non·co·a·les·cent

Need characters.
Need characters with things in their mouths.
Words.  Reedeming words, and actions.  Foul actions, worthy of speechifying redemption.  Words and vows, that's what we need?
"Hey have you read my book?  I was called Number One Best Seller."
She chuckles agreeably.  "No."
"I wrote it in a library," looking for solace after having ended a love affair I don't tell her 'by the author of The Best Book in the Bargain Bin'
"Aww, don't say that."
We have stayed up.  So far into the night that it's dawn and the hot tea has for about a half an hour now been cold tea and the cold beer has long been warm.
"What kind of characters?"

Boys in street clothes on patrol by the east side orange line. There's a bulletin bass beat in the background.  They open a grimy unmarked door and head down, the music immediately sounds muffled, good sound design that, and they enter into an underground farm, fresh green, foods and non-food growing in an unused car park "and shipping containers," says one man, pulling open his desk drawer and pulling out a paper.
"See, there's dialogue."
"Welll," she draws it out "half dialogue."
"Yes, truth be told.  You're right."
"What's his name?" Emphasis on the his because I haven't told her all of mine yet. Not ready.
"We'll call him Ono."
"Don't forget the shipping containers." Ono hands a laser-printed color map to a bearded man we haven't met yet. Reds and blues. The boys in street clothes open the door but domino into each other when they realize they are walking into a private meeting.
"Hey!" Ono yells, "beat it matones."
"They exuent."
"That's, what is that? Shakespeare?"
"Alright, they hot-step it outta there."
"That's better."
"Chingon tacuaches," says Ono. "We've got business to attend to."
The boys, largely unfazed save for the eldest among them, decide to stop by Walmart for a virus test and a delicious Pepsi.
"Product Placement?"
"Could be."
"What is this meeting about?"
"What meeting?" I hear and feel my phone vibrating within my pants pocket.
YOU ARE FULL OF CONTRADICTIONS
Ill timing for this text.  Timing never was one of our strengths.

By way of explanation for this textual aside, I'll relay a short anecdote from last week:
I had just returned from my monthly Taoist Kumbhaka Scuba group and was thus preparing, as has become my wont, to put off paying all of my bills for another month in accordance with the principle that it's inadvisable to spend more money than you have. The real solution to the problem of paying bills likely lies in the practice of not spending more than I have on frivolities, but that's neither here nor there, as they say.  I had just put on the VR headset for a quick catatonic romp around a digital hyperreality when the faker herself texted.
Her ringtone is a .wav file of a muezzin's call to prayer I ripped from a Steven Seagal movie.
It had been nearly half a decade since our secret bodies made up a shared geometry, the kind of pattern we called love, and staying "in touch" since had been a perilous game of one-upsmanship that had forced me here over this threshold without any easy or clear road back. 
It turns out she saved the pictures.  The day before I would have sworn that her mother burned them for her.  "Your mother is always doing things for you" I complained once, feeling a cathartic rush at the charging escape of this long withheld admission.
"That's what mother's are for.  That's what other people's mothers do! That's what your mother did. Things! For other people."
"Yes but..."  She asked HOW ABOUT THESE OLD PICS I FOUND.  No question mark and yet still a question. I evaluated: My jawline looked sharper.  Her smile unforced, eyes tired, pale arm flesh I could almost smell, feel...
THAT SHIP HAS SAILED

I am these days still learning how to communicate consistently without feeling like my every word needs to be perfect lest I put-upon someone a disappointing vaguary and here we are texting again in the midst of my predawn recitation.
I am not perfect.  I am getting better.  I am full of contradictions.  Why argue?  
SO, EMPTY, YOU MEAN?
A pregnant pause and a furtive look.
VOLUMINOUSLY she texts back.  As if that sets the matter to rest. It is always easiest to rehearse what needs be said beforehand. Lucky to this time have a script. Need characters.

I take a moment, grip my fingers around the phone, she pretends to be waiting patiently and oblivious, bless, I let the script run through my head a moment before it is time for continuing:

"Anyway, back to the story," the matter set to rest, the boys play race-car-driving heroic thief, rapper, lover, victor over all weaklings and rival mercenaries. Joysticks at the ready.
"I liked the '05 but they really messed up the design with the 2008," says one of the older ones, pulling rapidly on his plastic trigger.
The smaller one flounders and squirms, as if this kind of death can hurt, then his avatar spawns elsewhere.  Ono enters using his special whole-intimidating-bodyframe walk and the older boy quickly turns off the monitor prompting an "Awww" from the younger boy raising his arms to the heavens, turning around, seeing Ono and jumping up into formation with the others.  Quite the regiment.
"Idiotas," says Ono pulling out a pistol and holding it to the chest of one of the boys in the middle, "tell me why I shouldn't fucking blow you away right now?" The boys quiver in unison not sure if he's kidding nor willing to risk it by making a run for it.
"B-b-but, but, but"
"What is it?"
A stream of liquid pools around his jiggling tattered pant heals.  Ono juts the pistol up into the kid's chin then just as quickly puts it away and turns to get drink from the barely-working fridge.
"Infants!" he yells away from them, "fucking infantile."

"Sorry man," says the older boy.
Ono ignores him, cracking the last of the Pepsi "Do you have any idea... If we don't expand then I don't get paid.  If I don't get paid you can't get your reward."
"Sorry, we didn't know."
"Did you check the air flow numbers on all the units?"
"Yeah."
"Did you plug in the numbers?"
The kid looked down at this shuffling his feet but, Ono noted, did not try to run "Not yet."
"Get it done." The kid nods and breaks out a cracked laptop from his backpack, pecking entries from a dirty notepad into a spreadsheet and while the others idle, chattering in whispers and not looking over to where Ono has sprawled out legs akimbo on the musty couch.

Ono ignores them all and weighs the day.  The meeting with McGuire had gone well.  He can start to map out the expansion pragmatically now instead of in imaginary returns.
He has already broken it down into stages, maintain production quantity and modestly diversify output was obviously Stage One, since that's what had gotten him there.
Stage Two was to acquire more lights, filtration, tubing, etc... Then came Stage Three which had two parts 1) pay off the lease on the car park and 2) the shipping containers.
Extra labor for harvest and deliveries would have to be worked into the plan once production ramped up.  Hypothetical stages Four through Six needed to be further subdivided into steps for this and other concerns.
He could feel himself getting excited.

Once his heartrate got going on this, that, or the other his lusts would get the better of him.

"That's about as far as I've got."
"A real good start," she says distractedly "kind of violent." Having anticipated that particular evaluation I shake my head in consent.
"I didn't mean to bog it down in technicalities there at the end.  But it's probably going to all sequeway into smoke, toke, and a poke and then a showdown set piece later on."  I wish I could say I'd planned this.
She asks, "what are we going to do today?"
"I thought I'd do this," I say before realizing the exclusivity of the endeavor.  I can't very well sit there all day and write wannabe Gen Z Horatio Alger crime fiction while she sits chin-in-hands all doe-eyed watching.
"For a while sure, but I want to go out later," she says, kissing my forehead and skiffling off barefoot to the kitchen.
What am I even doing?
After the breakup I floated around for a few too many months losing credibility, adorability, about 35 pounds, and when I came-to I found myself taking Modernist Fiction Thursday nights at the community college and the few firing neurons that my brain had left- like the surviving proto-chimps after the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs- were dedicating themselves to the art of the long-form short story.
The semester ended with a group of us going out for drinks at Blevin's Water Hole and wouldn't you know it, three to six drinks later she's sitting next to me and we're comiserating about our exes. She's single. I'm single. She's attractive in that four-leaf clover kind of way of not quite believing what you're seeing until you pick it up and pinch it so I did and here we are, still not quite either of us believing it.
She's a vet tech.  I'm a wounded animal, no, I kid, I'm still devoting myself to the short story because why poisen the well that saved you, but because I neither possess nor desire the kind of control over one's life that lends itself to lifelong commitments we are officially without status and believe you me it's been weighing on me.

Except that it wasn't exactly overnight that this happened.
Not many people know this and fewer still care but the reason that we ended up moving in together as fast as we did had to do with a decision that I made late one night or early morning six months ago exactly.

We'd met at the end of the fall semester, so we'd been "dating" properly for the entirety of winter break which on New Years dawned on me as the height of pomposity, I wrote that phrase down.  What was I even doing trying to ruin somebody else's life by enjoining it into a relationship with my own.
I mean,  I'm not cruel, I don't do beatings, and I'm not stupid or lazy, but I am conceited and selfish. Upon sober reflection I am not immune to the tactile and largely otherwise imperceptible methods employed by society to scare frightened habituated indubitable bachelors like me into conformity, commonality, and complacency, especially around the dark midwinter firesides of holiday hearths.
I'm not religiously, entirely, or intrinsically against these things of course. However, I definitely am not interested in becoming the kind of people who say "oh you know General Paul and Lovey Garcia?  The General Garcias? Oh yes we know them socially too. Well tah dahling!" We'd had a great Christmas and New Year's together and my bubbling doubts about what exactly I was doing, what "we" "meant" coalesced into the furtive anouncement via text message on Thursday after work that I was GOING OUT DRINKING WITH DENIS
This was not a categorical falsehood.  I was going drinking for sure.  I just failed to invite Denis along. Forgot.  Oops.

I started at the Water Hole and stewed in a few of my own doubts until after sundown and then I really started cooking when I emigrated to the Diving Board and then the Mercury, thinking seriously about not thinking seriously at these and several other places where the drinks are cheaper in twos and more fun as chasers.

The wind was blowing strong that night I remember, and the next thing I remember I was face to face with a ginger bearded ominous heap of a man who looked me in the eye and asked "have you ever let the portals of your mind dissolve into clouds?"
My answer was a mix between a couch and a retch.  I remember how matted his locks of hair looked, how ruddy the skin around the eyes, like leather, dark dot eyes like a wild animal.  Deep, shimmering, terrifying. He poked me with a cracked crooked finger and grinned a mostly toothless grin when I squirmed and swore.
We were sitting in a ditch beyond the grain silo. He dragged himself up and dusted at his backside with mud dirt hands then yanked some litter-looking flotsam into a rickety shopping cart and moseyed off into the night.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that I felt a kinship with the guy but I do remember vividly feeling like my life was like that shopping cart.  The trips, the photographs, the experiences, all nothing more than accumulations that I'm dragging around in a borrowed shopping cart.

From the kitchen she half shouts "are you going to eat all of this?"
Passively communicating, subtextually, my latent inadequeacy, my expanding beltline. Why she chose to make the move I can't for sure say.
The ground sure feels strange, underneath her intentions all sorts of shapes that I can't make out but I'm bracing for a real doozie when the honeymoon wears off.
"You can have some," I holler back mockily too-loud.  Drenched in desire to be alone that is suffused with suffering over aloneness one hears a distinct tone of realization that there are times we need others on the path, like signs to show us the way.
Here we are, weaned off of pain by passion and thinking we're living in the land of milk and honey, when the milk is at best past it's expiration date and the honeycomb is filled with wasps. I am empty.  We all are.
"Thnkss" she says, her mouth full.


Need characters.
Need characters with things in their mouths. Maybe a gunfight, retribution.  Some words and vows, that's what we need. Quickly though, we're going out tonight.
That's what we need.
That's what we need.