𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚏𝚒𝚌𝚜 // 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚌 𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚔 [𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐]

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication [Guns N' Roses]

Moved this from a separate book to declutter my profile :)

The warehouse was cold, damp permeating the air and clinging to their clothes and skin, just as the unspoken hopes and fears of the five young men, meandering souls already believing themselves to be lost causes, hung in the atmosphere between them. They had all decided on who they wanted to be, but that didn't make things any easier. Names meant so much more than they would admit, transforming into a reckless, untouchable persona in the faces of those who would spit or laugh at them, but changing an outward identity didn't erase the memories of their pasts and the dreads of their futures.

None of them had made it to the mouldy mattress in the corner of the floor before their drunken, drugged knees had given out and they found themselves lying together in little more than a heap of limbs on the numbingly cold concrete, tangled together just as the web of their lives and futures lay twisted between their ambitions and talents, each relying so much more than they acknowledged on each other. For if one relationship fell apart, surely the whole unit would collapse, and the fragile hopes of anything but a futureless, doubtlessly painful junkie life would crumble with it into the dark streets of reality hidden from the tempting, bright lights of the city of angels.

Though the outlook was bleak, and they knew there were a million souls like them, desperately trying to be somebody to a world of nobodies, fighting for life and love on the desperate LA streets beneath the unreachable heights of the mansions of those who had already made it above them, there was something within them that refused to stop fighting, that refused to let another shot or drink be their last, that refused to stay lying there in the desperate, guilty comfort whose whisper of you could just slip away, die here, that would be so easy, who would know? they yearned to embrace.

Even as they lay there, a melancholy yet ambient silence thickening the deathly cold, infected air, the thought they all knew too well diffused into their ears from the very air of the city of two estranged halves - the ones like them, struggling for survival, grasping for success, and the others, swathed in luxury in the hills, the world at their fingertips even though they had no care for the desperation right in front of them - asking them all, what happens if this is the one? If this is the right combination of people, of instruments, of talents? If this ragtag bunch of addicts to much more than music becomes something more, something closer to the lords of the hills above?

There is something about a life of barely-there hope and constant uncertainty, of when you will get your next meal, next fix, next sleep, next fuck, that draws you in, acclimatises you to simply not knowing and holding onto those fragile threads of hope. If they made it, how would they stop killing themselves slowly? Could they? How would they adjust to having things handed to them and having power over something in this futile world? Would this band of outcasts survive out there with fame and fortune, or would the silver crack of opportunity's just-open door that had drawn them together eventually expose their incompatibility?

At the end of the day, every time anyone made a band out in those streets, as common as it was, they had to think: are these the people I want to make it with? Spend most of my life playing with?

Fate has wicked and beautiful ways, but the most beautiful part of all is its unpredictable mystery.

Reviews From Before Republishing [3 votes]:

Littlefantasyworlds: Love this. Written from the 3rd perspective, totally objectively looking at their lives now, what they could be, what would be of them if they become what they want to be.. Dreams can come true, but that's just much more to it. Much real, fucked up shit. And the question - is it all worth it?