Live, Love, and Hate – by Orpheus

 

Week 86 (the hundredth episode) – Stand and Deliver

 

                (6/19/06, 11:28 PM) Wow, it’s certainly been a while, hasn’t it, dear imaginary readers? And I have SO much to say, but nowhere near enough words to say it in. I suppose there’s no better place to start than with who Eurydice was to me (yes, a throwback to Deliverance). She was the perfection of a dream which I was struggling to find in reality. Or at least that’s one way to look at it. If you believe in premonitions, well, maybe she’s one of them. She doesn’t come around much anymore. In a way, the last time she came around, well, she seemed sorta like Ai at (at one of) the ending(s) of Hourglass of Summer.

 

                Speaking of whom, I got one of those yogurt parfait things. It was pretty good. Okay, Orpheus, what the hell does this have to do with anything? The imaginary reader asks. Well, I would answer, I don’t like yogurt. So then why was it good? The reader asks. Because it had, like, strawberries and blueberries and granola in it, I aanswer. So what the hell does this have to do with Seno Ai? The reader asks. Well, I’m getting there! I answer, like the impatient jackass that I am. Okay, well, she has this thing with, like, yogurt shakes, and well, yeah... Okay, the reader asks, why did you feel like telling us this? I really don’t know the answer to that one. Maybe it has to do with product placement. Or maybe, I dunno.

 

                Now, for those who aren’t aware, I had a run-in with little Amy either at the very end of April or the very beginning of May. She was civil enough, I wasn’t. Neither were her friends who just started bitching at me one by one. And apparently, yeah, I was right, the girlfriend was Nicole. Anyway, you may recall that in Nowhere 6, I seemed to be getting over her. Well, that sure didn’t last long, within two weeks I was already sliding back to all the crap you saw in the other Nowhere episodes. And while this conversation did just totally mess me up for a while, I guess it really did help me and, well, yeah.

 

                (6/26/06, sometime around 3 am) Since the beginning of ’05, I’ve been (both consciously and otherwise) cutting myself off from just about everyone I know. Where did it start? J, see the episode Silver Wire Is Hard to Break for an explanation, if you don’t quite recall. After that, I just couldn’t look at her the same way that I always had. Which is to say, like the older sibling that my real older brother just wasn’t (and still isn’t). Then the next was R. We tried to keep in touch for a while after the break, but it just didn’t work. Sometimes I’d wonder what the hell I ever saw in her and I’d just get so angry over all these stupid little things, other times, I’d just want so badly to get back together with her (J [whom I am not entirely cut off from] said that the reason for this was because I just needed resolution to the whole thing). She seemed just fine with it, but the whole thing was just too awkward for me. It bugs me that I never said good bye to her, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. And, of course I forgot one. My good old friend Kristofer. Now, we still stay in touch, we’re still friends, yeah. But we’re not what we used to be. In middle school, people pretty much treated us as one person, because that’s how we always were (as I recall, K once referred to the two of us as ‘the strangest person she’d ever met’, or something along those lines). I pretty much stopped talking to Amy after she came out of the closet. I mean, I was pretty fucking pissed about the whole thing, y’know? And, as you probably noticed, I stayed that way for so long, and somehow deluded myself into believing that it wasn’t true. But these days, I just can’t bring myself to feel angry about it, I know, I’ve tried, all that happens is I just feel so... so sorrowful, so regretful. I really wish that I hadn’t been so preoccupied with R during the whirlwind affair with little Amy. I wish that I’d realized just how great it was, I wish that I’d appreciated it more. But I don’t regret laying it on so thick, because that’s really how I felt. I don’t regret telling her that she tore my world apart because she did. Granted, it wasn’t a great idea to change my world so that the core of it was just trying to protect her, just trying to make her happy. Some nights, I get the urge to call her up and ask her if she’s happy, not to ask for forgiveness or for the second chance I’ll never get, but just to know if she’s happy. Of course, I never do, because I know it won’t do me any good, and it’d probably actually hurt things. Then there’s C. Pretty much the same story as Amy, only we were able to keep going for a while after she got a girlfriend, but hen, I dunno, I just all but stopped talking to her I don’t think we’ve spoken since maybe a day or two after the last time I spoke to Amy. Once again, I kinda wish I’d said goodbye. And as for Samceool, I dunno. We seem to have drifted a bit. Maybe it’s because I send him long rambling emails just about every night (usually two, but the second one tends to be shorter), detailing every last little thought that has popped into my head over the course of the day (or close enough to it) . It strikes me as this would get annoying after a week or two, and then seriously aggravating after a month.

 

                I’ve done so much dreaming over the course of the last school year that it really seems like a dream, at least time wise. You know how when you wake up, it could have spanned years, but you always feel like it happened in, like, 3 minutes or something? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. It’s just so weird being awake again. Oh, and it looks like this might be the last LLH. Right now, I’m listening to Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration album. This thing was so… emblematic, for want of a better word, of last summer. It’s so strange listening to it (or watching Donnie Darko, since it’s even more emblematic), just how much it reminds me of all the little things of back then that I’d kinda overlook. Like when I was watching Darko, I kept thinking about how sometimes on the walk home from summer school, I’d stop in at KFC and get a giant 64 oz soda. Anyway, back to what I was saying about the dream thing, I actually briefly though (again) about asking R for another chance the other day (I’m not sure why), when it donned on me that “oh my god, it’s a month and a week or so less than a year since it ended”. I mean, just, wow... (on a side note about Black Celebration being so emblematic, the song that strikes me as being best about this is A Question Of Time, seen in regards to Amy).

 

                And, y’know, yesterday/today (depending on if tomorrow starts at midnight or when you wake up), I went to the first party that I’d been to since December in eighth grade (for those not keeping track, I just finished eleventh grade a few days ago). It was kinda disappointing. It’s not that I didn’t have a good time (I did), but that I’d kinda been thinking for a whil that the next party I’d go to was gonna be R’s for her senior prom (she’s a grade higher than I am). Of course, at some point during the year-long dream, I forgot to forget about all that. Oh well.

 

                Oh, and at some point (maybe over the summer, maybe during the school year, I haven’t the slightest clue), I lost that scarab amulet. Ironic. Oh, and I promised Samecool I’d explain why I’d started watching anime recently (and rather a large amount of it at times). It’s because, well, it’s something I’d shut myself off from. At first it was because I wanted to see Princess Mononokecause Amy’d recommended it. And after that, I liked it, so I looked up the other Ghibli/Miyazaki movies. As for Evangelion, it’s because I caught an episode of it on Cartoon Network, and I liked it, so I bought the first episode of the comic, watched the whole series, and started getting the other comics. And, well, yeah, the rest of it (what little there is) is pretty much either an extension of that as a sort of what-was-I-missing-because-I-wouldn’t-accept-this type thing or because of that game True Love.

 

                And y’know, life right now is so weird because I really can’t much remember the last time I was without one of my horribly obsessive puppy-love crushes.

 

                Now, instead of a full menagerie, I just wanna give you the lyrics to (Don’t Fear) The Reaper by the Blue Öyster Cult:

 

“All our times have come,

Here, but now they’re gone.

 

The seasons don’t fear the reaper,

Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain,

We can be like they are,

Come on, Mary,

Don’t fear the reaper,

Baby take my hand,

Don’t fear the reaper,

We’ll be able to fly,

Don’t fear the reaper

Baby, I’m your man.

 

Violent time is done

Here, but now they’re gone.

 

Romeo and Juliet

Are together in eternity,

Like Romeo and Juliet,

Forty thousand men and women every day,

Like Rome and Juliet,

Forty thousand men and women every day,

Redefine happiness,

Another forty thousand come in every day,

We can be like they are,

Come on baby,

Don’t fear the reaper,

Baby take my hand,

Don’t fear the reaper,

We’ll be able to fly,

Don’t fear the reaper,

Baby I’m your man.

 

Now the two is one,

Here, but now they’re gone.

 

He came on the last night of sadness,

It was clear that she couldn’t go on,

The door was open and the wind appeared,

The candles blew and then disappeared,

The curtains flew and then he appeared,

Saying don’t be afraid,

Come on, Mary,

And she had no fear,

And she ran to him,

And they started to fly,

They looked backward and said goodbye,

She had become like they are

She had take in hand,

She had become like they are,

Come on, baby,

Don’t fear the reaper.”

 

                And now, for Orpheus the Ghost, in the final Oblivion episode:

 

 

                Orpheus held his arms around himself tightly. He couldn’t tell the voices apart anymore. He didn’t know which one was his own, he didn’t know which one was Eurydice, and he didn’t know which was that decidedly darker part. The worst (or perhaps the best) part was not knowing which one was his shadow.

 

                His body was covered in sores and strange tattoos. His eyes glistened black. His teeth were pointed and stained. He had all but lost the fight with his Shadow, whoever it was.

 

                But he would NOT let it win. He stood poised on the edge of the Nihil, arms outstretched. He could here the snarlings of the Spectres, the Shadow-Eaten, lurking just on the other side of the tear in the Shadowlands. Waiting to tear him apart.

               

                “Say good-bye on a night like this, if it’s the last thing you ever do,” he quietly sang before throwing himself down the hole. And then, without a flash or a bang, without even a whimper, and almost as if by magic, Orpheus was gone from the world.

               

                Okay, well, yeah, that’s mostly it. You all really ought to listen to this album (Black Celebration by Depeche Mode), it’s absolutely beautiful, especially Here Is The House and But Not Tonight (though the song World Full of Nothing has always kinda bugged me). Send any emails that aren’t angry snarlings like those ones Erika sent to [email protected]. And, I’d like to end this all with some lyrics, not from Into The Sky by Switchblade Symphony like I tend to, but from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, “It’s over now, the music of the night.”

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