“The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”

–Spike Jonze, Her, 2013

Nothing more. And yet there are so many days that aren’t part of this story, aren’t there? A countless number of unmemorable moments — these make up the bulk of our lives, if we’re lucky. The events that are interesting — the moments that shape us and the rest of our lives — are impossibly small in comparison. An ocean of living life and droplets of meaning within them, what a dangerous thought.

Even worse, it all just ends, doesn’t it? The curtain drops and its suddenly just blackness — not even blackness. A nothingness beyond what our primate minds could even imagine. The same sensation you had for the first 13.7 billion years of the universe’s existence. These are just circles made from kindle, burning themselves to an inevitable beginning.

…Have you ever read Paradise Lost? It was my Mother’s favourite book. I never got around to reading it while I was still alive, to her obvious annoyance. She named my baby brother after the blind guy who wrote it — can you believe that? I really dodged a bullet there. I’m just named after everyone else.

Why was his entire body sore? Milton thought to himself as slowly as he could, with a blonde haze surrounding his vision. It’s not like he even went to the party last night, right? He couldn’t find the motiva- tion to leave his tattered bedsheets despite the blaring alarm shrieking just inches from his face.

beep beep beep beep screeeech ruuurrrump pa-lump!

Yeah, whatever, just another day of this typical bullshit — the boy thought to himself as he finally managed to swing his lanky, awkward limbs out of bed.

He slid on the ripped pair of jeans beside his bed that he took off just a few hours before — along with an equally out-dated plaid button-up.

There were the usual dysfunctional rumblings from downstairs — and he knew he was going to be late when he noticed the hum of the shower filled the ambiance — meaning he wasn’t going to be able to enter the bathroom for another twenty minutes at least thanks to his baby sister.

Yeah, whatever. He checked his cracked phone — at 5% battery, forgetting again to charge it the night before — no messages, nothing to check anyways.

He looked over at the red duotang on his desk, annoyed by the mere sight. If you’re old enough to be drafted into the army, why are you still using a red fucking duotang? Though the answer was obvious, binders are cumbersome and heavy. If your supplies aren’t a burden, their contents aren’t a burden either, right?

He should open it though — and make sure that there’s homework in there that was completed. Calculus, chemistry, geography? It was only September, and he was already assured he wasn’t graduating this year. It took him a good minute to recognize the words that he had written yesterday, his fine motor skills had deteriorated, to the point where his notes mimicked the prescriptions he foraged to get opiates for Eliot.

Beside it, though, was one of the only things that brought any sort of solace to Milton: a spiral-ring pocket notebook. The first half of pages wavy and creased from excessive use and exposure to rainwater. The place where he could just sink himself into, where all the milk teeth in the world wouldn’t touch him.

His walking wall of words.

He had flipped it open to the most recently-used page — where he was writing a poem. Or rather, what pretended to be a poem, it was a confessional. A love letter. Something that had a clear objective and postage destination. As if today was going to be the day that happens. In the middle of that thought, he heard the shrill voice of his Mother call him downstairs, already comfortably late. Milton abandoned his bedroom only to be greeted with a wall of steam as Megan exited the bathroom, thanks for that. Though, seeing her did bring the first smile to his face that morning.

As he descended, the boy noticed his rugged Father sitting at the table, black coffee dripping from his moustache as he clenched the local newspaper. The sight was almost convincing enough of a competent man that you wouldn’t notice the empty beer cans around his ankles or general lack of employment. A man still silently grieving for his first-born son.

“Milt, late again? When are you going to get your shit together? Jesus.” He greeted his son in a nonchalant tone, looking him deep in his bloodshot eyes.

He didn’t reply, though, instead just grabbing a piece of burnt toast as it erupted. He winced at the grain burned against his fingertips — but really, who cares? It was clear the boy’s objective was to leave that townhouse as quickly as possible, if at least for the appearance of trying to keep himself the least amount of late possible. His long, strawberry mane was a complete mess, in due for a haircut, and he knew he would have to lift a pack of gum for his breath.

He got to the corner of Hawk Avenue and Main Street of Dogwood, Alberta when he noticed Eliot, his head in prayer as he looked down at his phone, not noticing he had the right of way at the crosswalk.

“Eliot!” Milton walked up to him, smiling for the second time so far that day.

“Oh, hey Milt. Are you skipping today? Where’s your backpack?” The other boy looked up for a moment, before returning to whatever was far more interesting on his phone.

Shit, what? — Not again. He even reviewed his homework in his red fucking duotang and every- thing. All he had on his was his pocket notebook and switchblade. Milton weighed the options in front of him: He could go back home and face his family once again and be so late that he’d probably miss all of first period entirely. He could go to school regardless, sans backpack, and accept another mark that would pull his grade down. He could go with Eliot’s suggestion and just ditch — that sounded like the most fun option.

“Oh, by the way, Naomi was asking about you at yesterday’s party.” Eliot let out, rather casually as they continued, just a block away from school at this point.

Shit, what? — Why would she ask about him? He had somehow managed to go the entire morning without even thinking about her — Naomi, at least directly. She had just box-dyed her long hair with those dark purple streaks a few days ago to celebrate the summer’s end.

“She’s sure had a glow-up, huh?”

Milton’s eyes darted at him. “Yeah, whatever. Do you have any gum, Eliot?”

Milton squinted hard. The morning sun was impossible. The way it angled itself perfectly to ruin everyone’s line of vision, particularly right after the beauty of the sunrise. The clouds are no longer heavenly pinks and oranges. It’s just a boring, cold blue with a blinding orange bowl of fire, it’s in front of you. The boy could not escape being out of breath just from walking up the faded stairs of the entrance to the building, his shoes felt heavier walking up them, as though there was a particular gravity to the school.

Only to be followed by the sea of people that simmered in the thin paper hallways. The loud yet dull ambiance of hundreds of conversations happening at once. Milton paused, not letting his mind over- whelm him, instead stepping outside of his body for a moment to meditate on the volume of these conver- sations. He thought to himself about the impossible complexity each one of these students invariably had. Every single one of these people loved, hated — probably had their own unique trauma. Suffering is inher- ent of the human condition, of course. He was able to selectively focus his hearing for a moment, and sure, he might listen to the mundane overhearing conversations about homework and sports teams, but he also eavesdropped on the particulars of people confessing their first loves to their friends, hiding the scars underneath of their sweater arms, painstakingly counting the calories of their cafeteria lunches, making plans to avoid going home after school, laughing about metatextual memes about complicated political issues.

It’s just so much, it’s too much, isn’t it Milton? It’s a miracle that these hundreds of students manage to wake up each day, far too early for their adolescent circadian rhythm, and decide to show up here, and try their best. And don’t get me wrong, Milton, their best might be shitty — they might (always) do their homework at the last minute, not pay particular attention to important lessons, make slights at people that just want to be their friend, but to your surprise, that still is their best.

It took a few minutes of wading through these overpopulated corridors, a failure of the education system, before the boy reached his locker, and opening it instantly from a lack of using his lock. The usual torrent of yellowed papers fell to his Chuck Taylors with a reluctant sigh, bending down to pick them up.

“Like Sisyphus, right?” Naomi smirked as she seemed to appear out of nowhere from behind, mak- ing the boy jolt a little.

“What?” he replied dumbfounded, looking up at the girl and suddenly just randomly grabbing pa- pers rather than trying to sort them as he was doing a moment ago. There was a brief flash of anger that he didn’t recognize behind his own eyes.

“You know, the Greek tragedy? I see you every single morning come and open that locker just to have those papers spill out. Over and over and over. Will you ever get a binder? Will you ever just, I don’t know, use a fucking paperweight? Probably not. It’s pretty amusing to watch.”

I’ll let you in on a well-kept secret. Something they don’t mention to you is that your popularity in high school is determined when you’re still just in elementary. That is, the friends you make — or decidedly don’t — when you’re still eating glue and picking your nose. That is a metric determination of the rest of your educational life, and the rest of your life in general probably.
What birthday parties you were invited to — How many snow forts were you a member of? The gravity of these questions is so often glossed over.

Naomi shook her head, getting lost in thought before she entered the colourless hallways of the eponymously named Dogwood High. Despite the tarnished outsides, the interior was meticulously cleaned, almost to a point of suspicion. It certainly didn’t help with the nihilistic aesthetic the school seemed to proudly boast.

It only took a moment for the girl to enter Mr. Armstrong’s class, with the teacher looking at her with an uneasy silent stare as he couldn’t help but barge in. Even after she was at her desk, he kept staring.

Why does it seem like the more you look at a clock, the slower time goes? And for some reason, it never goes slowly when you want it to, like when you’re spending the last day with someone you love, or you’re on vacation, or you’re enjoying life in any sort of sense.

On days like these, time seemed to violate basic laws of the universe purely to spite Milton. Every five minutes he would look up from his pocket notebook to see that only 60 seconds had gone by.

Sure, if you drift off into some sort of sugary daydream then time flew, but you couldn’t do that on purpose, the way you can’t just fall asleep whenever you like. You must first pretend to be asleep; you must roleplay the act of sleeping before you’re allowed to sleep. What a fantastic feature of being human.

“Milton?”

Hm? The boy lifted his head from his desk, a small circle of drool on the corner of his blue-lined paper. Beside him stood Eliot a little awkwardly, looking down at Milton with expectance.

“Did you want to hang out during lunch? I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
Before he could answer Eliot, he looked down at the paper in front of him and clenched his fists white-knuckled instinctively. Jesus. In front of him was nearly a page of writing that he had zero recollec- tion of writing.

“What the fuck…?” Milton whispered to himself as he kept looking down at it. This was the start of it, wasn’t it Milton? The beginning of the end. An apathetic grasshopper becoming the raged locust in the summer heat.

“Just. Fuck off Eliot.”

“Geez, Milt, I was just asking.” Eliot frowned at him, pulling the straps of his backpack before leaving the boy without giving him a chance to explain himself.

Although to be fair, Milton didn’t even try to explain that he wasn’t cursing under his breath at Eliot. Though he wouldn’t admit there were times he wanted to do that, at the very least for his boyish good looks, he just kept staring. He was lucky that Mr. Armstrong had left the classroom, ultimately leaving Milton alone as he moved his tongue and muscles of his mouth to the mysterious lines in front of him repeatedly.

Eliot couldn’t help but look at the orange bowl of fire in the sky before he sat on a patch of dead blonde grass in the field, he wasn’t the type to care about his jeans getting dirtied or the inevitable insects that would occasionally crawl on them. He had to part his long and heavy black hair out of his eyes as he took off his Marvel backpack and thick-rimmed glasses. His metallic lunchbox clanked as he pulled out a ham sandwich with the crusts carefully cut by his Mother. He looked over at Naomi.

“Why are you friends with him?” She asked with a high-pitched tenderness, before getting annoyed at how the granola got stuck in-between her new braces she felt too old for.

What — why? That wasn’t really a question to Eliot. There was never a point where he could afford to ask it. Isn’t there a sense of duty — of obligation to the people you’ve had in your life, all your life? — don’t they get grandfathered in with a legacy contract, tenured and protected? Loyalty meant nothing to his generation, it’s all so frustrating. Of course, the boy’s cute and crooked smile didn’t hurt. And the way he was always running his boney fingers through his blonde locks when he was self-soothing, which was often.

Hm? What was he doing? Oh right, not to mention that the boy didn’t really have anybody else but him. Sure, she kind of tolerated him, but who knew what would happen if he was truly alone — truly isolated. Eliot was smarter than that. He knew his place, he knew what needed to be done by him, for Him. It had been so many years at this point, almost an entire decade. How many birthday parties did he attend where he was the only guest? How many group projects did he carry? How many posts did he like purely out of obligation? He even pretended to do hard drugs just to buy them from him and allow the boy to have some money to avoid starving on some days. God, just hearing the boy’s name made his heart flutter.

“Sunk-cost fallacy, right?”

It was shortly after lunch when Milton was purposing going the opposite direction of his next class, meandering and pretending there was some sort of meaning to his wandering, before noticing the dark lavender streaks in Naomi’s hair and slowly walking past her locker, seeing her head down, chipped fingernails running over a piece of paper.

“Hey Ramona Flowers. What are ya’ reading there?”

It was his turn to startled her, making the girl jump before she quickly turned around to look at him, her black jacket squeaking as she did.

“Oh, hey Ozymandias. Don’t you have class?” She quickly put her arms beneath her on the small of her back, giving him a half-smile.

“Yeah, whatever. What do you have in your hands there?” He replied.

“Oh, it’s a… it’s a note.”

Milton raised an eyebrow, feeling his narrow shoulders tense up involuntarily. Who would be leav- ing a note in Naomi’s locker? He didn’t want to think it was the worst-case scenario. He forced himself to pause for a moment.

“…What kinda note?” He breathed out hard.

Naomi scrunched up her small face, her mouth moving to the side, her fingers still fidgeting instead of just answering him. She found herself getting caught up in a string of thoughts. She thought to herself about how Milton never really made his feelings or intentions opaque, as much as he might he think he does. She thought about the thousand of other things going on in her life that she never even had a chance to talk to him about — she felt bad for him, yet she felt so frustrated. She just wanted to be treated like a person. She thought about Eliot.

“Uh, Naomi, what kinda note?” He repeated himself, his knuckles turning white in clenched fists.

“It’s nothing, honestly. It’s really nothing. Just a dumb chain letter that one of my friends decided to slip into my locker.” She lied. “Like, seriously, are we in grade school? Am I right?” She chewed on her lip before giving Milton the warmest smile she could.

“Ah. Oh, okay.” Milton seemed to loosen up, nodding his head, giving a hallow laugh before lean- ing his lanky chest and lunging on the girl.

“Dude! What the fuck — !”

Before she had any sort of time to react, he grabbed the lined piece of paper right out of her hand, ripping it in the process. His eyeballs moved back and forth frantically as he mumbled to himself, reading it rapidly.

“Asshole.” Naomi gritted her teeth; she didn’t know why she even tried. It would have been easy to deck the boy in his throat, but she notices his eyes getting red and couldn’t help but soften up.

“Milton, Jesus. Did — did you write this?” The girl had no idea why she asked that, as though there was some sort of gravity to this boy. This dumb, emotionally-unregulated boy.

Milton turned to her, his cheeks starting to feel unexplainably hot, and his breathing becoming shallower as his mouth failed to properly move to say anything in his usual clever repertoire.

“No. Of course not. Why would you ask me that? This is so stupid. I’d never be this forward — this gross. Do you really think I’m like this? I can write so much better than this” He finally managed to spout out manically, his chest moving up and down.

“Listen, Milt. I’m sorry. I really don’t care.” She paused for a moment, her thoughts overlapping one another like crossed wires. “Listen, I need to tell you,…Eliot — “ She blurted out, not knowing how to finish the sentence she started.

The boy’s eyes widened as the realization hit him. There was no fucking way. But of course, it was Eliot. That sonovabitch. Benedict Arnold. Marcus Brutus. Judas Iscariot. The Antichrist.

“After everything, of course.” Milton dramatically gestured, waving his arms about as his he started to let out another hallow laugh.

It took about an hour for Milton to track down Eliot. It wasn’t like he knew his class schedule, or what he was even taking. The boy didn’t realize how large and gaping the high school maw could be. He would peer into one classroom after another, a mouse in a laboratory labyrinth. Endless stairwells, dead- ends, wings after wings. A sea of blank stares pressing against his skull repeatedly.

All this self-conscious weight made Milton reconsider for a moment, maybe

Eliot was just high out of his mind when he wrote that. Maybe he never actually paid attention when Milton told him about his feelings for Naomi. He quickly shook his head and disregarded any possibility that this could come to a clean or rational conclusion.

The metallic bell rang as a myriad of zippers could be heard closing — he was at this for so long that an entire period had passed. Thud. While being distracted by yet another classroom he bumped into another student. He looked up.

“Oh, there you are Milt.” Eliot chuckled, a little out of it. He looked happy to see his best friend.

“Eliot! There you are! Are you — are you…?”

Seeing the taller boy in such a nonchalant attitude unnerved Milton for a moment. For a moment he had forgotten all the clever, cut-throat things he was going to say to him, for some reason, his mind was flooded with his sister Megan — playing with her when she was little, taking care of her when their parents were gone for days. She was older, now. Those moments are never going to happen again. He thought about that red fucking duotang still sitting on his bedroom drawer — did it even matter. Why?

The boy rediscovered his resolve quickly, though. Milton stood up straight with his shoulders back, he knew what he had to do — at this very moment. There was a law to this sort of thing, a song and dance. Milton had his hands stuffed into the pockets of pants, running his hand against the handle of his black pocketknife. Eliot gave him no choice, here. This is what you do when you’re in love, grand gestures. Second-degree Shakespearean crimes. It was inevitable.

“Are you really unprepared to meet your God?”

On the other end of the school, Naomi was the last student in Mr. Armstrong’s class. She figured that he wanted to speak to her about her missing assignments, or something along those lines — really, who cares? She had already texted Eliot about what was going on, only to get no response. The skin beside her fingernails bleeding as she chewed on it, unsure of if she should have called the police. Was she a coward for just running away from Milton when she had the chance?

“Ms. Rainwater…” Mister Armstrong began.

The large man crossed his arms as he looked down at her. There was a pregnant pause as neither of them said anything for a moment. Nobody really knew why, but John Armstrong had always worn brightly coloured t-shirts that were a size too small for his figure. His pectoral muscles uncomfortably bulging out, desperate for people to know he worked out, that he was still fucking good for his age.

Who cares if she had left him? Or that he hadn’t seen his only child in months? He wasn’t balding, he shaved his head. He had figured out how to control himself at this point. John let out a sharp breath as he slowly walked over to the door.

“Mr. Armstrong, I’m really sorry, I know I’ve been slacking off in your class, but there’s something I need to tell you about. You know Milton? I — “

Fucking Milton, John muttered underneath of his breath. Why would she bring him up? Why would such an intelligent young woman even be in the same social circle as that ruminating piece of shit, he’s not even going to be graduating this year.

“Please, just call me John. Anyways, that’s not why I asked you to stay after class to talk with me.” He shook his head as he replied, cutting her off. His rugged hand turned the heavy lock of the classroom door, and the windows tightly shuttered. There would be headlines written about this in the upcoming days.

“I wanted to ask, Naomi, if you got my note.”

BEGIN TRANSMISSON: The amber-halo lights flicker outside the subway windows, like the Sun behind the stained-glass of the first-built church. There’s so much jostling from a lack of good infrastructure your feet feel like they’re far at sea, aboard a ship with Homer. You’re looking at him and he’s looking at you. It’s nice. But then I can’t help but look at you and lose my train of thought. No pun intended. Now, where were we? Somewhere important? Oh, right. There was a good movie on last night. Last Action Hero, I think. What’s that one about? Oh, you’ll get a kick out of this. Okay, let me try to remember. It starts out like a typical Schwarzenegger flick, right? But it turns out that Arnold plays a fictional cop that is brought into the real world, and his kid sidekick also joins him in the movie world. Oh, that’s meta. Yeah, right? You mean kinda like Deadpool? He’s pretty overrated. What? No way dude, c’mon. He’s one of the only superheroes that’s beloved by all. Don’t get me wrong, I like watching one of his movies to shut down my brain and relax, but the whole “I’m addressing the audience directly” gimmick is kind of overplayed and pseudo-intellectual. Especially now, everything is dripping with irony and self-awareness. It’s corrosive though. You’re just melting away at all sincerity until there’s no truth left. You’re doing damage to the psyche of art itself. Well, have you even read the comics? What the fuck are you talking about? Okay, it’s not that a big deal. I mean I don’t wanna argue or anything, it’s just something that’s been on my mind for awhile. Oh yeah, that makes sense, the guy complaining about how metafiction or whatever is overdone then proceeds to spends his free time thinking about how metafiction is overdone. I don’t think you can equate my anxious and meaningless neuroticism, which I can’t control by the way, with pseudo-intellectualism. Why not? Apples and oranges. Do they even exist? We can’t categorize simple fruits without getting into an argument, you really think we’d be capable of knowing what art is? Let alone how important its own awareness of self is? I think we’re talking over each other’s heads at this point. What heads? There are no heads, stop playing pretending. We’re just black ink on a white piece of paper. We’re just the silent voice inside somebody’s head. Geez, that’s kind of a depressing though, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to just keep at least that one last layer on and continue this silly conversation otherwise? Oh, you want to pretend we’re back on the subway. You want to wonder what happened to Milton, or Eliot, or Naomi? The ghost of his dead older brother? I mean, what a cliff-hanger for the audience, who we’re talking to right now. Hell, we might be one or two of those characters in a flashback or dream sequence, right? How enthralling, right? No, dude, you can’t pussyfoot your way around this. You want to start getting into the semantics of what actual art is then you must peel back every single layer until there’s nothing left. And then boom, it’s dead. Like a frog — it sure is useful to open one up to understand its anatomy, it’s biology and maybe its way of being, but once you do, the frog is dead. The joke is dead. The art is dead. There’s nothing left but some navel-gazing thoughts that aren’t even that useful. Just formless thoughts that carry no meaning because there’s no longer any narrative. They’re just there. But isn’t that what all art is? Just there. We always think art has an inherent purpose or mission, but it doesn’t. in it’s most ideal and pure form, art is only just supposed to be. Art just is. Yeah, you’re right. Besides, metafiction can be kinda cool anyways. I’ll admit. Finally. Not to mention you used to cosplay Homestuck characters at anime conventions. Fuck you for bringing that up at all, first and foremost. You know it’s against the rules. What rules? Don’t start playing dumb suddenly, mister “I want discourse on the inherent meaningfulness of addressing an audience directly”. Yeah, whatever. END TRANSMISSION.