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[konishi-zen.livejournal.com]

After a dry spell, and after looking at old records, I got inspired to actually write a short piece.

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Disclaimers: don't own, don't sue. It's all fiction. Song Lyrics by J. Englishman.

Warnings: Twenty-something angst. Longing.

Pairing: Slight Monaboyd

Feedback/Archives: Ta would be nice. At Songworks, if you want, ask.

Posted: monaboyd and x-posted at fellow_shippers .

 

Give me passion give me feeling
Give me something to believe in
Give me passion over feeling
Give me reasons to keep breathing-J. Englishman

 

Dom was sitting on the front step of his home, cigarette smoke curling up around his head in some kind of demonic halo as he waited for the words that were trying to get out onto the fresh word document to disentangle themselves and overcome the clumsiness of his fingers to make a coherent story.

 

He would write. All over the place. On little notebooks that people bought him. On tablets of paper pilfered from various places. On the backs of office memos.

 

He only did that cause he couldn’t really take his poor old laptop to many places. Not unless he wanted the thing to just crash horribly and lose all of his work.

 

Not that it mattered. He often had begun to ask himself whether it was all just a pipe dream after all, to publish a book based on his bleak hometown. Besides, it seemed he had gotten beaten to the punch, if what he had been reading in one of the local indie papers was correct.

 

He took a drag from his smoke and looked out at the city he had returned to after what felt like a trip on heaven. It was cold and dark and bleak, the leaves falling off the trees in a symbolic gesture of the death to come. The North Wind was picking up and making everyone feel bitter loss and regret at its wake.

 

Reminders of Mortality were never welcome. Especially when you’re twenty-something stuck in what feels like a limbo that you can’t escape from.

 

Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be anything more than a mediocre lifer. A person that just has to contend with their own existence. That has to be happy with simply doing a job for the money and not think about life in a bigger scope.

 

“If I had known this is what going to University was going to mean afterwards, I would have simply taken the money and gone to work in Australia.”  He muttered as he tapped the ashes of his cigarette and typed in some more of his story into his laptop with desultory stabs of the keypad.

 

It wasn’t that he was mad at the world or anyone in general. It was just that he did expect more. He expected things to be a little easier. More stimulation than just the dull consciousness of going into work to a place that drained him of even a will to live while trying to keep the specters of poverty away from the door.

 

He sighed and stubbed his cigarette out. He tried connecting the loose pieces of his story into a coherent narrative, but it all seemed to be insubstantial. He was seriously wondering if it was simply because he lacked any passion in his life, or simply because he was so drained and worn out, he couldn’t weave anything like he had when he was younger.

 

Growling irritably, he saved what he had written and closed his laptop.  Sitting in the dark, he hugged himself against the chill of the wind and wondered idly if he was simply suffering from a sense of detachment to everything simply because he wasn’t keeping in touch anymore.

 

Dom looked up at the bleakly beautiful starry night and wondered if that was all the root of his problems. That he got attached to people too easily. People that he knew would slip through his fingers no matter what they promised him.

 

He didn’t go down that road again, since he knew he would just drive himself into a bleak stage of despair as he wondered whether it was either his personality or his fate to remain always grasping for a companionship that seemed to always be a few steps away, yet he could never reach it.

 

He ran his fingers through his longish hair and pulled his shirt tighter around his body as the weather seemed to turn even chillier. Maybe it was time for him to get inside if he didn’t want to get sick. Apathy and disassociation seemed to suck even more when a person was sick.

 

Laughing bitterly, he shut his laptop and hauled it inside with him. He walked past the piles of rejection letters sitting on the side table and went to the living room, where he put his laptop on his couch and sat down beside the precariously towering stack of books he was slowly working his way through.

 

He looked blankly at the telly screen and debated watching one of his movies to ease his boredom or simply re-reading another paperback that was gathering dust on his bookshelf.

 

The lure of the movie won out and in minutes he was watching some art-house film someone had shoved on him and was staring at a blank sketch-book page as he tried to force himself to do something creative yet again.

 

He had only gotten halfway through the movie when his phone rang, knocking him out of his trance.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Dom. It’s Billy. How are you doing?” Dom blinked.

 

“Okay. I guess. You?”

 

“Crazy busy, that’s pretty much why I haven’t been calling man. You still working on your book?” Billy asked, sounding as if he was in a nightclub or somewhere else equally loud.

 

“He. Yeah. Still. I’m working on the last chapter man. What are you up to?”

 

“The usual man. Working like a dog. I just wanted to call you and tell you that I do miss you man. And to tell you to keep working on that book.  I know I’m not there all the time, as much as you’d like at any rate. But I’m still keeping tabs on you man.”

 

Dom laughed softly.

 

“Yeah. Thanks.” There was a long pause and Billy laughed softly.

 

“Come on, Dom. I’m in Scotland here. The least you can do is talk to me dude.”

 

“Yeah…Uhm. I missed you dude. Missed hearing your voice and missed hearing you tell me that.  Thanks…seriously.”

 

Billy laughed softly.

 

“Anytime, you git. Anytime.”

 

They said their goodbyes and Dom returned to his movie and his sketchbook. He sat there for a couple of minutes before he reached over and picked up his lap-top and turned it on again.

 

END.