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I don't point out that there's no amount of distance that can take me away from what's buried inside. I have to keep my mouth shut. Defiance has only ever left me sedated to a stupor.
Obedience means a measured walk back to my unit-slow because the guards at each elbow are watching me snivel and shake.
Tonight it's easy to flush my dinner down the toilet, sitting on my bunk afterward though-not so effortless. My mind is still stuck in that dark part. When I'm there in the moments after, I can't function.
Jake crumpled and lifeless on a bloody carpet. The nearby wall smeared. A single pristine handprint-a wide palm and five long fingers-etched into the eggshell paint. I was down on the floor when I saw it; my gaze passing over as I looked to the ceiling, praying for the world to end. I somehow know the height of the print matched the level of Jakes' shoulder and knowing that makes me shudder each time I blink because I can see him standing there in the small space between the bed and the wall. He's leaning against it, trying to stay on his feet. The images are burned into my eyelids so I can't close them.
Instead, I tell myself lies: it never happened, I am not in jail. There is no such thing as a new millennium. I am not a murderer.
I fold myself into the comforting lies my mind conjures: me, standing inside Jakes garage. There is no tour to prepare for, no search for a second guitarist. No lingering echoes of "not yet." He never packed and moved. It's quiet. Jake is visiting his mom and Henry. Max is probably at work and Andrew, the tattling asshole, is going to be replaced.
I am alone and at peace, staring at the blown out half-stack I always sat on. Max's drum set quietly sits with the sticks lying in X formation on top of a tom. Jakes favorite sunburst guitar is upright, on a stand beside the bass. I'm seeing the numerous band posters and stickers tacked up on the walls, but I am looking at the one poster that was different from the rest.
My poet used to wax philosophical sometimes. He once said, "Through the ages there have been millions of quotable things said. Phrases that seem to fit every situation." Jake liked to collect words like that-the kind that stuck with you. He had this cheesy poster in the bands practice space with hundreds of quotes on it.
His favorite one was a quote by Thomas Edison: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to always try one more time."
Jake never actually used it, but he told me once that one line was why he bought the poster.
I used to read it when the guys were trying to work out a kink in a riff or transition. Some of the quotes contradicted each other; like this one about how the greatest gift you can get in life is friendship, but another said health was the greatest gift. I wouldn't know about either of those.
I liked the one from Mother Teresa. It went something like: poverty is more than being naked and hungry. That being unwanted, unloved, or uncared for is the real poverty. In that sense, I've been poverty-stricken from birth. Rejected by the only family I had and passed around from house to house, barely tolerated by most of the Fosters that took me in.
I think, if I had just one parent that would have been enough. But my dad was a ghost. And my crazy-ass mother never wanted me-not because she had anything better, but because of her disease. I wonder, in her schizophrenic mind, if she was trying to show me that she did love me by taking me with her in the car that morning. Maybe she didn't want to separate from me, even in death. I could understand that.
There was another quote on that poster about how there is more power is in rising after you fall than in never falling. I like that one. But how can you get up when you're locked in freefall?
Another quote said something like, Freedom is something you have to win-and maybe it is. For the ones who still have hope.
I think being remembered is the greatest gift. It is the only thing I can give to Jake. I can burn my candle and think of him. I can sing his songs. I can remember him. I can never make up for what happened, but I can keep vigil until I find him again in the next life.
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41
-Avery
If I had met Angel at any other moment in her life, I would not have felt a need to protect her. It's a no-brainer. But I first saw her at a pivotal point: the moment of her breaking.
Literally, one second I was watching a group of cranes drink from a puddle between the trees, and the next I was watching her bones fracture. That boxy car rolled down the road: a little bump before it took a short flight from the pavement, then flipped. Something small and white burst from the space where the windshield had splintered into a million tiny shards and landed in the crook of two unsure tree branches.
A small tree, planted several years before was growing beside the roadway, and by pure chance, it caught her.
I've seen some shit in my life but that was, by far, the most terrible one. Something inside me burst as I took it all in, and I knew that I had been put there for a reason-that I was supposed to take care of her. That I was meant to keep her from ever having to go through anything like that ever again.
Okay, so I didn't always make the best choices, but none of this shit has been painless on my side. If anything, I have suffered more. I realize it wasn't easy on her, but she needs to understand that I have always only ever took what she gave me and dealt with situations as they came up.
There's no prep course for this shit. No one's ever written a guide on how to be second-best. And let's face it; that is all I have ever been.
I was just trying to protect us. How can she not get that?
Angel and me are different types of particles-maybe even opposites-but we're made to cling to one another to achieve balance. Or we could be like what my high school science teacher said. He said that outer space is black because light particles need other particles to grab onto. Since space is basically empty, there is nothing for the light to hold. So it just keeps traveling, never touching anything until it enters earths' atmosphere and finds something to cling to.
Angel is the light.
I am the one hurdling through the outer nothingness. Searching. Grasping.
Space and I have a lot in common. If only I could have known sooner, maybe I would have studied harder. I could have become an astronaut. I could have landed on the moon or docked in a space station with a Russian dude named Vlad. He might have held my tether when I went on a space walk.
