around public carrying an open can, bottle, or bag of alcohol, but in the fantasy, I’m arguing with the cop about the grammatical difference between open and opened and that ours was opened but is not currently open and maybe I’m slurring a little but they should still sound different, right? And he tells me the law doesn’t make a distinction between the two, which quite possibly it has passages for open and opened and both are illegal, I don’t know, but I’m so fucking arrogant that I think I know better. If the law is so fucking stupid to not distinguish between past and present tense then we’re all fucked. Then I go off on verbs as adjectival modifiers and call him stupid and he whips out his pepper spray because I’m irate and a threat. Suddenly we’re in court, I’m showing pictures of my eyes and face and all the other shit that happened because I’m pissed off at authorities abusing their power that anyone doing it deserves verbal shaming, and I’m talking about the assault of the officer, making me fear his violence, and describing his pistol as a silencer used to keep people from speaking out against him, and the battery when he pepper sprayed me and handled me roughly to arrest me, which I didn’t get any bruises from and so no pictures of as evidence but I tell them that it’s wonderful to tell abuse victims that if it doesn’t leave a bruise, even if it hurts, it doesn’t count. Which is all arrogant bullshit and I hate myself for it, but I have a whole walk of this scenario in my head, long enough that Lady wasn’t stopping or pulling on the leash to go elsewhere because she was thirsty for home, and I walk in and I’m getting an ice cream sandwich and my mom asks what I’m doing next like I’m doing nothing now. I hate that. I hate that people assume that in the window that they see me, the tiny portholes filled with oily glass, I tried looking up what they used to make windows out of because I know they used to be cloudy and not really worth looking out but I can’t find it. I think they were oily though. But people think they see five minutes of my life or even a day of it and they extrapolate that that’s all I’ve done. They’re wrong. I spend my life up in my room basically when my family’s home so they never see me and when they do I’m getting food but I’m not 700 pounds. I’ve put on some weight and I’m at my heaviest, but I’m not constantly eating but if they’re going to be ridiculous and assume my life is one of laziness, then I’ll take their same damn logic too and show them I’m not 700 pounds. I’ll step on the scale if I have to. It doesn’t make any goddam sense. I’m applying for jobs. I have people contacting me back once, then I go a bit without hearing more so I send a polite nudge to check in and I get nothing back. What am I supposed to tell them? I took one day to see a movie. I helped Jordan move and see him twice a week but that’s going to change. Our noon to midnight schedule is going to change in a week when school starts and I’ll see him once a week, probably Fridays from 5 till he gets tired because he’ll have plans on Saturday or Sunday with Laurel, so we’re getting sick of each other now so we maximize our yearly time together. And other than that I’m making videos. I’m writing. I’m still trying to get this script finished. I’m applying for jobs. I’m exercising. I’m taking care of the dog. I’m doing whatever chores they ask me to. So when she comes in and asks me in her softest voice, “You’ve been home for a month now. What are your plans?” I walk away annoyed because I don’t have any more than what I’m doing. I’ve got money. I’m looking for a job I’d want. And yet, I’m rushed because I’m still here. I’m a failure to them. This isn’t torture or misery, but I think it is. The 15 to 30 thing again. And I do it to myself when you’re not around. You took me off Skype. I’m not blaming you or doubting you. I know you did it to protect us so if they find your skype they don’t see my name. You probably deleted all the photos and emails and everything too and Facebook and whatever else. I’ve got everything backed up so I can send you whatever you want, but this has to be temporary. The day is too damn long without you. I cry too much. I cried during the new Annie trailer with Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. I cried during the new Christopher Nolan movie, Interstellar, which looks loads better than Inception.  No stupid action movie crap. I cried during the first scene of Guardians of the Galaxy and the theater wasn’t packed but there was enough light on me that the people sitting a few seats over probably could see the silhouette of tears. Annie Hall tells Woody Allen that he’s so egocentric that he puts her missed therapy appointment in terms of his misery. I’m sorry that I’m doing that. I know this is even harder for you and I’ll be here ready to listen or talk or joke or cry or do whatever you want me to or whatever you don’t want me to. I’ll be here until things get normal again if they ever do and I hope they get better than normal but I’m scared. I love you so much and I’m scared you’re gone forever and that the days feel so long because I’m counting my breaths till I can talk to you again and that it’ll never come but I’ll wait and wait till I’m old and miserable and finally wise up and just fucking end it. But I won’t do anything. I won’t email. I won’t talk to you on Skype. I’ll make YouTube videos and blog posts and promise you, the future you that actually gets to see these, that I’ll always be here. And I hope you don’t have too much catching up to do by then because that’ll mean we’ve been apart for a long time and it’s already too long. I love you, Miri. I miss you. 

I love you

Ch. 11

Nickel was at the base of our stairs with a big box at his feet. “Finally,” he said as I walked up fresh from my fallout with the Ostrich, still sweaty. “Carry this, would you?” He was up the stairs with the door closed before I could spit out the dry chocolate muffin and debate.

I lugged the burden, rang it on the rail, and nearly tipped back as the contents rattled and clanked with every stair. The box had been changed to nondescript cardboard. “What is it?” I asked.

He clapped his hands on it and the original label reappeared. It was an oven. I set it on the table next to our other oven, dirty from taco night two weeks ago. “Set it up, would you? I crave something. Not sure what though.”

I plugged it in. “It’s set up. Why’d you’d get another oven? We already have one.”

“This one’s clean. And it has a broil setting. We can broil things! What’s broiling?”

“I don’t know. I open a bag and my meal’s ready. Why didn’t you just clean the other? Can we even afford this?”

He was taking pictures of the new oven. “I sold the other on Craig’s list. Equal exchange. They get a new oven, so do we. One that can broil.” He had taken pictures of the old oven the day we bought it too. “We’ll sell this one before it gets minging too. So don’t take forever with the girl.” He sat in his recliner with a bag of crisps, the contents different from the label. He tried one; it was the wrong flavor. He wanted Hot n Spicy, not Au Gratin. The Hot n Spicy were in the cupboard in a Cheddar bag so he changed the Au Gratin to his preferred kind.

“She might’ve told me to cut my Achilles at the edge of a cliff.”

“Going back tomorrow?” He wanted a view of the hubbub outside, troubadours suckering customers with chart music till the crowd was thick then dispersing them with an original, but his recliner was in a corner with no windows and he had converted the others to drywall panes to help him sleep through yesterday’s daylight. He flicked the wall and it flashed and turned into a window. It was dusty. 

“Our landlord will ask questions if you keep renovating. So will anyone outside looking up.”

“No one notices windows. And I can handle questions. I have all the powers of the universe at my disposal.” He slapped his chest and the plaid shirt he’d been wearing all week changed to a polo. His odor, skin flakes, and the stains stuck in the fibers gathered into a gunk that he flicked out the window and into the troubadour’s donations.

“And you use it to be lazy,” I muttered.

“When are you going to see the Austrian again?”

“Why didn’t you just magic the old oven clean?” I asked.

“It’s science. And this one can broil food. Do you broil meat or baked goods?” He tossed me a Coke and got another for himself. He never drank Coke. His was Grouse or Scotch of some sort. Mine was too. I set it down. He only drank alcohol native to the country. We spent a week in Belarus—thankfully a summer week, and he had vodka at every meal. He even tried borsch-vodka, beet-vodka. That had him puking. “Plus the inner workings of an oven are too complicated to just guess at. I don’t want anything igniting my knuckle hair.”

“It was a waste of money,” I said. “It’s time to move on from Scotland.”

That got Nickel out of his chair. “I thought she told you to drop dead.”

“She did.” I went into my room and loaded my backpack. We traveled light but had camped here long enough that I had things—two cashmere jumpers as dusty as the floor, a letter opener shaped like a broadsword, an unwashed mug for cocoa. My pack was already bursting. I’d leave them for the next tenant. Maybe my pocket could fit that letter opener. It was pretty cool. “Just let me stop at the post office and we can head out. How do you feel about Liechtenstein? Everyone should be able to say they’ve been to Liechtenstein. The world would be better if we all said Liechtenstein more.”

He stood just outside the door frame as it was too short and he’d knock his forehead whenever he entered drunk or groggy like when he was brushing his teeth. He blocked my escape. “You don’t even know where she might be.”

I tracked her by the blog and where the views came from. I ignored the first few views assuming crawlers looking for an email address to spam. “The last views were from Liechtenstein. There were five this week. Two from Liechtenstein, two from South Africa, and one from the Ukraine. Are you up for more beet-vodka?”

“Where’s the Austrian? Where’d you send her?” He followed me around the room as I gathered dirty socks and dirtier underwear and the postcards from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Ayr. I couldn’t find the cord for my external hard drive which was loaded with tens of thousands of crappy cell phone pictures—quite a few repeats to get rid of blur—that I’d share one day. I remembered the cord had fallen behind my bed and at the time I had said I’d get it later. That was three weeks ago. Nickel pulled me out from under the bed so roughly I bumped my noggin, but I had grabbed the cord. “Why are we leaving if you didn’t help her?”

“She doesn’t want help.”

He let me go. He went into the common area and shoved the old oven into the new box. The trays crusty with burnt cheese jangled about and cracked the viewing glass.

“She told me so! She said this is the life she’s been ready for and she had her fun while she was away and she enjoyed it but she’s ready to settle down whenever she has to and she won’t have to worry about anything ever again. She told me this is what she wants.”

“When has that ever stopped you?” he yelled. He hefted the box to our stairway and kicked it down. It slid the first two steps then tumbled and everything spilled. Shards covered the landing. “You’re doing this because they’re the same. Nele is just like her and before you fail to convince her that there’s a better life—again—you want to bail. You’re being weak.”

“She’s nothing like Nele,” I protested. “She’s never had a sexual thought in her life.”

“You spend your whole day hitting refresh on your phone’s email even though you know it’s set to auto-update. And you tell me I waste money but you spend ten times the amount on data just so you can always have internet access, no matter the country, no matter the cost, and you’ve never needed it for anything but Angry Birds. You check the audience stats on that blog and pray for the view to come from a small country because if it’s Russia, we’re fucked and frozen. Aren’t you tired of staring at your email for a message that will never come?”

“I can handle it,” I said.

He stomped down the stairs and kicked the oven before leaving. I watched him tread the streets with a scowl. I was sure he’d knock someone’s cap off if they got too close.

~

Her good-natured teasing was gone the next day. So were our stellar conversations. I couldn’t get her interested in anything I said. My stories didn’t even get lols anymore. It stayed like that for a while. Then things got worse—a lot of talk of how she couldn’t believe this is how her life turned out, a lot of talk like this was it, talk how there was nothing good in her life and everything was just a disappointment. But I could always tell her it was okay. I’d tell her about our future, how our first date would go, how it was a paradox because by the time I could hold her and comfort her, she’d be free of those nasty people’s abuse and she wouldn’t need it, but I’d still hold her at night, every night; I told her how we’d get a dog. She told me to stop living in a fantasy. She had gotten bitter. She was harsh towards me. She’d apologize and I’d tell her it was okay, I could handle it.

I was out of money. Life was expensive. I could live off ten dollars of groceries, but even a cent over and I was asking the cashier to put something back. Few café owners let me just sit in their shops picking at the cheapest food they had, usually half a sandwich. Hostels were for rainy nights, if I could afford it. Usually I couldn’t. I had found a fight club in Munich but I hardly had energy to lift my fists so usually I went home with a concussion and fifty euros. They only let me fight once a week. If I could win, I’d get a hundred euros and could fight again tomorrow but I had nothing left. This one café owner had let me work for her for a week. I had offered to work for tips. Europe doesn’t tip, she told me. I suggested minimum wage. She looked at my passport and said I didn’t have the right visa for it. I wore her down to pay me in internet access and lunch. Then fight night came and I had just enough energy to stay in long enough to get my nose broken, which bruised both my eyes, and I’d get swollen split lips, which were already naturally big—I liked to say they were kissable. But I couldn’t work like that. It scared the customers. And she didn’t need me in back washing dishes either. She didn’t need anyone for the late shift. I begged for all of this. She didn’t believe me that my next fight would go better and I wouldn’t get hit once. I told her I’d stop altogether, a lie, and she let me work another week. Fight night came again and it was worse and she pointed to the door.

: I didn’t see you on yesterday.

Everything alright?

Me: Just got busy.

: ok

The screen stayed that way till my cocoa was cold.

Me: I wish hot chocolate stayed hot. It’s basically the same as chocolate milk when it’s cooled, but I can’t stand it.

: sorry

I should go

I’m not in a chirpy mood like you want

Goodnight

Me: You don’t have to go. Or be chirpy.

: Yes I do

If I’m not it affects you

So I’ll just stay away till I have the energy to talk about nothing like it’s fun

Me: You should let me come get you. That’d perk you up. Where are you?

 : You think it’s just that easy don’t you

Do you know what they’d do to me if they caught us

What they’d do to you

Nothing will directly involve you

Me: But we’re not doing anything. We’re waiting for a chance. What if the only chance we get is the one we make by taking this huge risk?

: You’re American.

They’d stop us at the airport here

I can’t go anywhere without my father present

and he’s not even here.

I can’t go anywhere because my uncle is in charge of me

Me: We could try a train

: That’s not the problem

Me: We’ll leg it. We’ll bribe the border guard. Or beat him up. I’ll let you take him. Get out some frustration.

: Train car feet plane none of it will work!

give up

get used to the idea

Me: please stop telling me that.

I’m trying really hard to stay hopeful

: be hopeful or don’t but it’s going to be like this forever.

maybe you should stop living in a fantasy.

brace yourself for reality

My cocoa was already salted, but a few more drops couldn’t ruin the taste. I wiped my eyes. I sipped my drink. It tasted awful.

: I’m sorry. I know I’m being difficult and this is hard for you too.

Is there anything I can do for you?

It was definitely love because who else could instantly turn suffering around with a gesture? I tried to joke.

Me: Maybe just not beat me over the head with the truth. I’ve already taken a few too many knocks lately.

I felt good enough from her simple gesture that I got in the long line and ordered another cocoa and mixed it with my cooled cup. She still hadn’t said anything.

: ok

I should go then

Me: No, stay. I’ll be bored without you. Or do you need to go?

: I can’t do both

I can’t stay and not tell you how shit this fucking place is

Me: you can tell me. I’d rather you’d stay and tell me.

: no

My mind was full of creaking cogs. She was upset today, but she was upset most days and she still stayed on even if it was just to say hey and then an hour later to apologize for not talking more.

: bye

Me : I’ll talk to you later?

: maybe

maybe if I find one thing to be happy about

but what is that?

what’s there to be happy about in my life?

I’ve got nothing

I wanted to say me. I was a good thing. But I was too scared she’d say I wasn’t enough.

: and now I don’t even have you

now I can’t even talk to you

if you can’t keep me hopeful

at least keep me sane

what about all those promises

Me: You still have me! Always

I’m always here, always yours

Talk to me, cry, vent, rant, do whatever you need

I’m here

: you just asked me not to be honest with you

you want me happy and chirpy and I can’t be that because my life sucks

Me: I just meant I need a few days to recover. It’s been hard here too. And you’ve been really down lately and the whole situation has been getting to me so to stay hopeful, I just wanted a few days where I can renew my spirit.

: do what you have to

don’t try anything too hard for you

Me: I’ll come for you right now

: don’t bother

Me: I just needed a break! I’m so drained lately. Why can’t I have a break?

: take it

just head back to the US and relax

I’ll be here whenever you decide I’m worth it again

Me: I never said you weren’t worth it. You’re worth the world. I’d march right in and get you. I don’t care if it killed me if it meant just another second with you.

: I don’t get a break

but go

relax

complain that your drink is cold

I don’t get to see the sky but let’s give you a break because your fucking drink is cold

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was gaping at the screen and blinking and shaking my head and trying to think but nothing came out. My fingers rested on the F and J keys, feeling the bumps.

: I should go before I screw this up anymore

I couldn’t even type I love you before she signed off.