Part One: Difference
It had been five months since he had experienced the head-rush offered by nicotine. It had been five months since he’d been friends with anyone. He journeyed in the quiet cold of the northern March air, lost in his own head, not noticing the cars that slipped across the roads, seeing only the long dark black of his hair swinging before his eyes. He was listening to folk music, and walking, as he often did before class, having nothing to do before 11am. His body often awoke him at 5am, and he couldn’t rally the energy needed for serious study, in this case, a midterm essay for his Philosophy class on Kierkegaard’s conception of repetition. The idea that nothing was new under the sun bothered him, especially because he felt that it was true, and that there was no escape from it, and that this philosophical problem had suddenly seeped into the breath of his life, and he could not avoid it just as he could not avoid breathing. When he went to this class, it was present not only in the discourse guided by the teacher, but also in the face of Emma, the blonde girl with plainly beautiful Dutch figures on her face, who was slightly shorter than his six feet, and was unbothered by Kierkegaard’s ideas, but instead curious, excited even, about it. When he looked at her, he didn’t see what everyone else saw—a girl, like any other. When he looked at her, he saw the past—things that were gone, that were dead, that had vanished from his life like the warmth in October. When he looked at Emma, he saw the similarity of the girl he had loved but had suddenly gone from his life without explanation, without apology, without even sadness. How could he think of Kierkegaard, or difference, in a positive light, when the lived-out presence of his ideas were not just the hollow pain of his words, but existed also as the girl, the girl so happy and pure and unaware of what he saw when he looked at her. It didn’t help any more that he of course found her attractive, provocative in a quiet way, such as her habit of letting the slipper on her right foot fall from the heel when she bounced her leg as it crossed over the left one, and how she played with the falling of the heel of her shoe from her foot, almost in the way a fisher sinks the bob on his line to and fro over the surface of the long traveling river that heads south, the same river that contained a pair of watches that he had thrown from a bridge in that same October, the watches given from a girl to him that was no longer here, or perhaps lay in wait, in absence, like the girl, at the bottom of that river, which he sometimes looked upon from the tall bridge in the dark of the night, when he dreamed of jumping down into the froth-white current, headfirst with his arm outstretched and his eyes straining to see past the flowing of the water onto his retina, in search of those watches, in search of that love; but such a falling from the heights into the cold water wouldn’t yield the watches, or the love, but only the waning of his life, as the elements took him under, finally, into its shallow indifference.
Just then, he swept leftward across a curb and past a homeless man that waited outside the tobacco shop. He avoided the eye contact of the homeless man as one does the leering eyes of a professor who wished to call on you. The dark currents of his thought, of the past, of difference and repetition, of love, of Emma, of the cold March air, of the stillness of the streets which was adorned with homeless men, eager students on their way to the library, and hisself, who had no journey but the one he always took to avoid sitting alone with his thoughts, all conspired together on this peculiar soft morning to move his legs past the frame of the door of the tobacco shop, which was manned by the reliable son of the store owner, who was then sitting there with his phone and trap music beating shyly from his weak speakers, so that one could only hear the skittering high end of high hats and auto-tuned vocals swimming in the ever-cool air conditioned shop that wafted into itself with the various scents of incense, fruit flavored juice, and the vague remembrance of marijuana that had been carried in repeatedly by stoned college students and had somehow left an impression on the smell of the store itself, so that with the fruits and incense there always lingered the damp musk of that chill plant which his peers loved to smoke so much but he himself had hated. He wished the plant’s musk didn’t cling to shirts and hair, and that its smell wasn’t everywhere, that it wasn’t here, that he only wished to smell the fruits and incense by themselves, but was denied this simple pleasure by the bored hand of the profligate stoners that were so frequent on campus that they could’ve made a reasonable attempt to be the school’s mascot. His mind was wondering as it often did when he heard the accent of the son behind the counter say what do you want? He was taken aback by the sharpness of the question, that was without kindness in its tone, nor was prefaced by a greeting, but simply probed him to action, and, somehow even worse, that the question, beyond the context of this store, was one he couldn’t answer. What did he want? No idea. Instead of having this honest meltdown in the store, however, he stuttered out the name of a vape that he had remembered was the deliverance of that last buzz in October that he wished to taste again, the taste in question blueberry ice, blue and sour as the small blueberries are, as his old love had loved, the small ones, where she laughed at how small they are before wrestling the juice from their weak skinned bodies onto her tongue in arrogant loudness which made her slightly pucker in happiness. $17.50, the son said behind the counter, with dark rims around his eyes and again a coldness in his voice. He brought a fist of single dollar bills, a gracious five dollar bill, and a roll of quarters that had been swinging bravely deep in the pockets of his hoodie. He spilled them down onto the counter from his shaking hands, and as the quarters spun atop the old dark wood of the counter, he said I think that’s $17.50, maybe more. The son, with barely restrained frustration at the task of counting all the coins and dollar bills briefly played across his top lip which jumped up to reveal teeth, as he sighed again, this time drawn out. It checked out, he was handed back some coins, and a receipt was pressed down onto his quivering palm, along with the dark black body of a disposable vape device with blueberry ice juice held in a container near the lip. He said thank you and went from the store back into the cold and banal air, and walked back to his dorm room, which he had the misfortune of being entirely alone in, which overlooked that river which held the watches, and bore a quiet witness to the dawn of the day, every day, again, and again. He couldn’t wait to get home, to try out this vape, to taste that flavor again, to feel returned to the past.
After a fifteen minute walk back through the University quad, where mysterious squirrels ran train-like across the social branches which reached long and out toward one another, he vanished into his room, and excitedly brought out the vape, which he had refused to draw upon as he walked. He wanted this feeling to be alone, in bed, with a song playing, where he didn’t have to move, but simply sit still and let the return wash over him, without distraction from the labor of walking. He settled into the stacked pillows of his bed and looked out across the breaking pale blue sky which was punctured with nimbostratus clouds, and journeyed darkly across the weak blue air, which reminded him of the faded cloth of baby-blue pajamas his Mother still had on display in a picture stoned flat against the wall of his bedroom at home. He played the ceremonious song, the one he used to play so often on his $200 Yamaha guitar which sat sullen and virginal again in the corner of his room, watching him like a vain woman who hadn’t been hit on in a while. The lyrics sung out from a cheap Bluetooth speaker he had resting on his windowsill, and which comforted him in their tender coldness, just as he began to withdraw the breath of the world through this device, which promised blueberries, which promised feeling again, which promised the past:
‘When I was young, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I'm older, see it face to face
And now I'm older, gotta get up, clean the place’
He felt nothing after one long breath. Maybe he still had a tolerance. He went towards his lips again and pulled more air from the world:
‘And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be’
A hint, a beginning of calmness flirted with his mind, but then vanished again like a fox around a corner, he almost could hear it laughing at him. The song was going by with the cold river water formlessly lapping around the curvature of the Earth. Once more, but this time two long pulls, to bring him fully into that headrush, the one he so longed for, this time, he hoped, to be brought to fullness with the third verse of the song, to imbue this miniature ritual with some magic, finally, again, another attempt:
‘And I was strong, strong in the sun
I thought I'd see when day was done
Now I'm weaker than the palest blue
Oh so weak in this need for you.’
A minor swelling of happiness in his head but gone again as quickly as the falling leaf from a tree withdrawing into winter. The lyrics of the song gave way to a sudden rising vigor to the rhythmic difference of the strumming guitarist, but it too died out into silence, for he had forgotten to loop the song, and he had nothing queued up after it. Where there was eagerness before there was now anger, madness at the world and the $17.50 spent for nothing, and the dying of the past, and of the blueberries that were barely recognizable on his tongue when he breathed in as it was dominated by the ice, crushed into pulpy shallowness, it too withdrawn, and offering no recollection. He threw the device headlong into the wall, where it broke into pieces upon his backpack which had peeking out from its lazy opening the lip of Kierkegaard’s Repetition. He laughed at this, and thought maybe there was something after all that was there. This moment passed too, and he went back into youthful annoyance. He thought about going back to the tobacco shop to ask for his money back, but thought this was too ignoble to do, and as he habitually glanced at his wrist which he realized yet again no longer was hugged by a watch, he chuckled even more madly and pulled out his phone which had as its wallpaper a painting by Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, which fit perfectly with the height of his phone, and which his eyes ignored for now the beauty of and instead went towards the time, which read 10:50. Annoyance gave way to dangerous anger as he realized he would have to run to class, which was a 12 minute walk. He remembered comically how the singer of the song he played during the broken ceremony, Nick Drake, had died mysteriously—some considered it suicide, and others, an accident. He wondered for a moment what his stance on this question was. Having no time to pursue that thought, he instead grabbed his bag and flew over the ground towards class.
He burst through the doors and was greeted by the professor, with a curiously jovial welcome, David, and to which he thought the words fuck off, but instead bowed his head sagaciously and grounded his eyes to the reflective tiles, as, just then, he saw in his periphery the bouncing heel of Emma’s slipper, and labored languidly upward, stopping at the holes ripped in anticipation at her knee, which spoke of soft vibrant pale skin, and further up now to the limp dragging of muted red cloth which made up her hoodie that stood in contrast to the pale blue ripped jeans, as suddenly he felt a scold torn into his eyes as he recognized that Emma was staring at him staring at her, who bore an expression of vague shock, the one which sits at the ambiguous borderline of hostility and sexual interest. Again he bowed his head and traipsed lonesome into the back of the dimly lit class.
So, where we left off… as the words of the professor resonated in the stirring bodies of the students David pointedly looked out the window, just in case Emma looked at him, so that she could see he was still not looking at her, but was so cleverly through the weak reflection of her flaxen hair in the glass which had in the background a magisterial oak tree fell by Winter, which for months he now pondered, but today, instead, the gold threads of Emma’s hair, in the foreground. For an hour he looked at her through the mirror of the clear glass, dozing off, almost, but not quite, for he was fraught with tension all throughout his body, silently screaming out toward Emma, listening half-way to the words of the professor which still droned on in non-inflective ambience around the cramped walls which held thirteen students, all who were anathema to David—nothing existed but Emma in that mirror he had fashioned out of the glass. He was broken out of his intoxicated boyish stupor by a stirring movement by all the bodies of the class at once, sharp, almost, in contrast to their silent and still waiting, as they had been for the entirety of the class, but now, with alarming pace and eagerness, were slamming notebooks and laptops into bags as they were racing their way back out into the day. Suddenly Emma’s hair was gone from the window, and his eyes punctured its clearness into the air beyond the reflection, which, he now noticed, had quietly been weeping from the song of the nimbostratus clouds, which anticipated the rain, and had finally spilt down into their long crying threads back down towards the earth, and David felt then the return, of the rain from the Earth back unto the Earth after its stay in the skies, onward and through the horizon back to where it came, the soft soil of the Earth, onto the heads of the students, of the thin and frail grass which rejoiced in the breaking of the spring, back, back again, finally, with stories of the heavens they had visited, back down into Earth, in difference.