Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twelve - Reckless Abandon

“What’s this?” Brendon asked, flipping through my binder. We were editing vignettes in English as part of the poetic writing unit we had commenced after beginning The House On Mango Street. Brendon finished scanning and spell checking his short story about getting his first dog ten minutes into the period, while I was still trying to think of words that accurately represented the emotions surging through my body while driving home from my first concert, the topic of my first vignette.

There was only actually one sentence that I was trying to fix, but the wording in it wasn’t right and didn’t have the flow I was looking for, so I’d been driving myself insane searching thesuaras.com for the ability to express myself accurately. I’d always been one to just word vomit out all of my ideas, then go back and edit relentlessly until what I wrote was actually decent. It was a strange strategy, but it worked well enough.

The other reason the progress of my gig story was so haltingly slow was Brendon’s constant distractions. He’d been pestering me ever since deciding his work was satisfactory, switching from trying to read my computer screen over my shoulder to inspecting my binder. The brunette was generally fun to be around, but I tended to get testy while trying to focus and actually get work done, and he’d been getting on my nerves.

Brendon’s eyes had landed on the ‘writing’ tab of my binder, which I shared for English and history. A folder for each and four English tabs kept everything somewhat separated and organized enough, as well as providing plenty of blank spaces to project the contents of my mind onto. My ‘writing’ tab, in particular, was covered in lyrics. The words were so crammed, tiny, and twisted together in some places that even I couldn’t discern them.

I always ended up with music running through my mind during classes, and would scribble down the words in hopes of making them end their constant track through my head. It never worked, of course; just helped solidify the song’s standing in my brain. But it made me feel better, thus resulting in the chaotic sheet.

“They’re lyrics,” I responded simply, hoping the subject could be dropped and my vignette further edited without interruption. No such luck.

Brendon tilted his head, scanning the words running sideways down the left side of the tab, reading, “Boycott love, detox just to retox, and I’ll promise you anything for a shot at life?”

“Disloyal Order of the Water Buffalos, Fall Out Boy,” I said, stating the origin of the lyrics. I never quite realized how fucking weird FOB titles were until I said them out loud.

“Never heard of it,” Brendon mused, turning the binder in order to read some of the larger words that I’d written towards the beginning of the tab’s defacing. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes – then again, it wasn’t like I expected anything else.

There was an annoyingly low number of students at Dulaney who shared my music taste. Sure, Zack and Rian were avid Blink fans, but they’d never quite connected to the music like I did. They listened to music in the background of their lives, while it had become the focus of mine.

Strangely, getting to the point of my existence where it became that took a stupidly long time. Up until about seventh grade, I had no fucking clue what my music taste was. I looked at the iTunes top ten for the latest trends and followed them without knowing any better, downloading popular songs and getting sick of them after a week. It was an endless cycle of finding something I somewhat enjoyed, then deciding I actually hated it a week later, and starting all over again. Honestly, I was ashamed of the total shit I used to listen to.

Sometime in seventh grade, there was this guy. I really never liked him, although, in retrospect, that was probably just due to a bad first impression. There were a lot of people that I initially hated in my life for absolutely no reason, until I realized, months later, that they were actually decent humans and I had no reason to dislike them. He was one of those people.