Ricky but Rick when he wants to impress Part 1 (Writers block story)
I’m having a hard time starting something new. I can’t think of a plot that strikes me. I still felt like writing though, so I figured I’d just do some exersize that I remember from seventh grade. We were told to just write whatever we thought. I started it and when an actual scene formed I just ran with it for a little bit.
I haven’t gotten anything. I cant think of anything. I swear I don’t know what happens when we think about friendship, I mean do we think about someone we love or do we think about ourselves, what we’re capable of and what we deserve. We weren’t friends when he leapt into that chilly pool of water in the center of a great expansive forest and it didn’t really seem to matter to him. Legs tucked under his wrapped arms and his hair, wet, clinging close to his skull as though it were afraid that if it didn’t keep close it might be lost in the Autumn air that had begun to surround us. It was more than that I wasn’t friends with him; I hated him. I hated the water that flew as spikes into the air behind him, creating a glimmering arc that temporary reflected miniscule rainbows. I hated the water that parted on the crash of his cannonball and I hated the fact that it didn’t reject him right then and there. I hated that it didn’t discriminate between he and I, that it saw us as equal, that it reacted to him in the same enveloping way that it reacted to me. We weren’t friends because I couldn’t find any piece of myself in him. Instead I saw a complete stranger, full of foreign ideas and conquests, wants that didn’t make sense, needs that seemed trivial, and I think a part of him was a saint.
We spent so much time together because we were friends. When he got kicked out of school for fighting with the principal, wresting the old man to the ground, we could see his long, gaunt legs fluttering, exposing black socks that ran almost to his knees underneath the pressed blue slacks. I hated my friend for that. I pictured the man, waking in the morning. I saw his bed that was empty before he lay down and was once again empty when he arose. I saw the tie rack that he had purchased and I saw him brushing his teeth, returning the simple but efficient toothbrush to a holder that held three additional slots, all empty. It was because I knew what it was like to enter the world’s day as unnoticed as I intended to be. I knew what it was like to get shaken from the safety of invisible proficiency by someone who seethed a rage that made me want to cry. It’s that feeling, like when you see an obese woman ridiculed and realize that it’s someone’s mother, that they are doing the best they can and that with all the pain you’ve already had in your life that sometimes just doing the best you can and being left alone because of it is as good as it gets.
My friend had a girlfriend and I knew he didn’t love her. Because, what really happens to us when we think of love anyway? What happens when he tells me about her shitty blowjobs and about the weekend she disappeared and never told him where she went. What happens when I tell him that she seems like a bitch and he annihilates the cartilage of my nose. It was just after he told me that he loved her. It was just after he wrote it down almost like the concept was so abstract that the only way to make it even remotely manifested was by writing it down on a piece of paper, bringing the word into a more substantial existence than just saying it.
I think they did have some kind of connection. I think there was some times that she really found something inside of him that had retracted so deep for so long that it had paled and wrinkled in the suffocating darkness. But what happens when she touches it? What happens to it? Is it like a book that hasn’t been read for centuries, crumbling into dust and fragments when touched? Is it like an old woman whose nerves have relinquished most duties and the lightest touch garners no reaction but anything more forceful can cause irreversible harm. Or is it like touching a wild animal that is so skittish from lack of human interaction, good or bad, that its immediate reaction is to kill and to kill fast.
I think when she touched the pale, shriveled, thing that maybe was his soul she made him think of love and I think what happened when he thought of love is that he lost a little coherency with his life and I think it scared the shit out of him. What happens when we think of love? We see an escape, but we also see it as a trapdoor and we see it as quicksand but we see it as something that is so out of place that it distorts the very reality of its surroundings, creating a disorienting ripple that extends outward over our entire lives like a spider’s web. Things reflect on the bends and it’s harder to make out certain objects and we want it to be the way it used to be. Like driving through a wasteland, if it were to rain we would still turn on the wipers, not because we want to gaze on the wreckage and broken bodies but because it is so much more uncomfortable to be blind. This fear made my friend propose and it made her say no. They were fifteen. They were parents. I never saw him again.
Even though he wasn’t my friend and even though I hated ever inch of ground that didn’t suddenly give way and consume him, erase him, as he stepped upon it, I searched for him.
