DATE: 6/28/20XX

LISTENING TO: William S. Burroughs: Thanksgiving Prayer

WATCHING: Once Upon a Time in Mexico

READING: The Thousand Orcs, R. A. Salvatore

MOOD: All over the place! O _ o

So Imir was always kind of an asshole.

Sorry to start the blog off like that but I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. I’ve been texting his brother off and on and he’s not doing any better. No improvement at the clinic. He doesn’t cooperate with the doctors, he cheeks his pills, he looks for ways to harm himself further. He’s become a burden on the staff and, with each additional day as an impatient, he’s becoming a financial burden on his family as well.

You could never get him to consider this, though. If you were to ever try to get it past him that, “hey, your family is suffering because of you,” he’d ask why you were trying to guilt him while he was sick. Sure, the people he loved were suffering, but he was suffering more. He was the one in pain, after all.

This is how it always was. He’d call me a bitch and I would be sensitive that day and reply that I didn’t want to be called that. Then he’d take offense as if I was trying to stifle his ability to speak. Soon I would be insisting I was the bitch he had said I was in the first place.

Doesn’t sound like a great friend, does it? Well, we all thought the contrary back then. He had this ridiculous way with how he spoke. He wasn’t terribly eloquent or traditionally charismatic. But he knew how to make you think he cared deeply about you. He was impossibly kind when he needed to be. He was insightful when I needed advice. He always knew the right thing to say.

I wasn’t the only person who thought so. When we got old enough to consider ourselves adults, he used his implacable charm to fuck a great amount of women- several of which from our friend group. He would keep a schedule, screwing different girls on different days and using his off time to flirt with those who refused. All the while, he had this hatred for the opposite sex under his skin. He considered sex a function, not a product of romance or connection.

That is, until a girl stopped entertaining him. Then it would be his apocalypse. Then, suddenly, he cared about love and devotion. His highs and lows with women were like a perfect wave on a baseline, like light travelling through a slit in a sheet, or a radio signal through the airwaves. His deep, horrible slumps were deafened by the next cute girl to be sucked in by his intensity.

We were riding high before I moved away. He was a king with everything he wanted; friends, women, a stable job with enough money, cigarettes, and nightly bar crawls to keep us thoroughly wet and stupid. We all thought we had made it, we all thought we had achieved some sort of post-high school, “rest of your life” status.

Then Sophia left us and it all started to unravel.

We were all once this close knit group of friends, together since who knows when. I would go as far to say that Imir was our leader, our de facto regent. He always wanted Sophia to be his queen. She was the one who never bent to him, never said yes. He begrudged and coveted her friendship all the same.

When she was gone, we didn’t feel like we were invincible, arrogant, vagabond masters any more. We were pathetic, bored kids in a boring world. Nothing ever happened in our town besides our benign shenanigans. We used to think we were this roving band of warrior poets. Turned out we didn’t know how to write poetry and we didn’t know how to fight either. And so we fought amongst ourselves instead. With our queen gone and our king unstable, we lost ourselves.

I moved away, I kept my phonebook filled with my friends’ names- Imir’s at the top. We would text and email. I would drive back home to see them every once and a while. We would get fucked up and for a few hours it would feel like the old days. Then, it would always turn to the fighting, to the brawling. I’d drive home, we’d apologize over text. It was unsustainable. I was happy to be gone.

Then, we started disappearing, one by one. Some of us followed Sofia in one way or another. Some of us ended up in jail. Some of us simply disappeared, as if we were never real in the first place. Imir was the only of us left. Without his kingship, without his cadre of duped and hypnotized cronies, without his harem of women at his ankles, he collapsed.

.

Awful nightmares last night. I was in places familiar to me that I had never actually been before. I was a waiter at a seafood restaurant. I was carrying a tray of lobster bisk and martinis to a table of four. When I approached, my foot hit a snag on the table. I tripped and dumped the contents of the tray all over one of the women at the table. She was impossibly skinny with her hair up in a bee hive like it was the 60s. She looked appalled, covered in creme and alcohol and lobster bits. I started to apologize but suddenly, I was sitting at her table. It was just me and her. She was all cleaned up and smiling at me.

I asked if she was okay. Instead of saying anything, she moved her foot under the table. I felt her bare toes run up my leg before stopping at my inner thigh. I was frozen in place as she started to rub at my crotch. I couldn’t think of anything to do except giggle stupidly.

My eyes darted and I realized we were being watched by all the other patrons, waiters, and cooks at the restaurant. They just stared, wide-eyed and incredulous. I tried to open my mouth in protest but it turned to mush. The girl kept grinning before ducking below the table. I felt her paw at my zipper.

The double doors to the kitchen flew open and a bright, heavenly light shot forth. Then I saw him, silhouetted in that light. It was Imir amongst the faceless others. He was pale and frail, his eyes were sunken beyond biological possibility. He was draped in a medical gown, a white bracelet hugged around his left wrist. His arms were pocked with random scratches and grooves. He stared at me among the others.

“Where’s the book?” he asked me.

From beyond the double doors, a pair of even more intense lights pierced the room. I had to shield my eyes as I felt my crotch being prodded and pulled by the woman below. The two lights focused, like spotlights in a stage play, and swirled into the shapes of two, horrible silver eyes.

.

More crows this morning. I’ve been reading about how people leave scraps of bread and leftover meat for their local corvids, and later find trinkets or even coins left in return. I’ve considered trying it but there’s something about these crows that make me think they wouldn’t be very appreciative. If I were to leave them presents, they’d bully me until I brought them more.

I saw the girl on the bus again, the one whom I pushed over at my stop a couple weeks ago. She sat in the front while I sat in the far back. I stared at her the whole ride. Maybe it was the weird, intense moment we had shared, but I found myself becoming somewhat infatuated with her as we rode. I didn’t have much to appreciate about her. All I could see was the back of her head and the side of her cheek. It was a soft, pale cheek, and her hair was long and mousey brown. That was all I had to focus on.

I felt very unlike myself and I wanted to get up and move to tell her hi, to say sorry again for knocking her over. I waited for the bus to reach a stop and, before I could do anything, that fucking lady with her mutt boarded. Immediately, the fucking dog’s eyes were on me. The damn thing must have had some trauma with guys who looked like me, or it didn’t like corduroy jackets, or it thought my old sneakers smelled too gross, or I don’t know what!

I felt crazy, I wanted to yell at the thing. “What the fuck did I do to you, dog?” I echoed through my brain and, for some reason, I expected an answer to echo back.

I sat back down and got off at my stop to the library. I passed the girl as I made my way to the door and made sure to get a good look at her face. Without the panic from before, I was able to let her features sink in. She had a thin nose and lips. Her eyes were, like, stormy grey. She caught me looking because that stormy gaze met mine and her eyebrows raised skeptically. She did not look amused to be ogled. So I stopped.

I got off the bus weirded out and humiliated. I wanted to find a different bus route so she never had to see me again. But as I shuffled towards the library, I let my fantasies drown me over and I wondered if I should ask her out. Talking to girls is not my thing, especially after moving away.

I wonder if she would want to go out for sea food.