I Love You

=====“Will you just shut up?!” He screamed at her.
=====“You’re the one who started it!” The burning intensity that flared up behind her eyes with every word singed his skin.
=====“Don’t try to pin this bullshit on me!” If the pressure inside his head rose anymore, he was sure it would explode like an egg shot point blank.
=====“Why don’t you just admit you’re wrong?” She asked.
=====“Because I’m not!” He yelled back, even though somehow, he couldn’t even remember what they were arguing about anymore.
=====“You arrogant fucking asshole!”
=====“You needy bitch!”
=====“Self-centered jackass!”
=====“Conniving cunt.”
=====“Yeah? Well at least I can actually give you an orgasm!”
=====He felt a dull throb in his fist suddenly. She was lying on the ground, clutching the side of her face, and looking up at him with a mixture of shock and horror. He looked down at his fist. It was speckled with dots of red. Suddenly she had let go of her face and was looking at him with a sinister gleam in her eyes, and a smirk painted across her face.
=====He suddenly found his fists pumping, raining down on her as she lay there, still looking up at him with that smirk through all the blood that flew through the air. He saw a bat lying on the ground below him, and before he could even think to pick it up, it was in his hands. He hit her with it, the sharp clang of metal on bone ringing through the air, vibrating through his skull, bringing the pressure in his head to a throbbing crescendo; he hit her again, and again, trying to bash that grin off her face, but no matter how many times he brought the bat down again, it remained there frozen, mocking him. Blood and sweat flew through the air, he could feel them mixing together coagulating on his bare arms and face, plastering his hair to the top of his head. He lifted the bat, his arms straining, trying to lift it as high as he could; raising it for the strike of all strikes, to finally shatter that fucking smirk…

=====Scott’s eyes sprung open. He could feel his heart pounding, adrenaline pumping through his veins, the muscles in his arms seized so tight he could barely feel them.
=====“Are you alright baby?” Jennifer asked him, turning over in the bed to look at him.
=====He inhaled deeply, letting the air creep through his body and relax his muscles. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
=====“You sure?”
=====v“Yeah. Just a weird dream.”
=====“Alright.”
=====They lay there in silence for a few seconds. Jennifer wrapped her arms around him and smiled.
=====“I love you.”
=====“I love you too.”

Why is everything I write lately just the beginning to something?

Untitled (for now)

=====Anthony walked into the first café he saw. It looked liked any other, nothing about it was remarkable in any way. He ordered a coffee and sat down at a table by the window, taking small sips as he watched the raindrops thread their way down the glass. His eyes remained fixated on them, following one, then another, as they all slowly wound down and left his field of vision. He watched as they acted out the trajectory of his life over the past twenty-four hours, all of the pieces diverging, splitting apart and trickling away into nothingness.
=====It had started the night before. Him and his girlfriend got in a fight, and not just one of the biweekly small spats they always seemed to have; a real one this time. She accused him of having cheated on her—which of course was the truth, he’d been nervously waiting for months for her to confront him about it. Not that she’d caught him or that he’d left any overt signs of it, but she knew him, and she was no idiot. He was almost relieved when she finally asked him straight-out, at least he didn’t have to wait anxiously for it to come anymore. There was more to the fight too though. He’d been working late a lot lately (both “working late” and actually working late), and in general was getting so caught up in work that he hadn’t been paying her much attention. Basically the fight was about the fact that he was an all-around-lousy boyfriend. Honestly, he was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner.
=====Then the next day (right before he went to the café), at the end of work, his boss told him he was fired. Anthony’s first reaction was a desire to applaud the sheer irony of it all: his girlfriend broke up with him because he was too concerned about work, and then he gets fired. Of course, even he knew that wasn’t all the fight was about, but it struck him as a bit amusing nonetheless. Once he got over the objective comedic value of the situation though, the reality of it hit him. As much as it was a pain in his ass a lot of the time, he really did like his job; and the pay wasn’t too shabby either. He’d been working there for years, and had no idea what he wanted to do—find another job like it (where there even any others?), or find something else (not that he had any idea of what that something else would even be)?
=====After that, Anthony needed to go somewhere and sort out everything that was rushing through his head. Hence, the café. He took another sip of his coffee, becoming slightly irritated that it didn’t taste better. He even considered throwing it out and leaving, but then reconsidered—he’d paid for it already, he might as well try to enjoy it. He continued to watch the raindrops, his eyes now slightly narrowed, watching them mock him by mimicking his life in their downward spiral. He almost wanted to break the glass just to spite them, but he wasn’t in a bad enough mood to actually do something like that. Not yet at least.
=====And that’s when he met Jack.
=====“Mind if I sit here?”
=====Anthony looked away from the window and to the person who had spoken to him. He was tall and gaunt, with a head of curly dark brown hair, somehow completely dry despite the torrential downpour outside, and he was wearing a long dark-gray overcoat. But what struck Anthony most was his eyes: they were a dazzlingly light sky-blue, and there was something about them that simultaneously made Anthony want to immediately avert his eyes and rendered him completely unable to do so.
=====“Go right ahead,” Anthony replied coolly.
=====“Sure I’m not intruding?” The man asked.
=====“It’s no problem. To tell you the truth I could use some distraction right now.”
=====The man sat down across the table from Anthony, and took a cigarette out of a carton of Newports from a pocket of his coat.
=====“You don’t mind, do you?” He asked, his piercing eyes locking onto Anthony’s. Anthony felt vaguely violated by the look somehow, as if the man was looking into him; his look penetrating through his skin and delving into his insides, inspecting his stomach contents and the state of his digestive tract.
=====“Fine by me,” he replied, and much to his relief, the man averted his gaze.
=====The man struck a match—a match Anthony swore he never saw him retrieve it from his coat or anywhere else—and lit his cigarette. He inhaled deeply, and then blew out a perfect smoke ring—it hovered out, then suddenly stopped, and hung suspended in midair completely still a foot or so away from the man’s mouth. It remained there, unwavering, until the man exhaled the rest of the smoke in his lungs, causing it to disintegrate and merge with the rest of the smoke, vanishing as it all dispersed through the surrounding air.
=====“The name’s Jack by the way,” The man said, holding out his hand.
=====“Anthony,” Anthony replied, shaking the man’s hand. He had a surprisingly firm grip for his lanky build.
=====“Pleasure to meet you Anthony,” Jack replied, his lips showing a faint smile before he took another drag on his cigarette.
=====And that’s how he met Jack; that’s when it all started.

The Morning After

=====Ryan woke up with hammers beating on the inside of his head, and no recollection of what had happened the night before. He rolled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, one hand shielding his eyes from the piercing light that streamed in from his windows. After downing a glass of tap water in one gulp, he refilled it halfway, and washed a pair of aspirin tablets down with it.
===== “Motherfuck…” Ryan muttered to himself, massaging his temples, then walked back into his bedroom and collapsed into the folds of his disheveled blankets. He remained there immobile for several minutes before willing himself to get up again. Maybe some food would ease his headache, he thought, and decided to make himself something to eat, even though he wasn’t sure if the faint rumbling in his stomach was hunger or nausea.
=====It was a simple breakfast—two fried eggs, a piece of toast, and some coffee—and only took him a few minutes to prepare, and only a few more to consume. He wiped up the soupy yellow remainder of the egg-yolk with the last bit of toast, and swallowed it after only a few chews.
=====Immediately he regretted the meal, all it did was further the discomfort in his stomach—it was nausea after all. After he emptied his stomach contents into his toilet, he washed his face with cold water, and looked up into his mirror. He looked like shit. He had well-past-five-o’clock-shadow, dark splotches under his eyes, and had the worn, disheveled look of someone who had slept outside all night.
=====Then Ryan noticed his clothing. He blinked a few times, and rubbed his eyes before he checked again to make sure he wasn’t just seeing things. But the crimson splatters, so dark he at first mistook them for black, still covered all of his sky-blue dress shirt, and even spread down onto his jeans a little too.
=====“What the fuck…” He asked, staring into his deep-brown eyes in the mirror; but try as he might, not a single memory of last night would come to him.

A New Beginning

Following in the mold of the play-a-day project I did, I decided to start something similar with prose (and also other forms of writing occasionally). It won't be as ambitious or strict as the play-a-day, as I'm not setting out to write something every day, but I'm aiming on writing at least a few things a week, so we'll see how it ends up turning out. But anyways, I'll post random small bits of prose, (very) short stories, and hopefully even some larger stories (probably in multiple parts), and as I said, sometimes some non-prose writing too. I'm not really sure what I'm planning to do with this exactly, but it's been too long since I was consistently writing much, so we'll see what it ends up turning into. Also, I'm guessing that the things I post here will probably tend to be much more just fragments than the scenes in my play-a-day, so they probably won't be as complete and self-contained in general (or at least that's what I'm guessing now--we'll see how it ends up turning out). Anyways, without further delay, here's the first story (or at least the beginning of one):

Sunday Morning Message

===== It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, the neon-red glow gradually forming the distinct lines of the numbers on my clock: 8:02am. My head felt like a freshly shaken snow globe, and I buried my face back into the softness of my pillow while I waited for all the debris to settle down. I must have had a weird dream; a strange sensation lingered in my head from it, but I couldn’t identify its source. Usually I at least can remember fragments, as nonsensical as they often are, but this time no matter how much I thought about it, all that remained was a blank canvas.
=====I was so caught up in trying to remember more than just the faint impression I had of my dream that I didn’t notice I was alone in the bed for a several minutes—or, maybe I noticed, but it didn’t strike me as odd yet. When I noticed, I figured Lisa must have gone in to work early. But it was a Sunday…
=====I got out of bed and wandered into the kitchen. There was no sign of her. I was too tired to really think much of anything yet though, so I decided to make myself some coffee. As I waited for it to finish brewing, I leaned onto the counter and stared off. I could see through the window that it either was raining already or would be soon, the clouds had that ominous look of anticipation they always do before a storm. If I squinted I thought I could see small drops of rain falling outside, but I couldn’t tell if they were really there or if it just looked that way because I was expecting them to be.
=====The coffee finished and I poured it into a deep-crimson colored porcelain cup. I took the carton of milk out of the fridge and swished it around to feel how much was left, then poured the small amount that remained into the cup too. After I threw the carton away and made a mental note to stop by the supermarket later to get some more, I turned back to the fridge, and this time I noticed the yellow post-it that was stuck right at eye-level on the door to it. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed it earlier—especially when I got the milk from inside—then walked closer so I could read it. It was Lisa’s writing, with that rushed-but-somehow-neat look to it, all the letters blending together but somehow still distinct and perfectly legible. The note bore a brief message: I’m leaving you. I’m really sorry. –Lisa.
=====The note could not have been more clear, but still I stood there staring at it for at least a minute. I couldn’t comprehend it, it didn’t make sense. She hadn’t said anything even hinting she was thinking of leaving me, and everything had been perfectly normal between us lately. Nothing was any different from how it had always been—but I guess it had to be, there was no mistaking what the note said.