who we are now we will always be.
living is what kills you
1.
Your father hired people to move the furniture out of your mother's room last week. You wanted to say, no, it belongs to me now, but you didn't want to keep it either. It had been long enough since she died. A few months. It was the last time you saw him, when you were kneeling by her closet and stuffing her clothes and make up and empty vodka bottles in large plastic bags, black. His publicist, his new one, wanted you to auction them off. You felt like hitting someone, then. You could see your hands shake. That's the last time you saw him.
He's shooting again. It's a big deal and he's ten thousand miles away. He said he'd given it up, but he's said a lot of things. One fucked up dinner and two fucked up kids later and he's sick of barbecuing and trying to live properly. Your father has said that he loves you and he's talked about his invisible cigarette burns and he's whipped Trina's boyfriend with the same belt he'd sliced across your back just weeks before.
You threw the bags away the day he left, and you wonder if anybody went through them, if her purses and perfumes are up on eBay. Most of it didn't mean anything. You kept the lighter, though, and you wonder if you should take up smoking. It seems like something appropriate. It seems like something you ought to do. Her paintings are stacked in your closet, her boxes and boxes of Blahniks picked apart by Trina before being shipped away. You don't know where. A storage space, maybe, a basement, somewhere where you can't see them. It was strange, you thought, how she didn't have that much in the end. Anything that mattered, that was unique to her. Strange but not unexpected.
2.
You stay up into the early mornings on weekends, watching I Love the 90's and eating Starbursts by the bag and absentmindedly trying to do your Calc homework. You only eat the lemon ones. You get invited to parties you don't go to. People call and they get inspirational messages of the day, but they don't get you. Weeks run by you. They'd told you that it would get easier, her death, as time passed, but it hasn't; it's been the opposite. You've always been special. The more the hours sandwich themselves between you and that day you saw her car on the bridge, the day you saw Trina in the hotel lobby, the more they do that, the more real it becomes to you. Her death gets sharper and more real and obvious every single minute. You avoid the lunch tables at school. You tell yourself, buck up, kid, fucking deal with it, and you try, but the more you try, the farther away you get from being normal again.
Oh, you don't fool yourself into thinking that you're a better person now. You keep provoking your teachers and getting sent to Clemmons' office. You keep being an asshole to people that don't matter and taunting Trina at every opportunity and it doesn't bother you. You keep doing all of that, but you have to try, and that's the difference. The difference is - your mother jumped off a bridge and your girlfriend was murdered and this town is completely and irrevocably fucked up and it's only now that you want out, but you can't, you can't leave. You're surrounded by it. Duncan disappeared and Veronica told Neptune to screw itself but you can't do any of that because this town, this place is who you are.
You are Aaron Echolls' son. You are an 09-er if there ever was one. You don't do student council and you're not on the football team, but you're famous and nobody can hurt you except for the people that matter. Half of them are dead. That's your mantra. That's your goddamned slogan. You can't protect anyone, you can't even protect yourself. You've got power, but not the kind that matters, not the kind that can change anything. Your mother is dead. Your father has never liked you.
You've got scars on your shoulder blades and scars in your mouth from them. This is something you understand.
3.
The more you hang out with Veronica, the less time you spend with anyone else. They're sorry, everyone is, but they've got something to break you down with now. You can see it. They've got something to pity you for. She doesn't feel sorry for you the way they do; she didn't like you and she understands you and sometimes she smiles at you. You used to be friends. You used to go to movies and talk about senior year like it was something for you to rule over, you used to do a lot of things that you're only starting to remember now. You look at her and you don't think that anybody understands what it's like to walk from moment to moment with that kind of hurt like she does. Maybe Duncan, but he doesn't want to, took the drugs and. And.
You kissed her. You kissed her and you knew that you were kissing your dead girlfriend's best friend, your best friend's ex-girlfriend. It's fucking fucked up. You're fucked up. Sometimes, you think that if she could love you, just the tiniest bit, it would be something like forgiveness, forgiveness from the closest thing to Lilly that's left.
Other times, you look at her and you don't remember Lilly at all, and that's the kind of betrayal you know deep down in your bones, in your joints, in every bloody beating alive part of you. You told her you had moved on. You lied. You kissed her. You're stupid. You can't even remember how to be angry anymore, it was easier when you did. You kissed her and you thought, please let me have this one thing, this one thing and I won't ask for anything else, at least not for a while; please let this last because I think I was happy again. You ask for too much, sometimes.
notes: purposely detached and abrupt. i hope it worked. the next three episodes are making me very anxious. oh, logan. :((