Deirdre of the Sorrows @deirdreofthecollins-blog - Tumblr Blog

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TEXT MESSAGE → UNKNOWN

PIPER: d my sweet lil pumpkin angel

PIPER: pineapple is the second code, it's fine

DEIRDRE: Hey, if anyone's the pumpkin angel, it's you. I'm obviously too obscure to enjoy pumpkin anything.

DEIRDRE: JK obviously we're still on for PSL when it comes back. Praise be.

DEIRDRE: Why pineapples, love? You okay?

#( reply. piper )

TEXT MESSAGE → UNKNOWN

PIPER(to the wrong number): pineapples

PIPER(20 minutes later): isn't that our code word for help me?

DEIRDRE: I thought our code word for help me was "mongoose"??

DEIRDRE: Have I been using the wrong code this whole time? That explains so much...

#( reply. piper )

nathan-stahl

Major Tom.

He looked up at that. Looked down. Like the sparks he couldn’t get past (and worried about) (his flammable sweater), like the jolt when you’re almost asleep but then your balance falls off, the reference stopped his breath in his nose. Her hair was a halo from one of those old Catholic paintings, lit up by the streetlamps nearby – and he’d always hated those old Catholic paintings, but Mary Magdalene always looked so miserable. This was something different. He couldn’t reach for the words.

People talk about prophecy in the same way, no matter what they believe: someone has a dream that comes true tomorrow, someone guesses your name on the first try, someone pulls someone out of an audience and tells them their father’s favorite color was blue. Nate didn’t know how to listen to that song anymore; Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory and Young Americans were in a cabinet by the record player in the den, but he kept that cabinet locked. When something dies, you leave it alone. Finally. And he was looking at the bobby pin he could barely see, dark against the shadow, and he was wondering how much people saw when all they had to do was look at him – hadn’t made the mid-day news, hadn’t earned more than two paragraphs on Wikipedia, so he was hardly a household name. She pulled it like the bobby pin: out of thin air. Nate had to stop his mouth opening to keep the cigarette in.

And she was closer, now, doing something to the lighter, and he had to look down to see, and oh, oh, his sweater. Major Tom. The logo blue and red and white. Not a premonition; just a reference, pop culture, oh, he blinked. He fingered the rolled-up sleeve on his arm.

Everything’s always simpler than it seems.

Like his trouble with the lighter – some fancy fingerwork and something metal went springing off the cheap plastic, clinked against the sidewalk. His eyes were on her, and the orange glow she made happen in nothing flat. “Safety’s–” Nate tried to say, around the filter in his mouth, but talking was muddled with a stick in his lips, and he took it out to exhale smoke and try again. He didn’t cough so much on the first drag, anymore. Some days he managed without a single hitch. “Safety sells seatbelts.” And then: “Thanks,” as an afterthought, because this had been a rookie mistake, hadn’t it? She didn’t have to be so cool about it, but she was.

So he was tugging the pack out of his pocket again, flipping back the top. “They’re just Marlboros,” he said. “I don’t know if that… matters.” It was an apology for how obvious a choice he’d made, how lame – next time, he’d try something else, something less advertised and more expensive. He waited for her to tug out her own cigarette before speaking again, desperate to cover up his desperation to seem seasoned. “He dies in that song, you know. Major Tom.”

deirdreofthecollins-blog

Once upon a time, Deirdre made friends the old fashioned way: at school, at work, at concerts in Seattle played by bands she cared about more than she cared about most of her friends at the time. Music always meant more to her than most things, because music had the uncommon duality of concrete simplicity and abstract complexity to a degree than she attributed to absolutely nothing else.

A song about a girl could be written a million different times in a million different ways and it would still have been made by hands, lips, and lungs; the same things that brought life and destruction to everything humans had to touch. Even the most brilliant, complex songs about men who die alone in space could be broken down into a numbered set of notes and vowels.

Once upon a time, when Deirdre gave meaning to something, it was impossible to take it from her. If she found that sunflowers reminded her of rainy summer weekends in Germany, she would carry that with her for the rest of her life. Everything had meaning, whether it was the meaning people expected or something completely strange that came from left field. It came naturally to her to see the world as full of hope and potential.

These days, she found herself losing the meaning she once put into so many simple things like a darkness leeching the sunshine out of her.

This man, this extraterrestrial on his home planet, looked like he had found meaning in something and had it taken from him. She would’ve sworn it had been in his eyes when he thanked her, his hands when he inhaled and failed and tried again, but she was as self-aware as she was helplessly prone to projecting her own feelings and fears on beautiful strangers.

Whether he was as lost as she was, he looked the way Deirdre felt and it reminded her of how she met her friends now; testing people with recklessness and keeping them for a few weeks or months if they passed. Eastcliff was full of people, as extravagant and as plain as people came, looking for an adventure and Deirdre got her fix by forgetting about her life and taking over someone else’s for the weekend. She knew his type, or so she thought. He looked like he was spending his weekends doing the same thing over and over, waiting for it to matter to him again.

“Everyone dies, Major Tom. Your namesake, the mousy girl from “Life on Mars,” the lovers from “Heroes.” Don’t let death stop you from enjoying a good song. That’s more of a shame than actually dying,” she mused easily, far too easily, as she took a cigarette and lit it quickly with her stranger’s flame. Maybe she could matter to him.

Scarred lungs took in cigarette smoke like it was air and Deirdre returned the lighter to its rightful owner, but rather than turn away and smoke in the quiet like most smokers would’ve, she decided she wasn’t done with him. “I’d tell you that nothing matters, but I’d hate for you to think I’m a nihilist. Everything matters until it doesn’t. Seatbelts matter until you die wearing one. What cigarettes you smoked matters until you’re not here to smoke them anymore. So why spend so much of your life caring when you could be living? The two are almost entirely mutually exclusive if you do it right.”

It was true that she fell in love with every person she met and her mind was already drafting a list of the things about this stranger, her newest tourist, that she could love if given the chance; that she would love about him until he lost interest like tourists do with all adventures.

Welcome to the Villa de la Collins, stranger. Enjoy your stay.

“I’m Deirdre,” she said, holding out the hand not pressed to her lips as she dragged another rough breath into her lungs, white hair falling into her face without her bobby pin, which found itself rendered unusable on the ground with the safety from the Bic.

Call her Deirdre, call her Marla Singer, call her Margo Roth Spiegelman, call her your guide on this sightseeing trip; the philosopher you follow to find meaning again.

Let’s get started, shall we?

#( reply. nate )#bae you wanted nothing but exposition right?

flmblr

#extras #eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

nathan-stahl

@deirdreofthecollins

It doesn’t count as a warning if it’s only in the fine print.

Real warnings are spoken out loud, or written in big block letters on signs: red lights, CAUTION WET FLOOR, don’t run with scissors or you’ll trip and gouge your eye. This, he had to search to find. Second page of the medication pamphlet, the bottom of a column and the start of another. Type so small you could overlook it. Black ink on a blue background – I mean, who can read a thing like that, really, anyway? Who thought of this design?

You should avoid or limit the use of alcohol while taking Fluoxetine.

Didn’t say why. And he didn’t ask, didn’t Google. He’d know the damage when the damage was done; that was experimentation, trial by error. That was Salty Dogs, the bar he had to drive to (he promised an Uber back, he crossed his heart in the mirror) and its peeling-wax countertop. He was 20 last time he sat in this stool, trying to pass for 21 – but he was taller than all the bartenders, so they didn’t pull his card. The staff had changed, since then. There was a small tear in the stool that he covered with his thigh when he sat down, knees pressed closed together, elbows at his stomach. It wasn’t the kind of place that got shoulder-to-shoulder busy on a Thursday night, but still, Nate stayed conscious of his limbs. He was not the kind of person who spread out. He pulled in, and in, and in.

The music had changed, too. Back when this was the sort of place he always wished he could take a date, he’d sit outside and pretend to have forgotten his license and listen to the muted R.E.M. tracks through the half-open door. This was – he didn’t know this. Or the song that came before it. Six months is a lot to miss, on the radio; and that was fine, he could down his second beer in two more gulps, if he took breath between. He ordered his third and thought about the word avoid, and how much he liked the word limit more.

And, honestly, did either of them matter? The Stella was leaving foam on his lip. He closed his eyes to listen to–to whatever this was, and to sit with the taste of the beer in his mouth, and he pressed a hand against the counter to make sure he didn’t sway too much without the visual guidance. Toucan Sam, they called him in college. Two cans and he’s gone. And it was an exaggeration, but as glass three turned into dregs, he was reaching into the pocket of his jeans to tug out the Marlboros he’d bought last week. The edges were crunched from getting carried around, but inside, only four were missing – tonight, there’d be a fifth.

Nate didn’t have cravings yet; he just had feelings, and as he walked outside (tapped the bar for a refill), those feelings were all there. The harsh of his heart. The way his thumb kept rubbing the knuckle of its neighbor’s finger, anxious and ready and Ready, okay? He still had to convince himself he was good at this. He leaned against the concrete outside, where the rough scratched at the nape of his neck, and he ducked down to tug out a single cigarette, pull out the lighter from his other pocket. Everyone made this look so easy: James Dean, James Bond. Meanwhile his thumb was pink from the struggle to sustain a flame. He tucked the filter to the side of his mouth as he tried again, striking, but it was all sparks. “God damn it,” he said, and moved to strike again.

deirdreofthecollins-blog

When the sun went down and Deirdre left her apartment, it was for the promise of something, anything, more exciting than sitting in bed alone and smoking until she couldn’t feel her toes. The flow of the traffic on the streets and the slurred shouting already starting from the sidewalk sounded like the kick drum and synth combo of electropop that made for happy trips on acid and nostalgic reminders of three-night relationships with DJs from the West Coast that felt weeks-long when they were over.

The beat in her head was persistent but fluid, a shove from a stranger casting the tune into a haunting lullaby for weary lovers; something more in line with how she felt walking down the street and watching all the people falling in and out of love with their neighbors and florists and childhood best friends.

If there was something Deirdre knew she couldn’t escape, it was love. She saw it everywhere and in everything; saw it in plainly desperate people and people who thought having their shit together would hide how desperate they were for a love they couldn’t find. She saw a lot of people fooling themselves and a lot of people pretending to go along with it. Everyone felt love, in one way or another, yet not a single person had figured out how to tame it. It still hurt people who once knew it only in fondness and did favors for those who abused it. It defied logic and changed its face from sorrow to joy as quickly as it pleased. It gave Deirdre whiplash to watch.

The lights that brought pedestrians’ faces in and out of the harsh glow seemed a little less bright and a little blurrier than they had the night before, the last time Deirdre had made the rounds to the bars and diners that lined this street, but that could’ve been any number of chemical reactions still happening in the fragile makeup of Deirdre’s mind. Perhaps that’s what led her to the train of thought stopped at the station marked Love. Perhaps it was the poem she’d left on her coffee table that taunted her about days well in her past; a time when electropop and a cigarette were all she needed to get her from day to day.

A time when there was always someone to bum off of.

Cut to Deirdre’s broken heart, fresh from a house specialty called the Sucker Punch at the Hut and the loss of her friends after their decision to stay at the tiki bar, pulling an empty pack of Benson & Hedges from her purse outside of Salty Dogs as she searched for her ID to satisfy the doorman. The spark, spark, repeat of an unwilling lighter came to her rescue for not the first time, and when she looked up to pay attention to her surroundings for the first time in hours, it was to the sight of a very tall man in a sweater Deirdre had always coveted becoming more and more frustrated with the means to an end in his hands.

Pale, nimble fingers plucked a bobby pin from Deirdre’s hair, allowing the unruly stands she’d tucked away much earlier in the night to be let loose once again, and light footsteps brought her to the source of the unrelenting frustration. The music in her head slowed to match the smoky haze in her mind and the warmth of the summer air against her skin. It was comfortable in a way that made her crave someone’s fingers in her hair and when she spoke, it was with a lazy smile and a spark of her own in her eye. “There’s your problem, Major Tom,” she started, taking the lighter from the man’s hands and in one quick motion, using the smooth side of her bobby pin to catch the safety and pull it clean out of the lighter. It was a trick she’d learned in high school that turned into a party trick for the boys who craved the concept of her in college.

“Safety is a false concept, anyway. Welcome to the great unknown,” she added, shielding the cigarette on his lips with her hand and lighting it for him. “Think I could bum a smoke?”

#( reply. nate )

Task 001, “Home”

Deirdre lives in a studio apartment in Coral Reef. All of the furniture in the small space is meant to make it look more spacious. The building doesn’t have a laundry room or hookups, so she has to bring her clothes to the laundromat down the street. There’s an elderly blind woman who lives with her caretaker next door and Deirdre loves running into her. Her neighbors and laundry buddies are some of her favorite people. Deirdre discovered several years ago that she’s terrible at gardening, but she learned how to take care of cactuses and succulents, so her house is filled with them. Her little kitchen is filled with quirky cooking tools and well-loved recipe books. She loves IKEA furniture and prides herself in her flat pack prowess.

#ecmtask #extras