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Real Humans

      “Listen, you hear the world ending as well as I. Listen to your own heart beating to your own death and things will subside to nothing.” He said walking forward far enough to find the crack in the sky between small buildings to look at the artificial stars. “The world is prettier than you think in fate-” he paused losing whatever classy momentum he was presenting and finished, “with all this shit.” He sighed, I sighed. We weren’t anything alike besides that we had our own philosophical stupidity that came in little spurts, never long enough to mean anything.

      I mumbled incoherently as a retort and forgot what I meant as soon as it spewed out of my mouth. I gave up and lit a cigarette instead. He hated that I smoked. Cigarettes, that is. He has never even tried, too much of a health imparity he thought. Though he smoked weed and did a few other recreational drugs. He stayed away from the harder stuff. I didn’t approve of him smoking and all that, but I never gave him shit about it because he knew all too well that it had been a problem of mine a few years back.

      He receded from the ledge of the porch and sat on the swinging bench with me. It was too quiet for either of us, he liked conversation and I couldn’t uphold that standard. I don’t know why he bothered hanging out with me. I suppose it didn’t matter, we were teenagers, and that’s what they did.

      “You know,” I said looking at him for the first time in a few minutes “It’s almost fall.” I tried not to laugh because I knew we both took note of the blatancy of the statement. “School will be starting soon, we’ll have to act like things matter again.”

      “Oh, I’m well aware.” He paused, immediately changing the topic. “Just so you know, which I’m sure you do but I’d like to make sure and a little more clear to myself that when I said ‘nothing’ before…” He paused again. It was almost like we switched our capability of speaking what we meant back and forth unknowingly. He tried, and I listened. “I was leaning towards that in natural humanity we are more prone to be sad than happy. Like, it’s just how people tend to be even though everyone wants to find their little slice of joy. An average feeling is more of a droning, negative feel. If nothing is the simple qualification of what an even medium between happy and sad would be, it would be contentment. ‘Nothing’ would be contentment.”

      I smiled because he was frowning. He didn’t say it the way he wanted to and was frustrated, but the smile let him know that I knew at least a bit of what he had intentioned. The whole time I had been nonchalantly dragging and blowing smoke into the air, watching it as I had listened to him and half-dead plants shouting nonsense to slightly polluted air. “I miss the cities.” I said quietly. “I didn’t have a lot, but I had friends.”

      I had changed the subject too. My mind floated to where I was content most in my life, when I had support without supporting words but just the banter of kids wanting to have fun with each other.  I didn’t like thinking about it, those times that him or barely anyone knew of. It was also the most sad I’ve been. I came back here for them, all of them whom I was slowly losing. That’s why it was nice to have him sometimes.

      He saw me staring out into the darkened street. “I need to shave.” He said slowing down the short statement as he made it. I realized he probably hated being a boy as much as I hated being a girl. It’d be much easier to be people, but neither of us would give up sex for that. He thought about what he said, looked at me and told me, “I can say all the stupid things I want. We can think the smartest things we can until our brains implode, but we need to-”

      “-make of it what we can.” I finished for him. That was probably the smartest thing I had said all night. It was my turn to walk over to the ledge and find the sky somewhere. I turned around and thought it looked even prettier in the reflection on the window. He saw my eyes shine. It was sad that we could only feel this way for a few hours a month and still lapse into the thing we had bothered working our way out of for this few hours. It was worth it sometimes.
Written by Kameron
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