Lorna told me once, 'I wanted to live something literary.'
I can't believe that in this moment, I could be doing anything but. Maybe, one day, I'll call her up, and take her for a chaste weekend in the countryside, and wine and dine her with no intentions of getting into her bed. It could fit into one of those eighteenth century novels, and that would be the whole point.
I like the word literary.
I'm standing outside the travel agent, looking like the moron I am. I could buy this plane ticket, and go back to the arms that didn't hold me in the first place. Something, well everything, in me is telling me this is the wrong thing to do.
The wrong everything. The wrong mood, wrong lighting, wrong decision, wrong plot to explore.
See, here's where it gets a little messy. Say I bought another ticket to a city where there's nothing for me to see. Say I went and slept with someone that has nothing to offer me. Say all of this happens in it's nice neat line, and I come home and feel worse than I do now.
It doesn't mean anything. And I'll be out the thousand dollars.
If I did go to London, I'd be bringing too many people and too many memories with me to enjoy sightseeing. Or fucking. And we wouldn't go as a couple, we'd go as a dead man and a ghost.
I stare through the glass at an older couple, who are staring at the glass and a poster of Italy. I should tell them to visit Britain, see the sites, write some living sonnets. Forget the birthplace of Petrarch. Find poetry for yourself.
Lorna called it being literary. I call it something I shouldn't do.
Not again.
I'm so scared that he won't want me again, and I'll have to go back home from London without that sense of, something, that I found there. I keep looking, but I can't really find it anywhere -- not under my bed, not between my sheets, not in my head.
I don't have many places left to look, anymore.
If she weren't with Alex, and happy with Alex, I might try and get Lorna back, and never let go, like the normal stories inspire us to do.
I can't believe people go around, inspired like that. I don't feel very fucking inspired, thank you.
But, then. These people all around me, none of them seem to feel the same bone-shaking nervousness I do. Even before... things. First of all, they wouldn't be in this mess in the first place -- they'd just take their grieving period and move on, and pick up someone else.
As if you can play people like cards. And if they wanted something labeled 'self destructive' from the pile or the deck... they wouldn't hesitate to go visit Pete, go get their brains shagged out, go find something beyond the ordinary.
I'm a fucking super-hero, and I have to get my head fucked around with to feel anything more than ordinary.
The plane might crash, and I could be Iceman to save it, but I still want a stupid red tee-shirt back and a chocolate covered donut in the morning. Because he doesn't deserve that memory, because I don't deserve that memory, and because I don't want to share Remy, even though I gave him up.
Because giving him up was living a legend. Because giving him up meant that he wouldn't do the same first. And because giving him up meant I could see whether he'd try and convince me that he was worth groveling to.
The postcards are in the mail, already, addressed to a man and a lover and a complicated situation. Their pictures drop down around me, and the scene converts under an impressionist's careful eye. None of the details suddenly matter, as I'm consumed by the total lack of focus in our lives.
I don't need a plane ride for this, I think. I leave the older couple looking at Portugal, and wander in my head and in real life to a bench across the mall.
I sit. I stare.
I wonder what is it about plastic food, uncomfortable seats, and too many hours breathing stale air that's supposed to change one's life. So many movies and plots have the plane ride being the end or beginning of a new and different life. It doesn't have to be better, but different is key. Knowledge, and a journey makes the world evolve, so rapidly we blink and miss it.
I'm still staring at nothing. People are walking around. The air conditioning is buzzing. I'm not thinking about the laundry I have to do at home, or the white button-up shirt tucked in the bottom of the load. It took a journey, too. Maybe I should ask it for answers.
It's getting a postcard too, I don't know. I don't remember sending one, but I wasn't the only one there that night.
What a funny thing, postcards are. We write four or five lines, within view of the mailman and the clerk who sorts mail, and the people who look through our mailboxes, and the postal worker who collects the mail from the boxes -- all these people view our private communication. And yet, each time one's sent, it has lines of personal messages, each and every time.
We put our thoughts on display, like a sonnet. That thought excites me. I should send a lot of postcards, and let the mailman deliver my bouts of drama to their rightful destinations.
I get the feeling that even if I don't address them, the right people will see them.
The peanut gallery, being an ocean away, doesn't normally get the latest news instantaneously.
But, thanks to forward progression in technology, and a conscientious leader, Pete Wisdom hears about the newest X teams in less than 24 hours, and through an email address he forgot existed.
Bad news always travels fast, they say. Why he thinks it's bad news, he's not sure. Why he feels that chill, and knows he was inexplicably a part of something far vaster than he originally thought, he doesn't know.
But Pete can tell -- and could tell, from his start -- that what happened in his flat didn't really stop there. Or start there. Or tremor there, though the epicenter might be his bed. He should feel used, being this catalyst for earthquakes.
And little earthquakes, too. Like a red shirt.
Such a simple little email, really. Just mentions the status of each current X member, and possible transfers. Bobby's taking 'personal time'. Kitty is wherever members go that are working. And LeBeau is--
Pete chuckles, and deletes the email with a forced lack of flourish, without bothering to read the rest. He's not-- that is, he doesn't really care about where all the X-men are. There's a burning in his pocket, where an invisible set of keys to an invisible flat where an invisible girl and him don't share an anything.
And here he is, in his real flat, with a real email now in the trash. And a real worry about what he might have been the spoon to stir up.
But. He remembers just buying Bobby a drink. That's all he did. And. He remembers not really being... comfortable, with LeBeau. But they had fun. Whatever he might have seen those nights when something burned, vast and far away, so he could barely see it out his window-- whatever he lit up, he can barely remember it now.
Which might be playing down his knowledge of events, or of people. So, but, that's his memories. And they rattle around softly, with those invisible keys, and maybe a postcard addressed from New York.
"I can't help but feel like Bobby's withering is my fault."
This is what the man looking in the mirror would say, if he knew anyone that really wanted to hear it. This is the eternal problem, he finds. He has all these confessions to make, and no one unconnected to hear them. Everyone he meets eventually gets involved.
And Bobby, like them all, he feels responsible for.
Remy goes outside, and picks up the school's letters from the post office. He drives his motorcycle, and air molecules stir at his passing. He meets no one willing to hear his side on the way there. He gets the envelopes. He finds nothing for him.
The postcards must have gotten lost in the mail.