Archive for 'Quarter-Life Crisis'
He sat, defeated, against his now-defunct car. The sun reflected off the hot tarmac as though it were a mirror, blinding him as he grimaced. With face contorted in a futile attempt to beat the sun, he looked first west and then east. The vacancy of the horizon suggested the advent of unwilling solitude on a stretch of unfamiliar highway hours from home.
After a moment of struggling to make out little more than the shimmering waves of heat lying low along the road in the distance that straddled him, he slowly let his head fall into his hands with brows furrowed and eyes shut tight. He rued the moment.
Begrudgingly, he lifted himself off the ground. He supported his clumsy rise with her body—an unlikely source of aid, given the circumstance. Standing upright, with shirt glued to his back as only perspiration can adhere, he again surveyed the landscape. His fears were confirmed as he lay his hands on her for support.
I am alone.
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Furious, she ripped herself away from my embrace. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she screamed with a venom that could have bored holes in the dust-covered kitchen tile beneath her would it have fallen from her mouth rather than been spit into my face with inhuman force. She stepped away hastily, nearly tripping herself on the half-built shelving unit that lay in pieces on the floor.
Here we stood, a newly-unionized couple enjoying the first weekend of togetherness. We stared at one another for a moment in silence, her venomous ire dripping down my face in the form of sweat and a stray tear. Her anger began to engulf her: her face turned as red as the pits of Hell, her eyes burned with the fire of a thousand suns, and she clenched her fists around the house’s best wrench, no longer screwing dainty screws into untreated wood, as though it were my very throat.
We stood at odds with one another across that pine-felled battlefield; wood chips and scattered debris punctuated the scene, signifying the great war that had taken place.
As the dust settled, I caught her eye. Not a moment passed before her mouth went from ajar to fully open, giving way to an erupting, streaming spew of ceaseless and deafening noise. The spring sun beamed into the room as though it was the hellish rays of God’s own punishing eyes burning into my back at the beckon call of her demonic roar. The pine boards across the battlefield glimmered in the soon-summer light.
Time stood still as she mouthed her discontent for my eyes to behold. Each word thrust from her mouth like an epee, carefully and precisely piercing my soul further and further with each strike. My soul fell as blood to the floor as it seeped from the unseen wounds, seemingly staining the wood as an everlasting reminder of my crimes against humanity.
So began the ballet: she twirled about the kitchen, deftly dancing around the modern marvel of unfinished furniture, as she sung the song that would end the world in the name of deriding my very being. And when she was finished, nothing remained but the completed shelving unit which stood in all its miraculous beauty anew.
All the devil asked for its creation was an unwilling man’s corpse.
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The Spring of ‘86
Waves crashed on the coast’s dark banks. “White sand is overrated,” I’d heard more than a few times already in my days. Ultimately, there were more wrongs than rights—on the trip, and in life.
The wind playfully carassed my burnt face as I lay peacefully on the beach one day, her fingers draping down my cheek to my neck before being drawn away. How good her touch feels, I thought, even if it was phantom and fleeting. No one stepped in to take her place as she drew calm and left the beach. “Ca va mal,” I responded to her abscence in the spirit of the vacation. But she was already gone, and my words fell to the soft, hot sand below. (more…)
I have a problem.
This realization dawned on me first when I was lying on the beach in Cuba a month ago, but I felt it again this weekend past after a night out with some of my coworkers past and present. Sitting with a group of happily married and newly-engaged couples who all seem so well-to-do in life left me wondering about what I have to show for my (soon-to-be) 25 years.
I thought the same thoughts as I stared out into the sea, and a difficult problem to solve had arose—one that I fear has become an increasingly-recurring hinderance exaserbated by ye old quarter-life crisis.
For whatever reason, nothing that I do or accomplish ever feels real. (more…)
I saw a man today as I was riding the bus home. A trip with a work colleague to Yorkdale sent me sailing back to North York on a long, lonely bus ride, and for some reason, this man sticks now in my mind. Old and withered by time, he stood atop the world on his high-rise balcony. He stood, staring down on the world and judging it and its residents.
As I normally do, I concocted a little narrative for the man in my mind; I built a fiction to explain his existence in my world. For he must have some great purpose if I picked him unknowingly out of the thousand unknown faces I saw today. Sadly, it was only when I reflected on the narrative I’d written for him that I realized why my subconscious decided to award such attention to just what would otherwise be just another apparition in the crowd, if I may let Ezra speak for me.
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