Animus’ Longevity

 

Inside a small diner near the south of Uniontown, there is a booth with knobs carved into the posts, small initials on the back, and the sour taste of lamentations. A single cup of coffee, abandoned antidote to lost dreams, steams away in its own graceful gradual demise. Jadia right hand draws the warmth from the cup; she left sleeps soundly in its own solitude near her left leg’s comfort. A world has broken down for the characteristically melancholy dreamer, a often times conscious believer in melodrama at its finest. Gray, cold winter winds whirl about the busy café, roaring through the single pane windows of a cheaper diner and its poor owner. Barely afloat, the busy diner breaks more budges than it fixes; Jadia’s concerns bare far more importance these days than the fight to keep the little business afloat. Her hair, miskept in its glorious pink dye, lay forgotten, down, and sunken. Thankfully, it covers the poofy eyes she refused to raise to the bastard in front of her.

            Broken hearts, broken spirits, and broken dreams: Chris. He sat there chewing his right thumbnail beyond any real cognitive thinking. These days, the poor sap was more like to blow his head off than figure out how to deal with the growing resistance in his heart. “Blondes,” he thought to himself. “Blondes always act this way!” he knew better than to say it aloud, that would lead to more trouble than it was worth. Thankfully, the filters which scrubbed those expressive feelings destroyed any chance of him saying it aloud. Honesty, in this case, is the worst policy. What those filters missed, his finger nail thankfully caught. There were those moments when nothing beat the destruction of protein.

            Wafts of steam rose from the slow spiraling of refreshingly poured coffee. Jadia’s intense gaze seemed only to only add in the gradual entropic spiral. It is hard to say what exactly Jadia was thinking. At one instances, she remember a short story about a young girl killing her boyfriend. She’d read it in some stupid class or other, and the thought of smoking the fucker in front of her made her slight, thought still, sinister streak bristle. This brief complex was followed up by a backlash of integrity; her mind drifted back to the exact wording and how he had said it. It was there, somewhere, locked beneath disgust, rancor, and anxiety.

            “I mean,” he started. He didn’t finish. He wasn’t certain what he had meant and he wasn’t complete certain it mattered. What world could possible have existed that words, exiting his mouth, could have done anything but ruin the still tentative disaster before him. He felt like that kid at school that accidentally pulled the wings off of the butterfly. “Accidentally,” he swore.

            “Do adult women let themselves be hurt?” Jadia mind finally produced as a logical, drawn out reasoning. She was not certain. She imagined how her friend Sarah, the loud mouthed bitch from Florida that enjoyed saying she could kick the shit out of boys would handle this. Jadia felt certain that she, not Sarah, could and would sob, regardless of whatever determination she mustered. Her consciousness had yet noticed the warm droplets of emotions, salted sullen tendencies strolling gently down her face.

What bodily contribution could she have made to the equation between the two of them? It always seemed to her that it was best to talk these things out, reason something to make the pain go away; yet, the vibration of her larynx would have caused Jadia to snap. Already, those carelessly forgotten hands were urged to crush his trachea, working whatever frustrations out like horrible claws across his face. Only fantastical world worked on justification, retribution, and revenge. Well, some type of compiling of the three. Reality for Jadia worked on those crushed emotional ambitions which surged deep within her tear torn eyes.

            “It’s not for anyone else,” he said. To the young Chris, this reasoning meant his biased mind-- pumped full of dick sucking, soft feet on bare skin, lifting and sliding, and the occasional love poem he stumbled through: those lost stanzas usurped for his own purposes-- could safely continue his life without going into details about ‘why’. “Urges, stoic muses, sought for his removal!” he thought to himself.

            “You’re an idiot,” Jadia said.

            Neither of them knew what to say to that. It was broken. Both the argument being presented and the ad homonym retort left nothing but ambiguity in its wake. Then, with one erroneous, false, stupid epiphany, Jason responded, “For passion!” his voice, that often too loud for the restaurant one, broke in its crescendo of effort. “I can’t force myself to feel for something. I can’t! Why am I stupid for not feeling that there is in this withering goddamn forsaken heart enough room for anything as special as you! What do you want me to do! Do you want me to lie say, ‘hey Jadia, remember that time on the beach when we held hands while fucking in the slow, gradual descent of the moon!’” Jadia stopped listening as Chris continued to spew forth some poorly contrived commentary on his life, heart, and other motifs in his life that he hardly could come up with an arguable reason he deserved them. What bitter contemplations Jadia held for him.

            Chris didn’t stop, there was some broken gear—maybe one of those filters— that pulsed and probed him into continuing. His foot held down the pedal. “One way or another, as the song goes, he would tear through this problem.

He continued, “You think this is easy for me? I’m broke, I’m lost, and my fucking life has been one misstep after another. I’m the littered playground for dozens of wonderful girls, whores, and the fucking mistakes that I uncomfortably ejaculated into!”

            Jadia looked up at him and broke a young, lipstick smile. “You don’t understand a fucking thing about me,” she explained. Truth be told, she didn’t really understand much about herself either. She imagined, though, that it could be gratuitously true, a more universal sort of truth, for the boy roaring before her. She told him, “Frankly, I don’t know enough about myself either to understand how exactly,” the word traveled on saliva burst forth from her mouth, “how to fix what you broke.” There wasn’t really anything guiding the train of logic in her mind and, after she spoke them, she kinda felt sorry she said it was his fault; like any fine human being, she refused to tell him that much. “There’s some giant fucked up deity up there writing bad scripts in both our lives. You got one that screams for you to follow that disgusting void you call a heart. I have one torn between stabbing you in the night, going home and writing a poem, and maybe sobbing on the phone to my friend, which ever one fucking picks up their goddamn phone!. Hell, I might even go home and eat a fucking bowl of ice cream. Works in the goddamn movies! I’m sure you can relate!” she slapped her fist on the table, which wasn’t really fair to the coffee that sloshed about the table (Chris soaked it up with a paper towel).

            With that out, Jadia made it obvious she was sorting the sugar packets into their standard piles. A waiter stopped over; he peered and left. Two customers in the far booth did their best to discern the situation, and the asshole on the right decided to say, “lil’ quieter!” His suggestion though fell on the lost, intentionally absent ears of a lonely girl and her attempt at redefining the useless, entropic sugar packets. Heedlessly, her pursuits continued into the production of a more appropriately and efficiently aligned artifice, a sweetened tower comprised of her efforts of both conscious, subconscious intentions, and the mediocrity dooming her relationship.

            Tapping his fingers relentlessly, the actor-turned-theist frowned. Chris, after this frown brought about another uninterested look, wrapped his fingers about the cold cup and pressed its frigid rim against his bottom lip. With a loud slurping noise, he drank the timid, two-sugar-sweetened liquid into his mouth. Then, when this annoyance failed as well, he went back to his predisposed commentary, “you cold?” he asked.

            She looked up at him, “you know what, you’re a bigger dickhead than I thought,” illicit in its intentions, the comment failed at achieving anymore than a smirk. He offered her the torn, green coat that he had infamously stolen from back stage after a concert. She, of course, refused it with a direct and intentional flip of her middle finger. The right hand, now exposed from the comfort of its cup, spread back along the warmth of the left, reuniting without its fellow sorrowed phalanges.

            “This is going nowhere,” he stood up, “I’m going for a cigarette. Can you get me a cup of coffee?” She shook her head no; he shrugged, “I’ll get it when I get back. Promise you’ll be here?” She shook her head no; he shrugged. “Well, I’ll see you in a sec.” Nonchalantly, the downtrodden, former suitor did his best to look unmortified; though, this of course was involuntary; he never really was able to pull off sad.

            Outside, the wind pulled lightly at the paper filter snuggled and gripped in his rough, tortured, split lips. Inside the slow process of his head, he was certain, or at least a little assured, he was doing the right thing: “Whatever that might be,” he whispered into the roaring air rumbling about him. “A night fit man nor beast,” his conscious urged. He had always wanted to say that for something or other, but mostly used it for a witty commentary on the Weather channel’s website. If that was an apt use of the phrasing, he felt vindicated in using it.

            Something of Macbeth existed in that night, he thought. He had seen a production sometime ago, or maybe he had read it; he was confused about which it was. “The later,” he assumed, since he had lied more often than not when talking of the plays he had been in. “You have to,” he told the cigarette, “to get ahead.” He read countless numbers of plays, from antiquity to modernity: “You had to,” he agreed and sucked a lil’ more off the animus of the cigarette. Without care for the relationships of actor and play, he felt like the weather roared as it might about Duncan’s death bed. The abandonment of illusions and reality spread so thick that you wondered which it was: the swirling chaos outside the stone Scottish mason work, the knife before the Thane’s face, and the hooting of diligent owls in the stormy countryside. Maybe the owl outside was creeping about yet blooded castle with the intentions of predicting the future, the slow and painful evisceration of the King.

            The wind aided in the rapid demise of the cancer stick warmed in his mouth. It pushed the embers onward while he pulled the fire into his lungs; a struggling, brief light in the fury of the tempest. “Melodramatic,” he thought. Then with one sluggish draw, the fire heaved against the butt, and snuffed out just barely before he crushed its longevity against the brick wall. “Once more into the brink,” he laughed off his morbid dreamy contemplations with some homeless Shakespearean phrase, and went back into the small restaurant.

            There, alone at the table, sat the warmth he would soon accept as his metaphoric state: a lone cup of coffee breathed gently against the mechanical circulation of the fans. His shoulders shrank. He had done a better job, he supposed, of condemning his relationship. Standing besides the booth, he thought of sitting in her seat, maybe caressing the stoneworked cup in his hand as he had so intently watched. “No,” he decided. He wouldn’t know how to explain away the creepy if she returned from the bathroom and found him.

            She didn’t, though. The waiter came over and handed him the receipt: one cup of coffee $1.20, +2 refills $0.00. A slight laugh was chocked back somewhere in his gullet. The waiter looked at him, “Nothing like getting stuck with the bill.”

            “I get off soon, you mind paying shortly?” the waiter, as uncompassionate as his occupation dictated, answered.

            “Yeah, I,” he muttered, “in a little,” he reached his hand about the cup and shot the contents down his throat. There was a burning rupture as the flap that covers the windpipe seized. Downward, the burning caffeine liquid burned its course along his esophagus and into the stomach, where it found the watered down hydrochloric acid far more potent than itself. In defeat, the warmth slowly adjusted to its acidic new home. Chris on the other hand, waved his hand profusely before his mouth and struggled to keep the pain from tearing its way across his face. “Fuck,” he yelped. The waiter, who had previously walked away, stopped and looked at him in fain interest, smirking as he reeled about the restaurant; he continued collecting the remainder of his bills.

             With a slight streak of vindication, Chris placed the exact change on the table: a single wrinkled green bill, a dull dime, and ten or so moldy-- as disgusting as fate enjoyed its ironies-- pennies. Then, with an imitation of the waiter’s smirk, he walked past the cash register into the wretched ill winds of Uniontown. “Maybe she slipped out the back door,” he though to himself. He didn’t hear her leave, but she hadn’t returned from the bathroom either. “Not that big of a place.” He thought about calling her and just figured he’d let it go for awhile, a few moments for his nerves to cease their shaking. The wind pulled at the stolen green coat, mercilessly pushing its way through the synthetic fabric. Chris shuddered, two hands holding the ripped zipper together around him; his right hand abandoned the left to pull a cigarette out, lighting it carefully with a flick of his thumb upon the Ohio blue tip match. Despite the wind, the flame managed to ignite his cigarette. He tossed the burnt match aside-- it fell nicely into a wet drain-- and he slouched down the sidewalk, cig between the lips. With scuffed leather boot before leather boot, he went about his way.