The Day Joel Broke Down

Joel had been acting a little strange for weeks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him smile or make a genuine joke; he was nearly silent when I saw him in person, and he never answered my messages. He never had been the most outgoing or the most talkative, but I was still worried about him. He seemed to have been absorbed into a world of his own, and the distance between us scared me. 

One night he came over out of the blue, which was unnerving; he would never just turn up like that. It wasn’t him. He’d usually take days to plan anything. I beckoned him in and asked him what was wrong, but he treated me to more of his now almost trade mark silence.

We went into the living room; both my parents were out. I perched on the sofa, and Joel sat himself uneasily in the armchair across from me. His face was white and gaunt; he looked thinner than he ever had. His clothes too were creased and untidy, like they’d been thrown on in a hurry. He was losing himself, that much was clear. I clenched and unclenched my hands nervously, anticipating what was to come. Was he going to explain? Was I going to be able to help? We sat in more silence for a little while, and I resisted the urge to fill it with meaningless babble just because culture said I should. But no – this silence was important. This silence spoke to me; it was a message in itself.

 I waited, and then the tempo of the situation suddenly changed. Joel got up wildly and paced the room, running his hands together and then through his hair, his shoes clipping the wooden floor. I sat and watched as insanity seemed to pour out of him like an overflowing cooking pot. He looked out of it, dazed; I laughed at him because I didn't know what else to do. His agitation made me anxious. He was breathing deeply, scratching marks into his arms, continuing to stride from wall to wall. He didn't even seem to acknowledge that I was there; it was just him and this invisible, improbable quest.

All of a sudden he lashed out with his fist, pummelling it into the wall. It was so sudden I didn’t have time to shout out, and at first I thought he was attacking me. My yelp of shock a second later was almost comically delayed; it was like it suddenly hit me what had just happened.  I know he'd never hit me – I do know that – but it’s in the moment, when things happen so fast and there’s such anger in the air, that you can never be quite sure what’s going on. He wouldn't have it in him though; he is such an angel. I know him. I do. He pulled his bloodied fingers from the plaster wreckage and there was a pause as he stared down at it. He seemed bewildered, and I was fucking bewildered too I can tell you. It then dawned on me that my parents were going to kill me; there was a Joel’s fist sized hole in the wall beside the mantel piece, but that was a bridge I would have to cross later.

He went passive. He sat himself down on the floor, cross legged like a child sitting in assembly at school. I half expected him to put a finger to his lips to prove his obedient silence: a regressive move to revalidate his goodness. But the blood was running down his arm onto his jeans, dripping onto the floor even - this wasn't angelic. It was crazy and terrifying. I wondered if perhaps I should ask him to leave. But no - I knew him, and this was odd. His freckled face was blank; he seemed to not know what to make of it himself. I saw with a pang how much he was shaking, as though he'd dived into the snow without a coat. There was more silence and more silence - did I ask? Did I wait? Did I go? There was no handbook for this, no one to tell you what to do or what to say. One wrong step could be drastic when someone was clearly teetering so close to the edge. Still - to say or do nothing would be more of a crime, I decided. This boy needed me. He really did - right now more than ever. 

I moved slowly, and he glanced up at me, terrified, like a rabbit in the headlights. I slammed on the brakes, taking a moment to gauge his reaction, but he seemed okay with me coming closer. He was still breathing as though he'd just done a 100m sprint. I sat down slowly, sitting in front of him cross legged, so our knees were almost touching. He was staring at the ground, so I took his hands in mine, being careful of the injured one. We sat for a moment like this, and his breathing slowed slightly. I felt as though some of the angst he was feeling was passing down his arms, through his hands and into mine, where they could then escape into the atmosphere. I was draining him of his fears somewhat, and for that I knew I was a decent person. 

Eventually he looked up and stared intently into my eyes, and I've never had a moment like it. They were a vibrant blue, and I saw everything I needed to see, heard everything I needed to hear. He was hurting; he was lost and confused. I saw in the pupils the pain he was feeling and how much pressure he was under. In the swirling iris I saw fear - of himself, of the future, and of the world. They explained to me the erratic behaviour, the silences, and the anger. The colour hit me like a tidal wave of emotion, trapped in his soul, encased in him - thoughts bottled and blood boiling, all crammed together in one fragile human existence. In the white I saw a reflective purity which spoke of the goodness he aspired to, which he so often failed to obtain and hated himself for it. In his eyes I experienced and empathised with everything: I finally understood. 

He recognised my understanding. He licked his bleeding hand like a cat or a dog, and then he began to cry - great, heaving sobs which seemed to almost shake the room. He lay his head on my shoulder and he soaked my t-shirt with his tears, and I simply lay a hand on his head and stroked his hair. We'd come so far; he'd come so far. I was glad more than anything that I hadn't asked him to leave; that would have been the worst thing. He needed to let this out, and the tears were the biggest blessing he could have asked for. 

I realised we hadn’t spoken a word for nearly 45 minutes. We hadn’t needed to. I may not have been told in explicit details the extent of his problems and what was bothering him, but for now that didn’t matter. We could get to that later. What mattered was that he knew he had me, and I would do anything for him; we would get through it together. And I, after being so scared and confused by his behaviour, found peace in his admittance of pain. He had come to me and I could at least try to help. 

My favourite things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

I scooped up a stone and threw it violently into the ocean - there was no skipping, just a clunky splash, and then silence.

Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens.

I sat myself down on the pebbled beach. The grey sky pressed down on me and the wisps of wind ripped through my jacket like invisible knives. It looked as though it could rain - as though it needed to. It seemed as though the sky was holding on, it's knuckles pressed tightly together, yearning to just let go. The water lapped nervously, anticipating the storm, and I sat stubbornly on the shore. I was refusing to leave.

-When the dog bites, when the bee stings -

Maybe I should go back, I thought, as the approaching clouds grew darker and the wind blew harder. No. Instead I hunched myself forward, wrapping my arms around my knees, telling myself I wasn't afraid. The first bullets fell from the sky, hitting the lake like - like - drip drip drop little April Showers. Murderous showers. Du du de du du de da de du - de de da du de da du de de dum. It was December and the rain was cold as ice.

Brown paper packages 

A raindrop rolled down my cheek like a tear. Or maybe it was a tear - I wouldn't know any more. The rain started to hiss, splattering around me, sounding like a melancholy New York city. I felt glued to the stones - there was no way I could leave now. I had to wait it out.

tied up with strings

"Martin! MARTIN!" It seemed as though the wind itself was calling me. Wait - "Martinnn! MARTIN IS THAT YOU?" - it wasn't the wind. I was shaking. I refused to turn around. I was in the storm - I was the storm. Thunder growled overhead and lightning flashed as though on que, illuminating the lake and the desperation it appeared to be hiding. "Martin?" Something like an arm touched my shoulder, and I sat rigid as a rock. Perhaps I had become a pebble. I was the same as all the others on the beach. They'd never know which was one was me. They could throw me into the ocean - clunky splash, silence - and they still wouldn't know.

I was being dragged to my feet. I looked down at my hands, noticing now that they were covered in blood. Mingling with winter's rain and dripping maliciously onto my boots... every part of me was covered in blood.

These are a few of my favourite things. 

Emptying my brain

I tremble as I observe the world, so splendidly horrific in everything it presents to us.

“Why write? Why read? So pointless. So…unnecessary.”

I reach out a hand on an icy night, and note the billons of cells combined together to create its nervous whiteness. I watch the knuckles flex, and I feel a pointlessness so strong it physically strikes me. My hand snaps back. Why have hands? Why have anything at all? Why think these thoughts?

With imagination there is everything and anything. With reality we are limited: we are held back by particles, laws, morals, and existence, but with a story the possibilities are infinite. There is an exquisite, uncontrolled power in a writer; they can veer one way then sprint another, before taking to the sky like a firework and exploding the universe, ripping out the fabric of time and space - if they so wish. They can coax a wimblowicket out of its dusty hollow, whatever that may be. They can make love blossom in the most unlikely places, or they can paint misery into the eyes of characters we then come to think of as real.  As a writer you have the whole world and more at your fingertips; you have time, space, reality, surreality, emotion, life and death to knead with. You can dance and play with everything we know and everything we don’t…you understand this world is splendidly horrific. You love this beautiful pointlessness.

Others may pretend to know. Professionals present themselves as smooth, knowledgeable and damn smart – smarter than these writer lunatics. But they are just as damn stupid and damn scared as the rest of us. They will never admit they know that hollowed out feeling, as though they are capable of nothing and can do nothing to make anything right – because everything feels wrong. Writers can write what is right; they can sculpt what is wrong. They can make peace with futility.

You tell me it is pointless – well tell me, when you glance into the obscene blackness that is the sky tonight, do you understand? We are on a rock hurtling through a void, but yet you stand here, as still as anything, watching black water lap over black rocks in this black night. Where were you in the daylight hours? There was colour then, I promise. The rocks were grey, the sky blue, and the water as colourless as crystal. I wish you’d seen more than this shadowy black. Have we just never seen our world in what I will call “day”? Are we believing black when colours do exist? Perceptions, determinations, brains, infinity. I am blown away with possibility, yet chained and calloused with the clasps of your damned reality.

Madness. What a strange, strange word. How can one not be mad, when you regard seriously our position? We turn our backs on the inevitable and smile; we sweat and labour until our eyes close for the last time, never to reopen – and even then, on the borderline, we will have no idea. And yet, despite all this, you still believe my words are pointless. Their words are pointless. Their reflections of this stupid, bewildering, terrifying group of existences are to be discredited as nothing? There is never nothing…nothing comes of nothing. I am stepping forward into nothing and yet I know I shall fall into the hands of something, and perhaps something shall save me, or perhaps it shall not.

Never shall it mean nothing. Because never shall anything mean anything. We are running in the dark – we always were, we perhaps always will be…if dark can mean anything to us at all, can mean anything to us who know nothing. 

Jack, Jake and the Lake

He soared with his wings wild and wide, whistling in the wind and wavering above the wintry waters. The frozen hands of Jack had touched the lake below, and with a weary white face it offered up no break from the fall. The span of the once watery surface was acres and acres, and Jake flew for his life. The wind still tried to take him down, to be crushed against the ice, to be blood on snow with broken bones. He shook and looped as clouds covered his view, and his heart cascaded to the depths of his internal reality. He descended like a dart, dropped from the heavens, damned to death by the Gods above.

Down he went, the wind acting like the ice, breaking into his skin and freezing his blood, stopping his organs and grinding them to a fearful halt. They no longer sloshed but crunched, a noise like metal on metal, like mechanical parts striking clunking cogs. The noise deafened him as still he fell, the world spinning, the white icy face coming closer, calamity upon calamity, he knew for certain he was set to die. Though he was entire three dimensional, he felt only like an unreachable ball of fiery emotion headed to the centre of the earth like a burning meteor, which would chomp through the surface as if it were mere cheese.

He blinked. Back in the sky, the wind held him. There was, there had been, no drop; he was flying as sturdily as ever. His gorgeous, glorious unrivalled white wings stayed true, as they had never failed to do. They felt not a part of him, but a part of the sky itself, as though the universe was holding him tightly. Perhaps that meant the universe could decide to drop him, if the wings were not his own, but for now he trusted in them and continued his courageous course. He smiled, for he was but more than emotion, more than fear, and more than a wreck upon the cold and stone like ground. He was more than even he knew, there in the hands of the world itself.

The snowy face of the lake lost that look of bleak weariness; Jake could see the love in its invisible eyes. Jake could see contrast. He could see science and he could see art. He could see death and life, love and hate, pain and happiness. He could see dark and light, fear and courage, anger and soft serenity. He could see it all. Perhaps to see is not to understand, for he understood not why he did not fall. But see he did, and fly he did, for joy, for tears, for the want of never knowing, for the want of never coming within the safety of the ground. 

Grades

And now I stand here, branded for life by letters which do not take into consideration circumstance or personality. This group of letters, collected together after years, will now stand to reflect my intelligence and my work ethic. They show what I can do. They show what I can’t do. They determine my future - they represent me. I will be left with these letters for life.

I feel these letters are like covers to novels. Sometimes, I’m sure they represent exactly what they’re supposed to. You see an A* cover, you open it, and there is the life of an A* student, there in black and white. But also, they can misrepresent. If you open the book, you may find things you never expected to. Behind a D grade student, there may be unspoken hardships you hadn’t anticipated, invisible broken relationships or pain that is unimaginable. There is no way to tell a person’s story with a simple letter. There is no way to pour humanity into a man made symbol, to whittle life down to a mere grade.

There is no other system. It has to be like this – there has to be some regime that evens everything out, ignores the majority of factors, and puts everyone in the same boat so that they are comparable to one another. I understand this, because this system makes up the fundamental backbone of our working society. But it still doesn’t make it any way right. When a kid is born into a working class family with six brothers and sisters and barely enough food to make it through the day gets bullied for five years because of his hand-me-down clothes, and then gets judged by the same letters as a middle class, well-educated only child whose only hardship in life was his iphone’s battery life – IS. THIS. FAIR?

Well, life’s not fair. But it’s not just to do with money and class. It’s to do with unforeseen situations and other factors which cannot be taken into consideration when they make that A or B, or C, or U official to everyone. Life is something we don’t understand – it is complicated beyond belief. We are beating hearts and blinking eyes, whirring brains and chattering teeth, and each of us splashes a path across the globe, interweaving with other paths and situations and events.  Words and memory spiral from this and history is made; emotions play their song. The future envelopes out in front of us….unknown, not understood, but we take steps towards it anyway because there is nothing else to do but trust. And yet, despite all this complicated craziness, this blast of bizarre brains brought together by some big bang, we label our letters. We reduce our lives down to such simplicity, that sometimes I think we miss the entire point of life itself. If there is a point indeed.

Some will think me bitter for writing this - would I be writing this if I'd got the grades I wanted? Perhaps not.  But it is not just for me that I pose this unwinnable argument. It is for all those people who got letters on their pieces of paper who feel they have a different story to one of laziness or stupidity. Whatever life is, it is more than that. 

The red in the river

The river flowed red between the autumn leaves, and no one seemed to want to look upon it. Isaac shifted uneasily with his arms tucked across his chest, and Max and Mark stepped away with their backs to the scene. Whatever had happened upstream, it was definitely not good. Isaac glanced at the others, but they refused to meet his gaze; it seemed this one was on him.

He stepped cautiously over the ground, each step crunching crisp underfoot. The sun was setting at the bottom of the valley, and everything around him seemed to glow gold, red, orange, and brown; he absently thought how beautiful it really was. It shook him to note that the beauty he was commending came from the decay of the nature around him, and soon the trees would be bare, the sky grey and the air a damaging cold. With a heavy heart his eyes swayed to the maroon tinge spiralling through the river to his right. As he walked, its width and colour thickened.

Darkness gathered around him and still he was walking, until in the hazy half light ahead he saw a shape sprawled across the rocks in the centre of the river. Ah, so there it was. He slowed somewhat; after such a build up, after taking one for the team, his reluctance was really starting to kick in. What if it was someone he knew? What if the person who had done it was still around, watching?

As he drew closer, his heart started to rage in his chest; it was definitely the shape of a person. It seemed as though they had been thrown, with their limbs splayed out over the rocks; the blood seemed to be coming from a wound in the head. From what he could see it was a man, wearing what appeared to be a black tuxedo. They were face down, the head almost underwater, so he could not see if he recognised them or not.

He waded in and checked for a pulse, with the attempt being met with a silence that confirmed death. Isaac did not do anything else to the body, but simply waded back out onto the other side, and sat himself down onto the earth. Forensics would kill him for this – there could have been clues, tracks or footprints where he was perching. But for christ’s sake, there was a man dead. He would sit himself down, because he was human and he had a heart. 

A day in the life of the field of a time

She was sitting amongst the long summer grass cross legged and looking at the ground. The day had thrown itself over the edge of the horizon, the sun the forefront of the crusade, rearing its fiery head in anger at the quivering and retreating darkness. She regarded this as if it were merely nothing – this major breakthrough of nature, this occurrence of magnitudinous strength. Her eyes followed the path of the grass tails as they darted to and fro in the breeze, never content it seemed with one position or the other. Millions upon millions of them swayed in the field – if you were 100 metres in any direction, maybe even 50, you would not have been able to see her at all. But there she sat, like a Pixie of nature, but one that had in her countenance an unbearable sadness that led her to be blind to all beauty.

How long had she been there? It seemed like all of eternity. How long would she stay? That was yet to be decided, and only the decider knew that, and herself, of course. She could move, if she wanted, but yet she seemed almost attached to the ground on which she resided, her palms pressed into the grassy, dusty ground. Where had she come from? She was borne out of nature – everyone was, and nature was where she would die. It didn’t matter from which area she came, where she had been, or what she had previously done – she was here, at this very moment, as it was exactly meant to be.

Hours later the clouds sauntered in – they did not roll, it was slower than this, and much less joyful. They were almost as miserable and as dark as herself. They covered the glorious sun momentarily, and this at last dragged her pretty eyes from the ground, causing her to glance up, interested in a change. Finally, some life in this life – even the very grass seemed to dart faster in answer to this decided moment…but then her eyes dropped again, and all was as it was.

Time passed. Time always passes. There is never a time when time does not pass. A rumble sounded in the summery field – thunder? No, this rumble was more subdued…it was her stomach. She was hungry. She was only human, and a need for things other than one’s own thoughts would put an end to any fanciful notion of stepping outside the realms of humanity. But she did not respond to her bodies protest at her stance…she merely stared on, as if watching an army of ants fight the battle of the Roses. Except of course there were no ants. Just her, the grass, and the sun.

Was she really, truly, to stay here to her death? The sun had reached the height of day and it towered proudly above her, probably hindering not helping her defiant situation. She shuffled around and shifted herself forward, so she was half lying on her stomach, her arms supporting her, her back to the sun. Perhaps in hundreds of years time they would find her skeleton in this position, and with a shiver they would feel the sudden overwhelming presence of her emotion and the strain she seemed to be under.

As the sun sulkily started to sink, melting into the darkening horizon like it was almost unwilling to leave her, she sprang up. Her eyes were wide, her hands muddy, her body stiff and her joints robotic. But she shook not from cold, but from what had happened – what had almost begun to happen. Her eyes went wider, her mouth stretched - as if it had not thought of doing this before- and she smiled. The smile pained her muscles, but it was the most beautiful thing the grass had ever seen, and for their dancing tails she would smile a million times. She stretched her arms above her head, and such sudden movement after so long on the ground caused the world to almost falter. It was unexpected, spontaneous and entirely joyous to watch.

She took to running. She ran and ran, silently thanking the world as it beamed back at her motionful body, and the being that had inhibited that field for as long as this story became a spec on the horizon, where it disappeared, her journey yet to go on.