coup de foudre | jercy

six: everything but sleep

✥   ♣︎   ✥   ♣︎   ✥

✥   ♣︎   ✥   ♣︎   ✥

hey.

i drop the message at 3am, still the same saturday night—or sunday morning, if that's how you'd like to interpret it. maybe he's still awake? i wonder if he's gotten home yet.

this is jason.

my groceries are still sitting on the granite kitchen counter, out of the plastic bag but leaning in onto each other with a certain unimpressed air about them. i sigh, placing my phone face-down beside them, and get to clearing them out.

as i organise them, a million tiny observations brush at my skin, like the needle-thin splinters of wood jutting out of the side of my cupboards. more than half of it is about the cupboards—that they creak too much when they open, that the inside walls are grazed by barely-perceptible scratches and dents. there's an old, empty box of hot chocolate—different brand, the same impulsive buy—that i've forgotten to throw out.

i throw the empty box out; the other issues are things i'm not particularly keen on fixing right now. there's some sort of temptation, but i ignore it. some things, like these, are like the weeds you find in fields of grass—you could keep plucking and plucking, but they aren't really going to disappear. and if you squint your eyes, it's all green anyway.

my phone buzzes while the cupboard is still open.

i pause, glancing backwards. my phone's face-down; it could just be one of those default notifications some apps have. nico once downloaded subway surfers on my phone, a year or two ago, and it sends off a hopeful message inviting me to play the game every so often.

a long creak of the cupboard drawls out in the air and my phone ends up loosely sitting between my fingers.

his contact is saved just as: percy. it shows up on a pale white bar at the bottom of my screen.

hey!

it takes a long minute for his next message, but it comes: i realised a bit too late that you could've thrown the coffee cup without reading it. glad you didn't :)

i smile.

did you just get home?

he types his response in split-out messages. there's a few typos but i brush past them; my sister's dyslexic, so i'm used to texts studded with spelling errors here and there. no, not quite home yet,—he's just left his mom's house, still on the way to his. it's not too far. for the most part, he ends messages with smileys.

i don't know what else to say, so:
you have nice handwriting.

oh i asked the barista to write that - i'm dyslexic so i can't do cursive haha.

ohh, okay—my bad.

he wrote the phone number himself, though, he adds. he pins another smiley face to his message.

it gives me a small bit of satisfaction. so he does draw a line through his sevens.

again, i don't know what else to say, but i can't think of anything else to bring up. the stars? i'm half-certain i'd imagined it. i return the smiley, partially hoping for him to pick up the conversation like he seems to do whenever we're face to face. he doesn't see my message immediately and i don't stare at my phone screen waiting, as gratingly nice as it would be. i finish clearing up my kitchen, slam the lights shut with the side of my palm, and stand in the middle of my room for a moment, suddenly disoriented with nothing to do.

i don't really have hobbies. i'm not very interesting, and most of my time where there isn't something to be busy in, ends up culminating into two things—art, if i want to forget about the time, or boxing, if i want to forget about everything in the world entirely.

if it weren't so late at night—or early in the morning, technically—maybe i'd go with the second. boxing is a nice, easy habit to fall into; like most habits, after a certain number of years it's become a safe zone. instead, i pick up a pen and start freehanding something that starts off akin to a scribble.

i figured this out back in high school, that any type of art—drawing, writing, dancing—has two ways of going about it. with drawing, it comes down to either deliberately thinking of strokes and what the final piece is, what i usually do, or just letting ink glide over the paper until the twitching in your hand goes away. maybe two is my lucky number: again, today's the second.

i check my phone once again, then a third time, before it hits 3:20 and a hallway of crumbling statues stuck in movement stands before me in black pen ink and i think i should sleep.

i haven't cleared out the trash in about a week—percy's cup is still in there, the words still hovering somewhere inside. "jic u wanna be friends": had he asked the barista to write that, word-for-word?

friend.

when was the last time someone asked to be my friend? like that, i mean. that type of direct statement. something about percy, the way he does things, that i find both so roundabout and so direct. i remember seeing the sea at night once, as a kid, barely understanding anything beyond its black reflection of the sky, but captivated enough i didn't realise when the water touched my chin. thalia had scolded me a lot, that night. 

the ceiling above me is plain white and frozen in the popcorn-like bubbles that are so common with ceilings here. my house in california was different, a landed house with walls made of wood and smooth ceilings—but then again, there are many things here that beat california. for starters, the night. the nights here are easy to slip into, easy to walk beneath. everything here is easy to slip into. the life, the people, the transport.

everything but sleep.

3:28am, and i get up from my bed and pour myself a glass of milk. offhandedly hammer a punch into my punching bag on the way back. no new notifications on my phone. the kitchen light peeks into my room, a line of white tracing the gap beneath my closed door.

3:34am, and my phone buzzes. subway surfers, again. i delete the app: nico's old high score of five million has been doubled months ago, i know, and he won't be missing it.

3:41am, and i notice a dead bee on the kitchen counter. i have no idea how it got here, but there it is; stomach upwards and legs curled in on itself, laying on the black marble. i turn off the kitchen lights, expecting it to disappear in the dark—but it's still there, a single hole burning black into black.

it looks less striking under the white light, folded between a white tissue, tossed into the trash. i check my phone again—i don't usually check it often, but some compulsive string keeps on pulling at me to repeat the same action. either way, it doesn't matter because my phone's out of battery. maybe that's a sign. 

dryly, i smile at myself. 3:46am.

✥   ♣︎   ✥   ♣︎   ✥

✥   ♣︎   ✥   ♣︎   ✥

i'm going to lean a bit into shorter chapters, just because it's easier for me to get things out there faster. thank you for understanding! expect more frequent updates in the future :)