She wasn’t seeing double — not yet. Or at least she was seeing things happen, then happen again a split second later. She wasn’t sure if that was better or worse; she’d never heard any of her friends talk like that was a thing. She didn’t even know it could be a thing.

Wait, where were her friends? She twisted around, looking for them. She saw two strangers high five, one sitting on a ‘97 Pontiac, the other walking by with his girl in hand. The dude walking by had a weird mullet. It had to have been fake. She turned to tell that to her friends, but they weren’t there. Right, they were gone, and she was drunk. At least she was outside. Or was that a good thing?

The dude sitting on the Pontiac, after a furious level of in-phone typing, finally left and she managed to walk straight over to where he was and sit down. The hood was still warm to the touch, but everything else was cold. She texted her friends and shivered. All she had on was a cut-down sleeveless shirt and flip-flops and denim shorts. She’d thought this night would begin, middle and end in cramped rooms with her friends, yet here she was on a sidewalk, alone. She texted them again, half-scared. There were some serious creepers giving her an eyeful.

While she waited for her friends to respond — like she prayed they still could — the music blew out from the speakers from one of the bars. It was all music she loved and wished she was inside dancing to. Shit, she wasn’t even sure how she had managed to get outside. Why was this happening? There were no memories, and that scared her. How close had she been to something bad happening?

Some guy walked by and asked her to stop sitting on the hood. She nodded quickly and moved over to some nearby concrete steps. It was getting much colder now, and her eyes were just beginning to stare wide at any entrance she might want to feel safe inside when her phone started buzzing.

Trying to reassure someone whose name you can’t remember. Trying to provide comfort, to “get through to” them, and falling over yourself. Trying to ease their suffering, and only compounding it further.

It all must feel so worthless in the end, so broken down, hollow and empty. Like you tried to stop a building from being condemned, and all you did was nudge around a few pieces of trash, maybe kick up some dust. Like you never could have fixed anything, and if you did anything at all, it was make it worse by trying.

It’s a strange thing to know in your heart that you ruined a friendship by trying to be a friend. It is strange to know it’s not even that strange.

+++

Six months ago, a makeshift radioactive bomb went off in lower Manhattan. One hospital on the upper side managed to only sustain the force of detonation, shattering the glass and shaking loose the fixtures. Thankfully, the backup generators still worked when the island’s electricity went out, but they were a stop-gap by design, and as the doctors passed each other on the way to comfort their patients, the looks they gave each other betrayed the reassurances they gave their wards.

One of the boardrooms was converted to a sleeping area. Some slept. Nobody knew how much radiation had reached the building, but did it matter? Well, maybe. There might be a future, one way.

Slowly, things fell apart completely until everything was untenable. By that time, though, everyone had been evacuated, and all that was left were the crumbled ruins. Nobody who knew any better ever dared to go back. It’s not like you want to relive that kind of horror. It’s not like you could believe there was a way to repair what was broken. It’s not like anyone wanted to even try to do anything but forget.

(via inemptyhallways)

They were so beautiful. The conversation he heard bounced from school to work to plans, and it was all tinged so wistfully for him. He remembered being in love, and it was exactly like this.

When they stood up to leave, he looked down so they wouldn’t realize he was staring. When he looked back up, they were gone and the table was frighteningly empty.

It’s all signs and bars now. Don’t do this, don’t do that, and no, no, you have to do it this way, it’s for your own good. This world used to be full of men. Now we’re all women and children.

So I ran. I didn’t watch for ice and I didn’t care. I ran out into the street, ran where I wanted, and when I slipped and fell and woke up with blood on my face and hands, I felt alive.

+++

In a few hours, the blood had stopped. In a few days, the wound had closed up. In a few weeks, all that was left was a small but highly noticeable hashmark cluster of scars that literally everyone would ask him about.

He resorted to more ridiculous stories every telling. First it was an accident. Then it was a fight. Then it was both, then neither. It turned into a life story that was too complicated to tell. Then, finally, it settled into a birthmark, and there was no story at all.

At first he didn’t know why he felt ashamed, until he told the truth to his wife and she replied that it seemed a remarkably childish thing for him to do. And he couldn’t help but agree, nodding and grinning sheepishly. His wife walked over and kissed him on the scars and gave him a hug and in that moment he felt alive, too.

She left to go to work a few minutes later and as he watched her drive away it occurred to him that there are far worse things than being told no.

Great American Burgers, huh. What does that even mean? he thought to himself. He wasn’t sure. One of those burgers sat in front of him, so he took a bite. It tasted good, but so did every other burger from every other joint.

He took a swig from what was ostensibly a Great American Beer as he contemplated “greatness” meaning “as good as everything else.” He didn’t have a good response. It all felt so abstract and meaningless, and he just wanted to enjoy a good burger and a good beer.

Well, it was a good burger and a good beer, and he realized he’d need to give up caring to enjoy it.

So he did.

ponchopeligroso:

my second book is available for pre-order. click the cover to go to another page with the cover where you can hit another button to buy it

Poncho is an enormously talented human being & from what I’ve seen of ‘The Realist’ it’s going to be even better than ‘the romantic’

It was a calm day at the hospital, and it was about lunch time. It was a bigger hospital, so there were always minor tragedies passing through, but today there were enough minor miracles that the doctors felt, for the first time in a long while, that perhaps they had chosen the right profession.

By the end of the day, they were all willing to believe that nothing past noon had ever happened.

The music was loud, the room was covered in a deep hue of red light, and for him everything was a blur. The empty table he had stumbled away from was covered in cranberry-hued vodka, some of which had dripped onto the seats and floor; he had almost slipped in it on his way over to the bar. And now he was at the bar. He grasped onto the counter, his cup slapping onto the glass counter. He felt hungry. He didn’t know if he felt sick. He looked down at the cup, fascinated by the stylized bat inked onto the hard plastic. His eyes stumbled to the counter. He noticed it was made up of small glass cubes, and he stared at the random little patterns of clear and dark cubes running across the surface as his fingers rubbed over the smooth surfaces and grooves where the cubes met. A man nudged him on the shoulder.

“Hey man,” the guy shouted, “am I in your way?”

Was he? No, he wasn’t. Just trying to get a new drink.

The man edged away a few feet.

He remembered that he spilled a drink. He figured he should clean it up. He looked up at the bartenders mixing drinks back and forth across the bar. One of them had massive biceps. One of them didn’t. One of them with a rag tossed over his shoulder walked up to him and nodded. He asked for the rag. A friend of his had spilled over at the bar, he said. The bartender slung the rag onto the counter.

When he got back to the table, he found it was already wiped clean. He wasn’t sure how. He felt dizzy. He sat down, slapping his cup onto the table. He didn’t mean to slap it down, and it upset him that he did. He gripped the cup tight, then loosened. Maybe he’d get another drink.

He stared at a few women dancing in a miniature lightshow, half a bar away. He watched the neon green and purple and blue dance across them, across the thick and omnipresent red. He saw a face he recognized. Krista was her name. He tried talking to her once, when he was drunk. It didn’t end well.

A large man whom he recognized as one of the bouncers ambled drunkenly into the dance floor, drink in hand. The man stumbled around in the middle of the pack, spilling his drink on one of the women, then stared at her, confused, as she frantically wiped at her top. Krista intervened, giving the man a big hug and leading him over to a booth. The woman he had spilled a drink on went to the bathroom with one of her friends, and Krista brought over a bowl of popcorn for the man to munch on. A few minutes later, the man was passed out on the booth and his roommate was called in to lead him away.

It was all an abstraction, and watching it tired him. He felt like he was watching this from ten feet in the air. He felt like he was miles away, sitting upright in his bed. He felt like he didn’t exist right now. He lifted his cup to sip at his vodka and cranberry, then remembered that he didn’t have any. Maybe he’d get another drink. Maybe he’d just get water. Maybe he’d just leave.

The colors and women and lights danced around the room for a while longer, and then it was closing time. Things went white, then black. It was all a blur for him.