Breathe

clay.

When he was young, he played with circuit boards. He never played with toy cars, crayons, or chalk; it was always circuit boards. He'd take them apart, look at the pieces and wires, then put everything back together to make it work again. As he got older, he continued to take things apart in order to put them back together again, but soon this challenge was ludicrous. He began making things work out of simple lines of code, starting in C and working his way up to python, java, and even html, but java was where he found his potential being used best. He could make things happen, even little tiny things like turning on a light, and to his young, untapped imagination, this was huge.

So right now, the fact that he wasn't able to figure out where his final syntax error was killed him a little bit.

Clay had been rummaging through the code for hours looking for the one syntax error that was breaking his code and sending it into an infinite loop. It would crash his system every time he ran the code thinking he had fixed the issue. In his distress, he coded a command into the terminal that allowed him to shut down any running code before it fried his hard drive.

Sighing and placing his head in his hands, Clay eventually gave up on trying to finish the code. He'd been at this for at least four or five hours. It was probably time he stopped using his brain to this capacity and go out for a walk, or even just a snack. Anything except the same 400 lines of code he'd been staring at all day.

He got up out of his chair and stretched, his back and neck cracking as he extended them for the first time in hours. He was tired today, more than usual. It could be due to the nightmares last night.... ? But they weren't worse than they normally were, in fact one could argue they were better than usual. But it was no matter, he was here now, in the present, without the nightmares that had haunted him for years.

Clay lumbered down the stairs and into the kitchen. He grabbed a banana and pulled out his phone and checked the five hours worth of messages, texts, calls, and notifications he had purposefully ignored. Most of them he continued to ignore, but a select few were opened and answered.

george !

3:36 pm

george !

Are we still on for filming today at 6?

5:19 pm

me

yeah, sorry, i was coding all day today :/

george !

You're good! See you then :)

me

ty :)

snapmap

12:06 pm

snapmap

have you told gogy abt the house ?

5:22 pm

me

no why

snapmap

i almost let it slip that we got the house we wanted

me

holy fuck nick, we discussed this. i'm going to tell him when it's time, but now is not the time. we haven't even closed yet

snapmap

k sorry, i don't think he knows

me

it's ok, i overreacted sorry

read 5:28 pm

Clay set his phone face-down on the counter and listened to the thunderstorm brewing outside. He was too stressed out about his code to be having conversations about moving. Him, Nick, and George all had the crazy idea to move into the same house together and split the rent. That way, they could produce content easier, and on top of all of the other benefits it provided, it just sounded like a lot of fun. But the reality was, Clay was not mentally prepared to move into a new house, even if it was with his two best friends (and possibly three, as they were going to propose the idea to Darryl as well). Clay was stressed out. He was anxious. He was a ball of spitting flames and burning rotation.