like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither

[Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu] Fauxliage

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:37:30 GMT

Title: Fauxliage
Series: Suzumiya Haruhi
Characters/Pairings: Kyon, Haruhi
Genre: Gen
Rating: K
Summary/Notes: For 31_days. June 5, "Discipline"

"Color blindness" is the last thing Kyon hears before everything flatlines into self-absorbed semi-consciousness, and when he reviews his notes in the clubroom later that day, he puzzles over the clumsy scrawls over his notebook.

"I see that our Biology lecture is more advanced than yours," an irritatingly cheerful voice observes over his shoulder. Kyon shifts his face away by reflex. "Too close," he hisses, also by reflex.

"Hnh," Koizumi replies agreeably, sliding his bag from his shoulder and taking the adjacent seat. "Did you know," he continues, chin nested on steepled fingers, "that red-green color blindedness affects approximately 8% of the male population, and rarely occurs in females?"

Kyon leans back into his chair and folds his arms (closed body language, meaning: stay away). "And?"

Koizumi shrugs. "Just sharing. I mean, isn't that the point of school? To build upon knowledge? I just thought it'd be fair." He's reaching into his bag when Haruhi bursts into the room, a freshly concocted scheme glinting wildly in her eyes.

Kyon blocks out her voice as she makes her announcement, and thinks instead about their uniform: green coat, red tie. He thinks about Christmas trees, candy canes, stop signs. He thinks about apples. What if Adam and Eve were colorblind? What if Eden were gray and the apples (red/green) melted into the leaves? The serpent would pick the fruit from the tree, and Eve would frown at it. "That can't be it," she'd say, expecting something golden, something glowing. And the Serpent would tell her, "Of course it is, see how clever your Creator is, to craft the world such that you can't find Knowledge."

Then Haruhi's voice, obnoxious as ever, from the heavens: "Ordinary humans aren't good enough to detect it, much less partake of it. KYON, ARE YOU LISTENING?"

Kyon blinks; Haruhi's eyes are bright, blazing, angry. "What now?" he yawns into his sleeve (green).

"Penalty for daydreaming during important discussions (what 'important' discussions)!" She stabs an authorative finger at his direction, her armband (flimsy, paper, red) hanging loose like a warning. In Haruhi's head, the gesture is probably repetead in five different angles. In Kyon's head, he's launching into a lecture about how rude it is to point at people. He opts to say nothing, but his eyebrow twitches at Koizumi's smirk.

The rest of the day passes without further (Haruhi-induced) incidents. The foliage from the trees he passes by on his way home are greengreengreen, and the sky above him is bleeding a vicious red. That night he dreams of being stuck with Haruhi in a car that was going too fast, and the stoplights blinking gray, gray... Gray.

***
Misc notes: Yes, yes, I am aware that in the Biblical myth, it wasn't specified that the fruit was an apple.

[Kurosagi] Drabble#1

Mon, 04 May 2009 06:01:16 GMT

Title: N/A
Series: Kurosagi
Word Count: 300, approximately
Characters/Pairings: Kurosaki, Tsurara
Genre: Gen
Rating: K
Summary/Notes: Drafted on November 2007 on a notebook. I think I intended this to be a ficlet, but at this point I'm sure I won't be able to wring anything from it anymore.

He doesn't say sorry the first time, or the second, or the third. He doesn't sorry the twenty-seventh time either. That's the way it's always been. He's never willing to give her a sincere apology (because it would be sincere; he no longer bothers with pretenses around her, it isn't worth the effort), so he gives her a sincere lack of one. In return, she glares at him, calls him names, slams the door. Sometimes she cries. The next day he'll nag her about rent, threaten to throw her out. She's not stupid, he knows, even though he always tells her otherwise. Any change in attitude and she'll think he's becoming softer, and he refuses to give her that satisfaction.

It's a cycle, routine: he hurts her and doesn't apologize. One day she'll snap. One day, maybe, she'll walk away for good; pass him by along the stairs with her suitcase, slap her payment on his hand, look him in the eye and tell him, I don't owe you anything anymore; tell him, I don't need to stay anymore; tell him nothing, just a weariness and the hint of something sad tugging at her mouth; and she'll walk away, and he'll follow her with his eyes until she disappears into a corner, and his right foot will shift forward but he'll end up turning around, her money in his hand. There will be no note in her room, just furniture and the scents he associates with her lingering.

That's what he's thinking right now, as she stomps upstairs: one day she'll walk away. Still, he goes on like he always has, because he doesn't know another way.

[Poetry] Maptape

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:57:48 GMT

(track 01) I do not write you letters
But I stitch together
Songs
For a mixtape,
My heartprints scattered and coded
In the verses and vibrations of strangers
Like hidden treasures,
And this mixtape is the map
To where they are.

(track 02) I do not tell you "I miss you"
But I mouth the words
Over the ache in the voice of
The Invisible Floating Torso Man
Through my cheap plastic earphones
At exactly 1:00
And again at 2:13

So would I be out of line
If I said "I miss you?"

(track 03) Somewhere, radio stations
Are transmitting the wavelengths of my soul,
My tears leaking through the static
And the listeners, they do not pause from what they're doing,
Not knowing that the curves of their ears
Are cradling something precious.

(iv) And how would you react
If I sent you the mixtape?
Your coat is still in my closet
I could easily slip it into the right pocket
For you to find when I give it back
With nothing but a hand-drawn heart
On the label.
You're much too curious to resist knowing
What's inside
So you'd go home and brush the cobwebs off
Your parents' old cassette player
And it would feel both strange and familiar
As your fingertips push the tape inside,
Rewind
The side with the heart on it.

It begins with the throbbing pulse of drums.

Miles away I'd be lying on my bed,
Staring up at the letters on my cellphone screen:
Do you hear my heartbeat?
But I wouldn't press send.

(track 05) Not knowing what kind of shape
You'd make
When you put together the pieces in my
Little treasure hunt,
Not knowing if it would be a blade
Of grass
Or of steel
If it would shimmer in your eyes
Or crumble at your touch,

Not knowing
And afraid to know,
I trace the lines of my map
With these words (my own words)
I collect all the pieces,
All the lonely cities and the tiny islands
That fit into each other,
I collect them and recode them
Into these letters on a screen
And I send them
To places you will never find.

[Poetry] Inventory

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:21:05 GMT

She likes putting nametags on her feelings:
This is Bubbles Floating Upwards
This is Red Roses Blooming in an Open Field
This is Struggling Against the River Current
This is Sinking Slowly into Silent Sea
This is A Crackle Across the Sky
This is An Anchor Chained to My Ankle
This is His Lips Two Millimeters from My Temple,
The Tightness of His Jaw,
Heavy Footfalls Slowly Fading.

She likes making lists. So far:
Thirty-three shades of happiness
Sixty-four fingerprints for sadness
Thirteen flavors of anger
One hundred and seventy-eight variations of his name,
Not a single one repeating
She gathers all one hundred and seventy-eight,
Spreads    t h e m    carefully around the [empty space] on her bed
And
       Falls
           Into it.

[original/short story] citydust

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:20:10 GMT

Genre: Fantasy/Romance? Idk. IT'S A LOVE STORY, period.

Citydust

I do not remember the circumstances of our meeting; I can't recall what was said, if anything had been said at all - as all nights had the same beginning and the same endings, the first night melted into this current of successive other nights. In fact, I do not remember much of what she looked like; all I have left are these words, and perhaps it is just as well, for she is very, very beautiful, and if my stories captured her splendour more vividly, then I have no doubts that you too would fall in love with her, in a manner that is too deep and too real, only to have your heart broken.

Of how long the affair lasted, I cannot tell you. It could have easily been days or weeks or months. Years, even. Time did not seem to hold any meaning whenever I was with her. Night after night she'd arrive at my doorstep and stay with me till morning. Often she'd ask me to tell her stories - stories of my childhood, stories of other people, stories that never happened. We would sit, knee to knee or face to face, and she would listen while I spoke; she never talked about herself, but I knew she must have lived far, far away, because from time to time she asked questions like "What do peaches taste like?" and "Where do birds go when they fly away?" and I would pause from my tales to give her an answer she was satisfied with. On other nights, she'd lay my head on her lap and croon wordless melodies in a voice that sounded like the cacophony of blinding lights, and though her songs would lull me, I'd fight to stay awake, to hear her sing longer. But it would always be the same in the end: I'd fall asleep and dream of street-mazes and tall towers that blinked against a black sky, and wake up to find her gone, just the ghost of her anthems lingering at the corners of my vision before fading into consciousness.

Sometimes she'd make me hold her tight while she sniffed and sobbed and shivered in my arms, and I could only wait for her sadness to pass, unable to heal it.

And then one night, I opened the door for her, but she didn't go in. Instead, she reached out. Her hand was small when it caught mine, and she squeezed hard but I didn't squeeze back, afraid that I'd break it. (And what a fool I was then, when what I should have eared was losing her because I hadn't held on hard enough.)

I did not understand her gesture, but I also did not wish to disturb the moment, so I kept still and said nothing. An eternity must have come and gone before she finally spoke: "Do you love me?"

And I, without sparing the slightest thought: "More than anything in the world."

She smiled a smile that could have lit up the sky, and so dazzled was I by how beautiful she looked then that I didn't notice that my surroundings had changed. Perhaps that smile had magic in it, quite like wizards' wands and love potions. Perhaps it was the hidden key, the forgotten password, to a secret hiding place. Who knows what other spells she has cast on me? To be honest, the notion frightened me. Yet still I loved her, this mystical creature of the night.

As these thoughts ran in my head, I surveyed the landscape to find myself all alone. It was dark where I was, and the only sources of light came from the bed of stars that dusted a vast stretch of sky, and its reflection on what seemed like a lake before me. I called out to her several times, but the shadows swallowed my voice and licked their lips until I stopped.

Resigned, I peered at the lake, fancying it as a magical gateway back to my home. The surface glimmered with mirrored starlight. The sky's reflection? No. The sky was the reflection, I realized, choking on my breath as I looked harder, deeper. There, there, underneath the film of water, was everything that she sang of, the world she'd painted to me with her voice: stoplights and skyscrapers, smoke and dust. And I could feel it all crumbling around me as I stood, mesmerized in spite of myself. I whispered, "I love you" over the roar of a speeding train, closing my eyes and breathing in the dying city.
When I opened my eyes, I was back at my doorstep. She was watching me quietly, almost uncertainly. Had I dreamt it all? The sounds and images reeled in my head, and suddenly I noticed just how weary and hollow she looked, and how her weightless hand was almost translucent in the moonlight, and I knew that everything I'd seen was real. "I love you," I said again, and kissed her softly on the lips.

That night she didn't cry or sing or ask me to tell stories, but she listened as I counted to her the many ways I loved her: I loved her with my mind and I loved her with my heart. But I also loved her with my eyes and my tongue and my hands and my body.

I loved the taste of her kisses. I loved the awkward way she swayed while we danced under a waning moon. I loved the curve of her ear and the line of her jaw. I loved how her collarbones jutted out of her smoky skin, how the sharp swell of her hip fit into my palm, how her hair tangled in my fingers. I loved each flicker of her eyelashes. I loved each part of her, and I loved her all over again for hundreds of reasons and in hundreds of ways, one for each streetlamp that glowed inside of her (she'd whispered to me the number).

I don't remember at which moment I fell asleep. Perhaps she had cast another spell on me, because otherwise I wouldn't have let her leave. But just like all the other nights, I woke up alone.

I waited for her that night, and every night after that, but she never came back. Not long after, I set out to tell stories of her, hoping that someone would recognize her and know where she was. But they could only sigh and smile at my tales, and weep at my questions. After a while, I stopped asking questions but continued to tell my stories. Somehow they became so widely known that I witnessed the birth of a city quite like her. She is young, too young to know what it is to be a woman, and knows not of love and death, but there are many who come here and fall in love with the towers and street-mazes; I myself have grown to love her, albeit in a different way. It is in her heart that I will die and turn to citydust, and in her heart that she will learn of love and death: a father's love and a stranger's death, and she will weep. And you, wherever you are hearing or reading this story from - if you are in this city when she's crying, press a kiss to one of her walls. It will not heal her sadness, but there is nothing else that you can do. And should a gust of wind blow dust into your eye, understand that it is only a man trying to embrace a crying child.

This is the last time I tell this story, but while this city lives this story will not die, and even then travellers will come and go to keep it alive. I have grown old and weary and my fingers ache as I grip this pen to finish this story, but night after night I walk these streets, the child-city's heartbeat strong beneath my feet, past hundreds of streetlamps that light my way, one for every reason and every way that I fell in love.

#

A/N: My submission for The Book of Imaginary Beasts, Book 13: Erase/Rewind. It's not very exciting and offers no explanations, but I wanted to write a story about a man who fell in love with a city, so uh. This. Notable because of the use of first-person POV as well as past tense, and the fact that it's a little more than 1000 words - the longest thing I've written in years. It's kind of sad. :))

[snippet/scraps] diamonds

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:55:32 GMT

Notes: This is something off an essay I drafted for school that I'm probably scrapping. I realized that a) 5 pages isn't enough, and b) it deals too closely with personal philosophies to have any academic value, even though personal reflection was the point of writing it. Watch me jump from Lamarcke/Haeckel to mundane experiences to global warming. Awfully big logically leaps, huh. This snippet is conceptually faulty anyway; I mean, natural selection and recapitulation in the same metaphor? *winces*

In psychology there's a term called "basic anxiety" - it's what children experience when they realize the world they were born in is a big, big place. It's things like these that make people question the value of their existence, knowing that they're only one of the billions that occupy Earth and their lives weigh nothing. And that's where the paradigm shift of recapitulation comes in, putting a twist to this worldview. To me, it means more than once having gills in my mother's womb. Think of carbon atoms and rocks under the planet's surface. Think of heat and pressure, and little crystals that dissolve, unable to withstand these forces. Think of millions of years. Now zoom out, fast forward: you're thinking about a diamond, brilliant and multi-faceted. That's what humanity is: the sum of generation after generation of natural selection. But it doesn't end there. Think again of that diamond. Think about how each facet catches the light and reflects it at a different angle, resulting in a visual cacophony of color and brilliance. We are each facet. We are the small carbon corners of the same stone, made of the same matter, and together we are beautiful. What recapitulation represents is the fact that we are all part of something grand.

How to Make Me Love You

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:26:35 GMT