Jayne is away

Relating to the character Jayne from the fiction written for this blog.

Don't tell me about loves. Don't give me another complicated story about how two people come together in the end. Don't show me that something beautiful exists deep in the heart of our interactions. Wait. Breathe. Be Still.



Be still.



Breathe.



Breathe.



It's not time. It's not real. It's not here. You know.

One day at a time. One day at a time. That's how I was taking it. I was taking it that way, but it doesn't work.


Why aren't you getting this? Why am I not getting this? This isn't working and I know it.

I love you. I love her. I love her. I love them. They are past. It doesn't matter that I loved. I still love.

It doesn't work. It's broken. Love is broken.

I don't need another story about lust. Not even close to love.

I don't want a romance. It's just about satisfying expectations.

This was a story about the way you heart beats when you see her.

Pause.

Pause.

Pause.

You see her--time moves more slowly. You're heart rate drops. You can hear it slowly, in your ears. space expands; you are inside your eardrum itself watching the sound of your heart slowly form in your inner ear: beat...beat (PAUSE) beat...beat.... And then, your whole body slips inside the nothingness and space wraps around you, your heart beating ten thousand beats per minute--the pounding of water, streaming from the fire hydrants on a city summer-day, beating. (PAUSE) beating LUB DU-U-U-(slowing down again) U-UB. Slowly. Pounds in your chest. You've done it wrong. Breathe. You. Love. Wrong. Breathe.

(Still)

Breathe.


She is in the room. You sense her. Her breath crawls up your back. Unseen, she screams through your hair with the breath that comes from a mouth that belongs to a face that remains unseen by your eyes, but you still know she's there. Her body's movements. A thousand miles away, your knees buckle a bit. She laughs. You hear it in your wrist. Your hand reaches to hold her hand--a million miles away. Breathe, young man. Breathe.Inhaling. (Pause) Exhal---es. 

You do not know. You do not care. You. About you. Is it about you? Your love story. Don't tell me  your loves story. I've already lived it before. I am the antagonist. I am that which advances your plot. You plot and his. I am not the hero. I am the foil.

Live. That's what you are doing. Do it. I am happy for you. Live you own story. I am away from you. It is not my story. It will not be my story. No happy ending, only a perpetual "fine".

I am kind. I am thoughtful. I reach out to you. This translates into: "Spit in my face, please." I understand. Thank you, nations of the world. You agree. You speak up for this truth.

Visceral. Do you know what this means? [PAUSE]  Rain, it has poured for the last six hours. I step outside, out of the door, onto the grass. Flimsy blades scrape the tender skin under my arch, water squishing through my toes. I step forward, and land, my heel thudding into the damp grass--I feel a pounding up the back of my shin bone. My foot falls forward onto the spiny green vegetation--the ball of my foot falls even more quickly, lubricated by the oily-gritty odorous feces, oozing across the ball of my foot and up through the troughs between my toes.I freeze. I have stepped where you have shat.

I have. I stepped.

Beat.

Beat.

I am covered in the rain. In the rain, I am soaked. Drenched. My hair clumps. I am cold. Dampness biting, digs incisors into the cold flesh around my skin. Gnawing. You are the cold flesh, gnawed away.

I have not love lost. I have no love to be found. I know where love is. I don't want to hear about it again. Leave me to cold comfort. Gnawing, oozing, damp, cold existing.

Not in a Disney story, not in Nabokov. No ABC family drama. No romantic comedy. This is not quirky ironic happy ending time. This is not the complexities of real relationships. This is lost. I know these and I do not want to hear them. They are not real. They are broken. They are stories, shattered across my room--shattered, like the glass bottle I threw against the wall. The wall is hard. It is plaster. Glass is clear and broken. A hundred pieces. A dent in the wall.The wall next to my bed, in the ten by ten foot room where I reside. The glass pieces are scattered. I sweep them up. Pieces from a Nantucket Juice bottle. I clean up now. I find pieces when I clean up the closet months later. I am gone, still finding pieces of this brokenness months later. From December to March. All over. It hurts. All over. It is...

I have swallowed the medicine. I am using the medicine. Your story is sweet. You play sweet. You are not. I do not know you. I do not believe you. I leave you. Your story will be beautiful. I am not there. Keep it to yourself. I will not find you. I am at work. A thousand days below the sun.

Shit.

All this to say, I am mad. I am upset. I am very upset.