Note: I can’t believe some of the weird conversations in this are actually from my life.
My fingers moved on their own accord, dancing across and then back again. My breathing was heavy and I was sweating slightly. The air surrounding my body was cold. My body seemed a furnace, burning with it’s own intensity; maybe it was just the beat of the music.
It’s natural now, playing and plucking at the strings, and the sound that trembled through me was right; of a low and steady resonance. I don’t even think about it anymore; it’s within me, as natural as eating or walking. Perhaps more . . . and it’s fast, and blinding, and the moment is frozen in silence even with the chaos of precision around me.
And then the end comes. My fingers slowed.
A drop of blood.
My fingers. I was bleeding. How?
I licked at the metallic thickness; I wished someone else was doing this. I wished someone else was licking my fingers. It’s always more sexual when someone else’s mouth is involved. I think I was obsessed. I was so hungry. My fingers are pinched and sore from the lack of human contact.
“Hey, wanna go out?” Die was characteristically himself; so direct.
I nodded and threw the instrument of my expression in a case. I had to distract myself from the hungry consuming me. I was sincerely tired and sleep deprived, but I would hate myself if I gave in. Drunkenness was always good.
“Who’s driving?”
“We’re walking. We’re being safe.”
Like anyone is ever safe. I looked at my bleeding finger for a reply.
+
He was lapping away at the alcohol, feeling the burning in the throat and the fuzzy warmth in the stomach. His breaths smelled sickly and sweet from all the sweet alcoholic drinks he had downed. He blinked; was that one or three or ten bottles on the table?
The nightclubbing and bar hopping session was over and he was drunk; he remembered somewhere in the health lessons that bubbly drinks were absorbed into the bloodstream faster.
He shrugged; everything he drank was bubbly and sweet.
Kaoru reminded him of a tree. He was a liquid amber tree.
A tree with 5 edged leaves; digitate leaves; the shape of a human hand, leaves that were lush and then rippling bloody bronze. Then winter would strip the liquid amber tree; but it stands ever so stoically for spring to come, waiting for the 5 edged leaves in the shape of a human hand.
5 edges, one for each of them; five digits and a hand they form . . . Kaoru would be the thumb . . .
He was drunk and his thoughts were slipping.
Die looked up, “Hey, what are you dreaming about?”
He smiled, “That Kaoru is a tree.”
Die cackled, “Hey, guys, Toshiya says Kaoru’s a tree. Hey, where’s Shinya?”
“I’m on the bloody floor, you idiot!”
Toshiya closed his eyes and went to sleep. He didn’t belong here in a bar, sitting with Die and Kyo. He didn’t really belong anywhere, at least he didn’t feel like it. Shinya on the floor . . . how interesting; except he was so drunk he couldn’t give a fuck why he was lying on the floor.
+
Kyo stopped torturing the yellow roses and looked up, “Don’t you think it’s lonely here? Don’t you want to get out and do something? Don’t you get tired of this solitude? Don’t you feel restless? Do you EVER feel adventurous at all!”
He signed and licked the blood dotting his fingertips, “Don’t reply . . . I’m hungry . . .”
I sat down on the floor and hugged my body. My world is enclosed, a room without the breaths of others to warm it. “I don’t know . . . sometimes . . . but life is calm without ties to people. There’s nothing to do, but then there’s no conflict either . . . it’s peaceful . . . and acceptable. I can suffer loneliness, much more preferable to sadness.”
He laughed at me, “You can be so incredibly dumb sometimes, Kaoru. It’s the misunderstandings in life that makes it what it is. It’s SO boring otherwise. Like me and scorpions – dangerous but fun.”
“What’s the point in hurting yourself?”
He grinned, his lips dripping. “Pain is what intensifies pleasure. How do you know pain?”
“Because it hurts, of course.”
“But how do you know something hurts?”
“. . . It just does.”
“You’re not answering me.”
“I . . . don’t know. It’s just this crushing feeling that I know is pain. I find it unpleasant?”
“Yes, well, even what is pleasant can only be known when you understand what is unpleasant. Everyone knows this, yet most people still go on not believing it.” He laughed, hysterical and hyena-like “It’s the differences, the duality between everything that defines, my lonely brother, the poor leader of our little insanity.”
Kyo clutched the rose stems and squeezed. He was bleeding. The thorns excited him.
Toru, you’re such a sado-masochist. Kyo suits you. But who are you really?
Male and female; life and death; black and white; blue and red; sense and delirium; dream and the real. The duality of man. To draw a scream from a moan, and a moan from a scream. I love androgynous people for that exact reason; their fusion, their loveliness that crosses all boundaries, their confusion. Most of all, they’re confusion.
Toshiya poked at me with white chalky fingers, blue at the tips. “You hide yourself in your tower and you look so scary. I was afraid of you when I first met you. We all were. Kyo was; I mean, does that say anything to you?”
Die dangled from the ceiling, “If you really want to be alive, you have to admit you can die.”
Kyo cackled and gleefully revealed the scorpion in his palm, “Unfortunate for you, that is the side sensitive to the sting. You have to pick away at the scabs to reveal the new flesh. The beauty of the human anatomy, eh?”
Shinya’s scissors, “It isn’t fair that you receive affections without getting a bit cut.”
RING!
Die’s flaming scarlet hair, “You’re stuck in autumn, alive but dying but never quite dead.”
RING!
Toshiya sat down and laced his fingers together, in his fairy dress with lacy stockings, the funny shoes, the tutu and a pair of batty wings in his hair; all black.
“What are you going to do? You do know that people find you fun, right? They like you a lot, and we love you like family, but you’re not satisfied are you? You still feel disconnected, don’t you? You need a resolution, am I correct? This is the solution we offer. I offer it.”
Ame knocked my head with a chicken drumstick, “He’s offering it. They’re offering it. Take it.”
There was silence again. The calm, the peace, the tranquillity of the monotone; the tick-tick-tick of the motions of the living dead.
RING!
Blue and coffin-sealed.
I woke up. The moon was high.
The door bell rang again.
I looked at my clock – 3 AM.
+
He staggered in ridiculously drunk with Die and Kyo lagging behind him. They stumbled/followed him so blindly, like lost cats. Cats, the musical; they were half-dressed for the part. He smiled in a sloppy fashion and announced they were all just popping in. I imagined theirs faces as poppy flowers and laughed.
He frowned and pushed Die in my face. Hang on to him, he ordered, wagging a finger; disorientating. If he was Kyo, I would have bit it off; too bad bassists need their fingers. He took off his shoes in an amazing show of manners over inebriation; I was surprised.
“I’m sorry! But Die is just so blood-y heavy; remind me to put him on a diet. I’ll force him to eat my cooking for a week; what do you think? His hair tastes like ginger and I don’t like ginger, so I wanted scissors but I didn’t have any with pink elephants on them. Do you have scissors with pink elephants on them?” He was talking like a child, in little lisps.
I shook my head.
“Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar and juice and marshmallows and – um, Kaoru, what’s your favourite ice cream flavour? Sorry, but I don’t seem to know that.”
I laughed and dragged the dead weight to the living room by the scruff of his neck. He stamped his foot like an indignant child, a hand out for scissors.
“Oh, just give me the fucking scissors so I can hack it off!” That did not sound like a child.
“It’s only like that because he has it puffy at the moment.”
“That’s a sorry excuse. Now, hand over the scissors Kaoru, or I’ll be forced to be a meanie.”
Die is snoring softly under the coffee table, sprawled out like a murder scene with his blood red hair. I wonder if it occurred to him that he would be the logical choice to steer a drunken Die; but then, he was soaring and seeing four Dies instead of one.
He walked, or should I say stumbled, none too gracefully with Kyo tucked under his arm and then just as unceremoniously dumped him on a lone sofa and sat down. His hand pushed Kyo’s face away as he yawned. I don’t think he knew what he was doing, because Kyo was having trouble breathing. He almost woke up.
I convinced him to go to the kitchen and we walked down the corridor together. He made some appreciative noises about my media collection and tried to pick up a CD on the floor. He toppled over. He was unsteady and giggling alcoholic bubbles, sitting there on the floor declaring that he couldn’t feel his legs. It was hysteria, and I laughed through dry lips.
“ARGH! WHERE ARE MY LEGS! I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS! SHIT! I LOST MY LEGS! WE HAVE TO GO BACK! I MUST HAVE LEFT THEM AT THE BAR! Oh, they’re right there. Hey, I can poke it! They’re still attached! My leg moved! Argh, yes, the feeling of moving legs! Hey, where’s the kitchen? My legs are kind of thirsty now. Actually, my hair is more thirsty. Um, conditioner and lemonade, Kaoru?”
In the kitchen, I gave him a drink and a chaste kiss on his forehead as he yawned again, cup in hand with elbows resting on his knees. Well, it would have been chaste, except I felt I was invading some sacred space around the body. He was drunk, yes, but I noticed he still had his knees together.
But he asked first.
“Hey, wanna be my parent for a night? Come on, send me to sleep! Just for the cheap thrill of it! Let me go to the Sandman for a packet of fruity dreams! Strawberry-flavoured! Action-packed!”
I sat there watching as he drank, spilt and gurgled the tea. He looked at me with a straight face and then broke down in laughter, slamming his palms against the kitchen table; it’s not an African drum, I wanted to say. More tea stained clothing and the kitchen floor than lips and throat. He hiccupped, and excused himself, succumbing to another laughing fit.
“Um, I can’t seem to drink straight.” His eyes shined as he laughed.
A doll’s neck, a doll’s wrist, a doll’s complexion, and a doll’s waist. Even the ankles remind me of a doll’s. Maybe he really was made from paraffin and fine clay, painted and moulded. I imagined a seed growing embraced by blood, to become a blue flower. But this blue flower punched me and challenged me to a boxing match.
There was a lack to it. The way he is stitched together. It’s wrong somehow. The bones that is, they stick out a little, the curves of them like they’re splitting his skin. He is tall; dolls are delicate and small. Dolls are classical and cold; he was tricky and trendy. Dolls are plump; the lines and mesh of his bones can be seen.
Sitting slumped, knees together but feet wide apart; a figure of a mischievous child. I wonder if he has noticed that children cannot be told male or female by the lines of their body. Perhaps he isn’t flesh and blood.
“Hey, Kaoru.” he said.
I smiled. He sounded real.
He smiled back, words slurred. “Thanks you so very much for being such a responsible, anal retentive leader. You remind me of a tree, with 5 edged leaves. And you smell at bit like a Lift bottle at the moment, which is really nice because I like Lift bottles.”
“I . . . do? You do?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Damn it, what’s with all the yes’! Don’t ask me anything, Kaoru, I’ll just say yes and I don’t want you to ask something insane, because then I have to do it, like a dare.”
He laughed, “This girl wanted to get breast implants and her mother wanted her to. And I said, ‘oh? I’ve never met a mother who supported her daughter like that.’ Do you get? Support? As in bra?”
“What’s that got to do with saying yes?”
“Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! YES! Don’t ask me.”
“Okay.”
“So, what does your scrapbook say about me? Am I good in there?”
“Scrapbook?”
“Yeah, where you keep all this crap about the band and us.”
“There’s no such thing. I don’t keep one like that, sure, I occasionally save stuff that I think is important but . . . I don’t have a scrapbook.” I shook my head and grimaced, “Where the hell are you getting all this information?”
“Nowhere . . . I don’t know. Don’t ask me.”
He got up and hid under the kitchen table with his cup, “I’m sorry, please don’t look at me today.”
I sat there not knowing what to do, feeling like I’d walked in on some freak show. He was acting too weird on alcohol, but what he said was pure and unstilted. It was childlike and from his mind, the stream of consciousness.
“Okay . . . are you sure it’s comfortable down there?”
“Yeah,” he sniffed, “Excepted I need a tissue. Can I use your pants? Thanks.”
I grimaced as he grabbed my trousers and wiped his face. I watched hands reach up on the other side. He placed the cup on the kitchen table with unsteady hands and went to sleep on my shoe.
“Your shoe laces are so pretty! I wanna take them home! Can they be my friends?”
“Um . . . sure, Toshiya, whatever you want.”
He was out and I dragged him to the bed. He bounced a few times before his body sank into the mattress. I dragged Kyo by the wrist and dumped him there too. He slapped Kyo in the face turning and twisting in his sleep. Kyo snarled and tried to bite him.
He bit back.
Kyo screamed murder in his sleep.
Arna.