(c) Katelyn Moore @ The Forest-Blade

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I graduated from college at the beginning of December, and, as a graduation gift/Christmas present, my wonderful parents funded a week-long trip to New York City for me. I went with three of my best friends, part of the group we call “The Usuals” because we’re usually together for our adventures (which include discovering a swimming hole in the Withlacoochee River and taking up the same table at Applebee’s every Sunday). And the adventure of New York began with something none of us had done before: riding a train.


Alexis, Carrie, Jarrett, and I boarded the train in Savannah on a warm evening, bogged down with carry-on luggage containing sweaters, coats, and scarves for when we arrived in NYC. We had decided to take the train because, well, we’re giant nerds and thought four kids on a train was the best cliché ever (Harry Potter? Chronicles of Narnia? Kids on trains. That’s the thought progression, there), and also because we figure that trains will be obsolete by the time we could afford another trip like this. That, and I really hate airports.
Riding a train is a very interesting experience. For one thing, it seems like everything involved with trains is stuck in the 1970’s. The decor of the Savannah Amtrak station, for example, was this very vintage eggshell blue with mod chairs and murals of shipping on the Savannah River. It was all very retro. And then we got ON the train.


The entire time we were preparing for the trip, Jarrett, our resident computer geek, had been excited that there would be plugs on the train so he could use his laptop. Well, when the train pulled up, we got on and were directed to four seats... nowhere near a plug. In fact, there was one electrical socket on the entire car, and that was just so they could vacuum when we all got off the thing. Jarrett was, to say the least, heartbroken. To be honest, he kind of whined about it. A lot. But we shuffled him along to the lounge car (another very retro experience, burnt sienna benches and all), which had plugs, and he was fine after that.


One thing about trains, there are very interesting people that ride them. On the way up to New York, we met a guy, whose name we never got, who just sat in the lounge car and listened to Alexis and I banter back and forth at 4 a.m. He was a little bit creepy, but he laughed in the right places, so we figured he was okay.


There was another guy (who looked vaguely like Stephen King) who spent the entire trip in the lounge car. That’s impressive, considering it was about sixteen hours from Savannah to New York City. He even slept in there, and I know that couldn’t have been comfortable. He, like Jarrett, appeared to be drawn to the plugs in the lounge car, as he had the most adorable wee computer that he typed away on for hours. He also had on giant air-traffic-controller headphones, so we were never sure if he could hear us or if he was listening to music, so we kept our comments to ourselves.


I’ve been commenting that things on trains are stuck in the 70s. The food in the dining car, I think, was actually put on the train during that particular decade. You haven’t lived ‘till you’ve had cooked, frozen, then re-cooked scrambled eggs. Thankfully, I ordered grits, which were just fine. It’s hard to mess up grits. But the rest of the food was just awful. If you go on a train, pack a few sandwiches. You’ll want them, I promise.
We finally got to New York, arriving at Penn Station at some vague hour of the morning that all of us were too tired to really remember. We stood with our luggage in the middle of the station for about ten minutes trying to figure out where to go to get OUT of the station and catch a couple cabs, and a nice man with a cart and a red cap came along and helped us, piling all our non-rolling luggage on the thing and hauling it out to a line outside for us. Red Caps are a godsend in Penn Station, I’ll tell you.


So we get outside Penn Station and get our first glimpse of New York City, and I’ll tell you... It was completely awesome. And it was snowing. Not sleet, not slush, but real snowflakes that you can catch on your tongue (I did). It was a perfect introduction to the city. But then we had to catch a cab to our hotel. And that is a story for another day.

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If you’ve never hailed a taxi in New York, you really have never experienced the absolute hopelessness and feeling of self idiocy that really defines the sport. Maybe it was just me, but standing on the side of the street waving your arm like crazy so an utter stranger can pick you up and take you somewhere for money made me feel just a little bit strange.


And let me say this. Four people do NOT fit in one taxi, no matter what you see in movies. It can be done, but someone is getting squished into jam. That’s all there is to it.
When there are four people and a mountain of luggage, finding a cab is even harder. Luckily, the New York Public Transportation Department (or whoever it is that controls the beehive) decided that investing in big yellow SUVs and minivans was a good idea. Unfortunately, the drivers of said SUVs and minivans are firmly convinced that they are still driving your standard #2 pencil of a taxi. Alexis, Carrie, Jarrett and I knew we had to catch one of these giant monster cabs, but, like when you hook a gator while fishing, its great that you’ve caught one, but what do you do with it when you have it? We hailed one of the SUV-type taxis and started hauling luggage over to it, much to the dismay of the cabbie, who’s cries of “too much, too much!” fell on deaf ears. We really wanted to get to our hotel ASAP.


We managed to get about half of Mount Luggage into the cab before the driver got fed up and shut the trunk on us. Then we realized we’d have to split up.


Not good.


As a preview of how our New York trip was going to go, we split up according to who had cash with them. Alexis and Carrie crawled over carry-on luggage to get into the SUV-taxi, and Jarrett and I were left to wait for the next available ride with the rest of the luggage.


After a hurried conversation to give at least one of the other car’s occupants the address of the place we were going, Jarrett and I hailed our own cab and got on the move.


I know there’s a million stereotypes about New York City taxi drivers, and really, I have to say, this guy was the only one who fit it. The rest of the time, we got drivers who were at least semi-polite and helpful, but this first guy was a nightmare.


If you’ve never been in a NYC taxi (and I hadn’t, up until this point), then really, you’ve never quite taken your life in your hands (unless you jump out of planes for a living). The lines painted on the road are really kind of just suggestions, and the horn is used in conjunction with the blinker to signal, not that you’d like to come over, but that you’re coming over into the next lane come hell, high water, or a giant Mac truck.


It. Was. Terrifying.


And then we got lost. Thankfully, Jarrett is the biggest nerd I’ve ever met (we love him dearly) and had his laptop with him, which, in true nerdy fashion, had a GPS system installed so that he could pop open the laptop and within a minute and a half be rattling off directions to the cabbie like he’d lived in NYC his whole life. Somehow, we managed to get to the hotel before the others, and we were unceremoniously dumped at the curb with all of our luggage.


A very nice man in a white double-breasted coat descended from our hotel (which was up a flight of stairs) and began hauling our rather bulky luggage up the narrow staircase to the lobby like a Sherpa hauling packs up Mount Everest. With the three of us schleping the bags, it only took two trips to get it all up there, and by that time, Alexis and Carrie had shown up, so we had to make a few more trips up and down the stairs to get the rest of the luggage actually inside the hotel.


Once that was accomplished, it was time to check in.

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Our hotel was nothing grand, but it was really nothing to sneer at. The Sohotel is supposedly the oldest hotel still in operation in the city, and, surprisingly, it isn’t very expensive at all. The fact that three college students and a recent grad could afford it for a week says something about it.


The Sohotel is smack-dab between Little Italy and Chinatown, so just sitting at your window and watching the people go by is a neat experiment... except our window opened to the roof of whatever was downstairs (judging by the constant noise, I think it was a bar of some sort). That in itself was actually kind of cool, because we were able to open the windows and, while we didn’t go outside, we did use the roof as our own little refrigerator for the sodas and bottled water we amassed like hoarded treasure. Since it hovered around freezing the entire visit, the roof-as-a-fridge thing worked great.


We got a room with two double beds, and, while they were large enough and all, they were the horrid plastic-covered crackly mattresses that you associate with your childhood years during the potty-training stage. That, or hospitals. So the mattresses were horrible, but other than that, the room was quite spectacular, especially considering how cheap it was. The bathroom in particular was magnificent: all marble, giant tub, and a toilet that tried to kill anyone that flushed it. It was the most violent piece of plumbing I have ever seen in my entire life, and you could always tell when someone was in the bathroom, not because of the tell-tale flush, but because of the scream of pure terror that accompanied the flush.


It might have been due to high water pressure, but the toilet flushed like a ton of bricks falling off a crane (which is something I have an interesting anecdote about, to be told later). It was terrifying. But we got used to it.


The best thing about our hotel was its location. We were about half of NYC away from anything we wanted to do or see, but we ended up exactly where we needed to be. God bless the people who decided the subway system was a good idea, because it saved our feet.


There were two stops on the subway that we used: Canal Street and Spring Street. Both were stops on the green line, which ran up to pretty much everywhere we wanted to go. But one of the most interesting things about the subway stations was just getting there.


Spring Street was the closest stop to our hotel. We walked a few blocks down and a few over and found ourselves descending a staircase into the ground. It was always interesting to walk back from the Spring Street station because our hotel was located in what seemed to be the lamp district. Every store around us sold lamps, chandeliers, and all other manner of decorative lighting. During the day, the lights were on and the chandeliers sparkled. At night, it was creepy. But we always knew we were close to the hotel by the sudden profusion of lamps.


The Canal Street station involved a little more walking and a lot more adventure. Canal Street itself is famous for its street vendors, and those are just the ones you recognize as such. People walking past will surreptitiously ask if you want to buy a “Chanel handbag” or “DVD,” either of which probably was stolen in the first place (all the legit sellers had shops). To get to Canal Street, which is smack-dab in the middle of Chinatown, we had to go through Little Italy, where there were Christmas lights strung across the streets and all of the lampposts, street sign poles, and fire hydrants were painted green, white and red.


There were restaurants EVERYWHERE, and at every one there was someone standing with a menu trying to entice us inside (the food of NYC is another story, really), and between the restaurants were bakeries and souvenir stores.


When you came out of the relatively quiet streets of Little Italy, however, Canal Street hits you like a wave. We had to have some serious crowd-navigating skills to get from one place to another, and we also had to disregard Southern charm and just ignored people, because if we didn’t, we’d be plagued by people selling things.


When we got about two blocks down Canal Street, there it was, looming out of the sidewalk like a mutant telephone booth: the Canal Street Station elevator. We never took it, because it looked really really creepy, but it was a great landmark. And from there, we had to get on the most convenient thing in NYC: the subway.

So NaNoWriMo didn't quite work out (as you well can see).

My New Year's Resolution, then, is to accomplish one writing goal a month until 2009.

They are as follows:

JANUARY:
JaNoWriMo- 50,000 words in the month of January (like NaNoWriMo, but in January, lol)

FEBRUARY:
Hyakunin-giri Kyoso- A prompt of my own invention, based on the Contest to Kill 100 People With a Sword (wiki it). Write a hundred 500-word drabbles about killing someone or being killed with a sword.

MARCH:
10,000 word challenge- Another prompt of my own devising, in which I take an entry from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest and write a 10,000 word short-story from it.

APRIL:
Bad Sex In Fiction challenge- write at least a 500-word entry for the worst sex scene in fiction.

MAY:
15,000 word challenge- Use an entry from the Little Lytton contest and write a 15,000-word story from the prompt.

JUNE:
ScriptFrenzy- write a full-length screenplay or stage play in June.

JULY:
20,000 word challenge- Write a 20,000-word story about the worst week ever.

AUGUST:
FanFic100- Use all 100 prompts for the FanFic100, writing a least 1,000 words for each prompt.

SEPTEMBER:
20 Chapter Challenge- write 20 chapters of 2,000 words each.

OCTOBER:
Bards& Sages Speculative Fiction Contest- write a horror story that uses traditional monster archetypes.

NOVEMBER:
NaNoWriMo- we know how this goes. I should be able to do it by this time. 50,000 words in November.

DECEMBER:
Story of a Year- in which I basically write 50,000 words about writing a shitton of words in 2008.


So, doing the math (hey, I'm a writer, not a mathematician), that's about 445,566 words in 2008. That's a lot. Woot. :)

So I totally didn't make the deadline for NaNoWriMo... but then I knew I wouldn't. Everything started to close itself up and I ran out of time on several things that were actually pertinent to real life, so I had to take care of them instead of write my 50,000.

But now I've gone and graduated and once I'm all moved in to my temporary place, I'm going to start back on my story again and see if I can't get it to a stopping place. I really like what I've written thus far and would like to continue it, even if it is just random rantings from my head. So keep checking back (if there is, indeed, anyone reading) for new installments.

Lyric sat in a tacky booth at the local Tex-Mex restaurant, trying not to gag at Jude and her boyfriend being cute. She shouldn’t be bitter. After all, she had pushed them together so neither would be lonely when she was gone. She didn’t know it’d work as well as it did. And now she was stuck watching them be cute and trying to hold herself together because she wanted to leap across the table and unsuction them from each other and scream at them, telling them that they had no right to happiness when she was being denied it every moment of every day she pretended to be happy and peppy and okay with the situation with him.

She put her face in her hands with the pretense of using the straw in her cup of soda, but instead sagged into them, hiding her despair behind the loose blonde locks she sported and allowing her face to relax out of the smile she kept pasted on her face when they asked her how it was going with him.

It hurt her to hear Jude talking about her boyfriend, the boy with the same name as him, and realize that what Jude had was something Lyric would never have with her boy. Ever. Never ever ever.

It wasn’t going to happen.

The realization hit with such force that Lyric almost knocked over her soda. She hastily caught it and, with a smile to the lovebirds across from her, stood and announced her lavatorial intentions.

She almost wished she could stand to smoke, because she had a great feeling that standing in the cold and smoking a cigarette would just completely sum up her existence at that moment.

Instead, she locked herself in a utilitarian-grey stall that reeked of those little pink cakes they shoved in urinals and, after a cursory glance at the toilet seat and a quick runaround with a piece of toilet paper, she sat, no intention of using the facility for its intended purpose, and put her head in her hands, trying her level best not to just lose it right there in the bathroom of the Tex-Mex place.

She knew that if she came out of the bathroom with red eyes, the two across from her would immediately go into concerned parent mode, then go into the “hunt for blood” mode. They would demand to know what was up, and she knew she couldn’t articulate it to their satisfaction and they would take it all wrong and confront him about it, claiming that he hurt her.

Really, she was just hurting herself.

She knew what was going on the moment she kissed him the first time. She knew that she would never have with him what Jude had with hers.

But somewhere deep inside herself, she had hoped. She had hoped so hard and so long and so deep and so secret that she had believed it didn’t matter that they would never date, would never be able to be cutesy in public, would never have a relationship. She had convinced herself it didn’t matter while her insides rotted away with that knowledge that it did, in fact, matter a lot.

She tugged on her hair, running her fingers through it to neaten the perpetually on-the-verge-of-a-mass-revolt locks that covered her skull, fingers catching in the ends. The muscles in her arms gave out in defeat, and she just let her arms dangle, hands caught in her hair.

Lyric made no move to untangle the mess, instead hunching over so that she looked almost like a refugee or someone so strung out on drugs that they didn’t realize how completely boneless they had become.

Had she not been in a public bathroom, she would have allowed herself to slump off the toilet and curl up around the cool porcelain, but the restroom was not her own and was not sanitary by any stretch of imagination.

But boy did she want to.

She wanted someone to come in and find her that could read her mind and know exactly what she was going through and what she wanted and be able to get it for her.

She wanted her mother, but even she couldn’t help Lyric in this, because she had know clue what her almost-grown daughter was doing. As far as Lyric’s mother was concerned, her daughter was on top of all of her classes instead of just barely scraping by and had half of her apartment packed instead of most of it flung about like child’s toys. Her mother thought that Lyric was doing a lot better than the girl actually was.
There wasn’t really anything to be depressed about, she supposed, sighing and making the curtain of her hair ripple in the breeze, the residual soda smell on her breath driving the sickly sweet urinal-cake scent from her for one blissful moment before it returned like a swarm of flies.

She had a job waiting for her. She would have a house in a matter of weeks. All she had to do was pass her classes and get out and her life was set up for her.

The thought somehow made her stomach lurch, but she wasn’t sure if it was a good lurch or bad.

She had everything going for her, if she could just concentrate and get through this semester of school, this last semester. If she could concentrate on her schoolwork instead of worrying about when she would next see him and what they would do and if she needed condoms when they went out stargazing because he might allow her into the sanctuary of his apartment and they might have sex (it was never making love, because he did not love her like that.) If she could get her classwork done and still devote time to the sorority she was rapidly becoming disenchanted with. They yearbook for the organization was due the week before, and she still had only completed one page. She was missing deadlines left and right and the only thing she had to show for it was a niggling worry in the back of her mind that always accompanied those decisions she really shouldn’t have made.

When Jude came into the restroom looking for her, she really wasn’t surprised. She assured her best friend that she was fine, just a little stomach upset, and stood, working the zipper on her jeans in a poor imitation of actual use and flushing the toilet, making it seem as if she had been using it for its intended purpose instead of a place to hide while she moped about like an idiot teenager.

She fluffed her hair and straightened her shirt, then pushed up her glasses further on her nose and hoped to god she didn’t look as bad as she felt. She opened the stall to Jude’s concerned face and smiled to ward off the inevidable “are you sure you’re okay”s, washing her hands in the sink and using the hand dryer for the first time in years because Jude wouldn’t even attempt to talk over it.

By the time the dryer stopped and Lyric’s hands were dry, she had come up with a topic to distract Jude from her friend’s roughly-concealed depression and immediately launched into it, not giving Jude a chance to interject with questions of her own.

Sometimes, Lyric didn’t know how she became so smart.

Then she would realize that she only seemed incredibly smart during those moments because she was a monumental idiot the rest of the time.

She burned with that thought all the rest of the way through dinner, stabbing at her burrito and pointedly not watching the couple on the other side of the table as they sampled bits of each other’s plates and generally were adorable in that “we just got together and we’re happy way.”

She managed to not strangle them.

It was incredibly stupid.


She couldn’t sleep.


She couldn’t eat.


She couldn’t do any of the mountain of work she needed to do to pass her classes.


She couldn’t even force herself to pack anything else.


And it was all his fault.


Actually, to be perfectly honest, she blamed the shit out of Jude and her boyfriend. They took their dear sweet fucking time and made her lose hers.


Had they just done what they were supposed to do and GET THERE when they said they would, she would be with him and all would be well. But no. Jude had to do whatever the fuck it is she and her boyfriend did when they were alone and take forfuckingever to get to Lyric’s apartment to get the GIFT she was giving them, and she lost her window of opportunity.


An entire day up to her elbows in the dust of her past forcing the tears back through sheer will because she just knew she’d see him that night, and then her best friend had to make her miss the so so small window of opportunity that made the difference between a night with him and a night alone with tears making tracks down the cheeks that would have been covered in dust and powdered ginkgo leaves from the previous fall had she not showered in anticipation of seeing him that night.


But no.


Whatever the hell it was, the relationship, the twisted sick thing that they shared, the thing that made him call her his “Alabama sister” no matter how jokingly, had to stop. And it was going to in less than a month, and the shuffle mode of her music player kept reminding her by playing all the saddest songs she owned no matter what she did.


Why did she have to be in love with him?


It would have been so easy if he had never returned her affections.


But he did.


And now Lyric was drowning and no one could help her. She had cast her entire lot with him, even going so far as to exclude people she had previously almost considered friends (but who had, in fact screwed her over several times and their attitudes towards him were just the final straw that made her drop them like hot potatoes). Everything with him was about timing, and if the timing wasn’t right, then she was alone.


She was always alone.


She was so tired of being alone.


Even though she portrayed herself as the one that didn’t need a damn one of the people around her, she was hopeless without him. She had allowed herself to become attached in exactly the way she swore up and down she wouldn’t, and she felt like it was killing her.


Lyric sat at her cluttered table in her living room and looked through blurry eyes at the destruction of the day—the boxes of belongings, the piles of paper destined for the trash can, the things that went in the trunk in her room, the leaning bike in the corner that she really should be using… The wreck of the day that had been so hurtful to her and was not getting better.


She knew she was going to cry herself to sleep that night, and it made her so mad that she wanted to hit something.


What did she have to do to be worthy of him? she wondered.


And she hated herself for wondering that. She was not one to change herself to suit the needs of others, but it had gotten to the point where she would do anything he asked of her to gain his undying affection. Shit, she’d take dying affection. She’d take what she could get, but what she was getting wasn’t enough.


She wanted to see his name next to hers on the profile of her stupid social profile. She wanted people to look at her and know that he was with her and she with him. She wanted the “about time”s and the “can you believe the nerve”s that she knew would come. She wanted all of the consequences of being with him.


But he didn’t want a relationship.


She was leaving in a month; how much harm could it do?


So he was afraid of love, afraid of affection.


He wasn’t stupid. He knew how she felt about him.


And like the good boy he was, apparently he indulged her.


But really. Did it have to be this way? Did she have to sit alone and hurt so that he could heal? She hated his exes so much for making him the way he was, and she found, when she looked deep in herself, that she was angry with him for allowing her to love him and not to return it.


She supposed he returned it, in his way. But not the right way. Not the way that would make her happy. And he never would.


Lyric knew that he would always be the one that got away, the one where the timing was never right. When she wrote that piece in high school about pear blossoms, it wasn’t really about the boy she was dating at the time. It wouldn’t become relevant until five years later, when she was sitting on top of a wheeled cooler, foot propped on a box of fabric, with her heart in pieces because she was sacrificing so much to be with him and she couldn’t.


It was horribly stupid.


Maybe her friends were right to worry about her, despite her assurances that she knew exactly what she was getting into and what she was doing.


She didn’t know what she was doing. At all. She was flying blind down a canyon and she kept hitting the walls and breaking off little pieces of herself every time.


U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” came over the huge headphones that made her look like an air traffic controller and she burst into tears anew. And she got mad for the millionth time for being so incredibly stupid as to believe what she was doing was a good idea.


As Jude and her boyfriend had left, they were cheerful and convinced that Lyric was going to be going to bed with him that night. She had made sure that they were blissfully unaware of how angry she was with them. She knew as soon as he had come home from work early and she was waiting for Jude that there was no way she was going to see him tonight.


The thought of him was all that had kept her together through that day, and now that thought was to remain just that.


He only wanted her on weekdays, it seemed. The days when it was most inconvenient and detrimental to her life. Was he testing her?


Why did she always have to have an excuse to see him or to go over or have him visit? It turned out all right in the end, she supposed, with both of them sated and snuggled together like puppies, but it was ridiculous.


The song on her playlist changed, the opening chords of Imogen Heap’s “Speeding Cars” filtering through the persistent hum in her head, and all Lyric could do was fall over onto the cushion where she had spent most of the day, curling into a ball and trying to disappear, tears falling down her cheeks like lemmings on a suicide run and soaking the front of her Buddha-emblazoned shirt.


She began to wonder if it was really all worth it, what she was doing for him. She cooked dinner for him, she was ready at his every convenience, she never cried or demanded too much of him. She made it a point to never discuss anything about what was between them in too much detail because she knew that he considered her a friend he slept with on occasion and nothing more, and didn’t want any more to come from it, and it was killing her inside.


Just killing her.


She could feel her soul shriveling, and that wasn’t fair.


It shouldn’t be affected this much by something so stupid as not being able to see him.


But the night before, the night she had been looking forward to the whole week, hadn’t worked out because it had been his long day at work and he had been asleep on his feet when he came by, then left quickly without so much as a real hug.


She had gone by his apartment half an hour later to get a copy of the movie she and Jude had been watching, since their copy was skipping horrendously, and there he was, sitting at his computer completely awake and alert.


Was it her?


Was that what it was?


She knew he didn’t want a relationship, but she supposed somewhere in her mind he had categorized that as “doesn’t want a relationship with anyone… except maybe me.” It was stupid. So stupid.


She kicked the bookshelf next to her, causing the candles on top to rock, wiggling their way to the edge where she could just see them peeping over the edge at her like a tribunal. She glared at them, willing them to ignite just from the sheer force of her will, but they remained obstinately unlit, as if just to spite her.


A lot was spiting her lately.


She was behind in so many things: her classes, her life.


She needed to just forget about him and get all of her shit done, but she couldn’t get the nagging feeling that she’d never see him again after she left out of her head.


Lyric had moved so many times before that she knew exactly what would happen. For six months they would talk and flirt and since she was gone it would always be a perpetual anticipation thing that would never bear fruit. Then they would never speak again until she randomly ran into him years on down the line after he had gotten married or she was with someone and the timing was again not right. The timing would never be right for them, she supposed.


Which was a shame. They fit together in so many ways that, had the timing ever been right, she would have been able to spend her life with him comfortably, each giving to the other and being supportive and generally having the best time of their lives. But no.


She didn’t know how she was going to face talking to her parents, who were pretty much aware that she was sleeping with him and asked every time they called how it was going with him and whether they were actually a couple yet.


A couple of idiots, more like it.


She kicked the bookshelf again, and a small hailstorm of decorative stones fell on and around her. She rolled off of her side and spread-eagled on the ground, the stones digging into her sides and legs and arms. She felt each pinprick of sensation and held onto it, mentally amplifying it as if she had brought this pain on herself.


And she had.


By being so incredibly stupid, she had allowed herself to become vulnerable. She had opened herself for the first time in five years and this was what she was getting for it. The urge to cry completely uncontrollably when she didn’t get to see him, like she was some stupid spoiled child being denied a toy they wanted.


She reached up with her left hand and groped for her cell phone, nearly pulling an avalanche of papers down on her head from the table as she grabbed it. She scrolled through the menus, finding the text messages they had exchanged that day.


He had asked her not to need him, basically. Someone had pulled the “L” word on him and he was afraid of it.


Shit, he knew that she loved him


Who had pulled it on him, she wondered. Who would she have to cross over to her list of “cannot invite to parties—competition.”


He had told her that any mention of wanting as more than friends was making him nervous, and then claimed that he didn’t have that with her. Considering that usually they’d be chattering away and they weren’t because she had mentioned her desire to come visit him and hear about his day and shoot the shit pointed out the lie in his statement. He didn’t want her over because he didn’t want her more than friends today.


It was like being stuck in a bad movie. Today he wanted her, today he didn’t want her. She was so tired of being yo-yoed from one extreme to another. She didn’t care at this point if she ruined their friendship… They’d fall out of friendship within six months anyway just because she was leaving. What was the point?


Why not just have a relationship. It was a month, for chrissakes. What could it hurt?


Nothing.


But the timing was never right to bring it up because he seemed to have a knack of reading her mind and shooting her down before she could even say a word on the subject. She was going to talk to him last night about it, and he left early. She was going to bring it up while they were lying in bed drunk as skunks a week before, but she was just so happy that she couldn’t bring herself to spoil it. She was going to suggest it as they laid on the hood of her car to watch shooting stars that Monday, but he had to be up early the next morning and she had papers due, so there was really no time for the discussion. The opportunity came up on their second stargazing jaunt but his explanation of how it was classified as a “date” had made her so warm inside that she had gotten stupid and believed that meant something.


So she hadn’t even brought up the complicated workings of her mind. And time was running out.


She rolled off the rock fall and stumbled over to her calendar on tingling feet, one nail-bitten finger running over the paper, counting the days.


Twenty-eight was to be the number of her doom.


She had twenty-eight days to do everything she had to do.


Twenty-eight days to be with him.


Then she was gone.


She didn’t want to be a memory, a ghost, so soon.


He was leaving her no choice.


Soon Lyric would just be another girl he had known, another memory to be put away.


He didn’t even have a picture of her. Not anywhere. It was like she didn’t exist on his half of the world. She was already a ghost.


She plopped down on the cooler again and stared blankly at the bracelets adorning her wrists, one made of the two favorite colors of each of her best friends. Five bracelets… counting hers. Somehow his had become wrapped up in hers.


Shouldn’t it be the other way around? she wondered to herself, untangling them. They shouldn’t be wrapped up in each other like that.

She was pretty sure that the thing she loved most about being with him was that he always left that scent behind him—the faint aroma of leather and old cigarette smoke, and the lingering whiff of some shampoo she could never identify. It was proof that he had been there, proof that he wasn’t a dream, and she was someone who always needed proof when things were going well.

Lyric Alta rolled over and let her hand wander the now empty and cool space that had, just a few hours ago, held the sleeping form of the man she loved. She inhaled deeply, burying her nose in the jersey cotton of the pillow next to her, taking the proof from the scent of him on the pillow. She couldn’t help but smile.

It wasn’t often that she had occasion for him to enter her bed, but she treated each occurrence as a precious gem in the collection of memories she was storing away for when she was gone. And she would be gone so very soon.

She only had a month left. A little more than thirty-some-odd days to cram the last struggling fits of a relationship-that-was-not-a-relationship into. She was terrified, but she didn’t show it to anyone but him, and only in the dark, when he could only hear her halting words of doubt and feel the minute hitches of her chest as she struggled not to sob like an idiot.

Lyric hated to cry. She considered it cheating, a way of getting what you wanted without putting in the effort. She tried never to cry in front of him, because she was well aware that his previous girlfriend had been a veritable human hosepipe, and she didn’t want any connection to that psychopathic drama queen.

She was having enough trouble with him without reminding him of Her.

She stretched, letting her hands slide under the jersey cotton-clad body pillow that stretched horizontal across the top of her bed and burying them in the satin-wrapped bundle of feather mattress that she used as a pillow, feeling the ragged stubby nails that were evidence of her stress catch on the smooth fabric. Her back arched against the ratty quilt her mother kept telling her to throw out and she allowed herself the luxury of a small moan before rolling out of bed, narrowly avoiding stepping on the wrapper from last night’s condom and the tangle of clothing that cluttered the usually clear patch of floor beside her bed.

With her toes, she picked up her purple and black lace bra and tossed it onto the bed, then began rooting through the piles of laundry—all of it clean—for a pair of underwear. She slid on the first pair she came to, then the pair of sweatpants she had unearthed from beneath a pile of button-down shirts next to her paper-cluttered desk. Bra in one hand and a shirt in the other, she picked her way around piles of laundry and papers and stumbled into the bathroom, flipping on the light switch next to the door twice before remembering in her still-alcohol-fuzzed brain that the bulb had burnt out the week before and reaching for the switch beside the sink, knocking a Dixie Cup full of hair clips into the sink in the process.

Lyric cursed and made a face in the mirror above the sink, sliding her arms into the straps of her bra and hoisting her breasts into the cups like a sailor picking up coconuts to be tossed into a crate. After manhandling them into place and swiping her armpits with deodorant, she pulled the ratty t-shirt detailing “10 Things To Do On Memorial Day” over hear head, causing her straw-colored hair to fluff around her head in a bright corona. She flattened it, then attempted to brush the tangles of last night’s sexcapades out of her hair, smiling at the memories of him as she always did.

It was pathetic, really, how she acted around him. She supposed that she should push harder for him to date her, but since she had so little time left, she figured there was really no point in it, even if it would be gratifying to see Her head explode with rage. Its not that Lyric wanted to piss her off (okay, she really did), but honestly, that girl needed a kick in the pants sometimes. Maybe Lyric shouldn’t have been going after him since She was one of her sisters (by money, not blood, thank the Gods), but, Lyric mused, she had been his friend longer than she had been Her sister. And really, what good thing had She ever done other than ruin Lyric’s twenty-second birthday by cheating on him with her ex right in front of her?

Bitter? Naw, Lyric wasn’t bitter.

Lyric was pissed, actually.

The brush hit a particularly good snarl and she cursed, tugging the brush free before attempting to work it out with her fingers.

Honestly, Lyric was pretty sure that things would have turned out differently with him had she grown a pair three years ago and actually gone after him when she first realized that she liked him as more than a friend. Those walks they used to take around campus when he was still a little muzzy from his relationship with his high school girlfriend (also a sister-by-money of Lyric’s… she tended to collect his exes, she found) were the highlight of her sophomore year, but she never made anything of them when she should have.

She had felt, at the time, that he was already spoken for by Her. And she supposed he had been. Didn’t change the fact that she should have fought for him then like she began to fight for him last January, when she finally got him, if even for a short time.

They never really talked about that time, really. It was like it had happened, but wasn’t really important enough to talk about. She happened to think it very important, because she had been there for him and he had still gone back to Her.

Well, she had him now, she figured. As much as anyone could have him, anyway. He wasn’t really to be had right now, since he was still trying to get over Her, the cheating and lying and manipulative bitch.

The handle of the brush creaked and Lyric realized she was gripping it pretty tightly. She tossed it in the sink and rooted around under it for the clips she had dumped in there, coming up with a handful and using them to put her hair up in its usual messy “its just up there because I don’t want to deal with it” style. She always forgot how long her hair really was because it was always up in that style, and she kind of liked it that way. Then it was surprising to him when she took her hair down around him.

Lyric flipped off the light in the bathroom and kicked aside last night’s shower towels to move down the small hallway connecting her room, bathroom, and “studio” (really the room where the washer and dryer would have gone had the bitch who rented the apartment last not stolen them) to her kitchen and living room and was immediately assaulted by the dual smells of the salmon she had cooked for him the night before last and the mouse she kept in a plastic cage on top of the smallest of her eleven bookshelves.

She hated doing dishes.

She rummaged around in her tiny pantry and came up with an orange plastic cup, a leftover from the small Halloween party she had thrown a few weeks before, then filled it with ice from the freezer and almost-flat cola from the fridge.

The cool liquid was soothing to her tequila-scorched throat. She was beginning to realize that tequila had become a code word between him and her. If they went out somewhere and she bought shots of Patron, sex was on. It was like living in an Eddie Izzard comedy sketch sometimes.

She smiled around the rim of the orange cup, finishing the cola and dumping the ice in the sink, where it clattered down the layers of dishes like a small avalanche before coming to rest at the bottom with whatever else had ended up there. She shuddered to think what that could be and, for the millionth time, wished the dishwasher wasn’t so god-awful old that the instructions on the four hundred levers and buttons hadn’t been rubbed off by fifty years of hard use.

She knew it worked… she just didn’t know how.

And now she grew things in the sink that even her pre-med major best friend made nasty faces at. And that’s saying something, considering that Jude wanted to be a CSI. Poking nasty things was kind of her shtick. But not whatever it was that lived in Lyric’s sink. She had a vague idea that it was at least semi-related to Pennywise the Clown, an idea that had been forming in her head since she had finished IT for the first time a month ago.

To confirm her thought, the sink burbled as it swallowed the melting ice she had tossed in. She backed away slowly in case turning tail and running would provoke it, and punched the lid down on her trashcan to make the other side pop up, making a mental note to remind Jude again that she owed her a trashcan lid, having broken Lyric’s attempting to seduce a boy at a party.

Lyric shook her head at the memory, still amused that she had it and Jude still didn’t remember that particular bit of the night.

Of course, he didn’t remember bits of the night before, she had found as he was getting ready for work that morning. Nothing important, really, just kissing her friend Kirit and being semi-molested by Lyric on the way to Waffle House and then drunk-dialing his sister. But he remembered the important parts, namely being with her.

She surveyed the living room with still-bleary brown eyes, groping on the stacks of books beside her for her spare glasses. Sliding the gold wire frames up her nose and peering through the scratched lenses, she took in the piles of papers scattered about from her rabid unpacking of a box sent by her mother and the remnants of the paper she had written last week on cognition.

The boxes stacked in the corner next to the parrot’s cage seemed to mock her, reminding her that she had a little more than a month to get her shit together and get the hell out of Dodge. She sighed and turned her back on the scene, thoroughly depressed.

Reaching under the ratty t-shirt, she unhooked her bra and pulled it out one sleeve in one fluid motion, tossing it over the lamp in the corner of her room, where it swung like a naughty version of a wind chime. She set her glasses on her nightstand (a crate with a 30MPH sign on top) and crawled back into bed, pulling the ragged quilt over her head and shutting out the thin morning light. She pressed her face into the hollow that had been occupied the night before by someone other than herself and, with the scent of leather and old cigarette smoke in her nostrils, she slipped into a fitful slumber.
* * *

So I'm insane. Certifiably. I'm teetering on the edge of being behind in schoolwork, and yet I decide, hey, I'll do NaNoWriMo this year.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which is where everyone goes insane and tries to push out a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Insanity.

But I want to try.

And I'm getting a late start. Let's see what I can do, eh?

Wish me luck!

Welcome to the Upper Deck, where thoughts and tongues are free as gulls.

This is to be my symphony, the collection of my words and thoughts that makes up the integral parts of me that I cannot express vocally. It is fragile and worn away in places, but it is also stronger than steel.

Climb the shrouds, take a seat, and listen to the tales I have to tell if you're thusly inclined. Have a pint of rum on me. Welcome aboard.