A Tangled Mess Of Things.

Baiden: Solitude.

People yearn for peace. Peace is probably the only thing that has man lifting guns and cocking bullets in reload and aiming it at a fellow man. The trigger is pulled and a bullet escapes the barrel of the gun and cuts into the forehead of the enemy. Blood flows. The man drops dead. The red liquid tomato sauce seemingly pours itself onto the concrete and puddles around the man's fallen forehead.

Baiden watches this scene unfolding in front of him. It's on the television. He tries to grasp the motives, the alarming clarity and the explosiveness of this scene and the violence it tries to convey. He then switches the television off and goes out into the balcony. His house is on the eighth floor of a high rise apartment. And it's cold. His phone rings inside. He goes back in to pick it up. It's her.
"Hey" he says.
"What's eating you?" she replies.
"Suicide."
"What"
"Death"
"I'm bored. Shall I come over?"
He nods.
"Okay. Ten minutes."
She hangs up. His phone moves, along with his hand back to the bottom and dangles between his thumb and his forefinger. He has just realised that she could not have possibly seen him nod. Yet, that was what he had done. And she had heard it too. He didn't like thinking too much. It made his head hurt. So he looked back up into the sky. That's when the electricity went out. He sighed and smiled at the same time.

Could the human brain logically allow someone to do that? First one needed to know if sighing was an expression of sorrow in particular. He picked the phone back up. His hands went up to his web browser and he typed in "sigh".

Pointless. The WiFi had gone out too.
He pulled toward himself one of the random chairs that lay around on his balcony. In the dim moonlight he could see all his paperwork and his laptop balanced on the edge of the table.

He stacked everything up and set it up against the wall on the left side and sat down on the chair. The chair was one of those chairs that leaned back just enough, neither too much and neither too little. And if he relaxed backward, he could see the sky without moving his head too much.

In the lightless night, he could see stars. Millions of them. Many, many more than one would have seen on any other night. His phone had subconsiously travelled back to his pocket. It rang again.

He wistfully looked up at the stars and grabbed his phone back out, struggling a little bit, wiggling his fingers around in his trousers. It was Heidi again.
"Hey"
"Open the bloody door."
"What happened to the doorbell?"
He says this as he gets up and walks back into the apartment.
"The light's out you idiot."
He sighs and smiles again.
"You smiling?" She asks.
He smiles again. He knows she's smiling too.
He cuts the call and drops it on the sofa.
He opens the door.

She stands there in her pajamas looking at him. Her hair is dishevelled and her grin is from ear to ear.
Yep. Definitely smiling. He thinks to himself as she pulls him into her embrace.

She feels warm. It's a cold night. He breaks free and drags her to the balcony. She trips over the table edge due to the lack of light and soon they are at the balcony. "Look at the stars!" He exclaims. At that very moment, the lights decide to come back on. For a few seconds the stars are still visible and soon the lights from many lamps blur out the stars that shine between the ones that are more distinct than the rest.

He sighs. She laughs. "I'm sorry" she says. He sighs again. They walk back into the house.

She starts regaling him with something about light stealing away the beauty in the darkness and then they're talking about William Shakespeare and his distaste for the morning sun.

That's when he gets an idea.
"Wanna go to Pride Rock?"
He's a little thrown by this sudden admonition. She replies with a "What? Why?"
"To see the stars."
She looks into his big droopy eyes and thinks.
"Yes."

They walk out of the apartment. Baiden wears a maroon sweater over the plain black tee he had already been wearing and he has his hood pulled up. It's his favourite sweater especially because it's a sweater and it has a hood. They don't say much to each other. He goes up to the elevator and clicks on the button that goes up.

She stands next to him now. She takes a wide yawn. He looks at her. She looks back at him looking at her and smiles. She smiles. The elevator doors open. They walk in.

She clicks on the tenth floor, two floors above.
"I just need my jacket." she says to him.

She lives two floors above him, two apartments above too, but on the opposite end. The building is shaped weirdly. There are two apartments on one side and a single apartment on the other side. On the next floor, it's reversed.

She gets out of the elevator and walks to the end where there is only one apartment. She sticks the key inside and walks in. He walks into her living room with her. She returns pulling on a jacket and simultaneously stuffing in a cap-like-hat into the pocket of the jacket. She looks up at him and straightens her glasses.

"There was no electricity? Did you come down to my place using the stairs?" He asks her.
"Yep."

They walk out the door and she locks it in again. He goes over to the elevator and they find themselves on the ground floor.

He finds himself lost in his thoughts again. He is thinking about the silence they share. It takes him to that scene in Pulp Fiction with John Travolta and Uma Thurman and the vanilla milkshake.

He doesn't need to tell her everything. She doesn't need to reply. It's weird but that's the highlight of their friendship. The fact that they don't have to break the silence all the time and say things just to not let that silence exist.

He smiles and sighs again. He starts the car. He needs to turn the key a few times to start it. It's an old vehicle. An old model Suzuki 800. Probably three-four hands down. It's also exactly what he wanted. When he came here to study, he had needed a car. But his self worked in such a way that involved his not spending anyone's money but his own. And until he had money of his own, he depended on his parents. And yes, that sucked. So he went out and got the cheapest car he could have found.

The car started on the fourth try. He jerked out of the parking lot and moved out of the housing society and into the main road.

When they had been studying together, him and Heidi, they had found a clearing type of place between two hills outside the highway that formed the exit out of the underbrush that had formed their university.

He wanted to show her the stars. And that was Pride Rock. They'd gone stargazing before. But never just the two of them. He felt like a weird warmth now. He thought of the liquor that he had in the boot of the car.

"We could pop a casket" he said.
"You have some beer left?"
"Yep. An entire casket."
"I thought we drank everything up on new year's eve."
"We did. This was the emergency extra casket."
"Lol"
"Yep. Lol."

* I'm trying not to cliché but yes, I feel like there's gonna be some romantic interaction. *