Unfinished: Searching for Starlight
Originally written: 16 Feb 2017
I think I've shared this one before at some point, but I can't remember. I nearly put it on ao3 as is but decided against it.
I was in a bit of a dark place and working some stuff out, I had just read, or re-read, Litany in which certain things are crossed out and I guess I was stuck in that feeling. Anyway, I decided against finishing it for fear of where it might go. The text in the doc is purple because its quite purple prosey, and I don't know how many times I can write them LITERALLY bumping in to each other. Lol
Mornings are nothing but haze. Dan is always lost, still stuck in the clinging tar of his night times. He’s like an abandoned road under a starless sky, desolate and alone. He rises on his couch, stumbles from a dirty cushion to dingy sheets and lays on his back, contemplates the crack in his ceiling.
He’s trying to remember all the things that he should but he’s coming up empty. There’s a faint memory of damp, heated skin and humid pants against his collarbone which is something akin to feeling, he supposes, but mostly it’s just numb and void and it’s definitely the way he likes it.
The distance is better, the desolate, separate roads and starless skies are better. Because stars are meant to shine, and Dan is a black hole, a singular point where all light disappears. And stars make him feel insignificant, small and inconsequential.
He has to drag himself up at some point, but only once the morning has given way to the afternoon and the sun has tracked a path over its highest point. It needs to be going down when Dan greets it, because anything on its way up would fall at the mere sight of him.
The coffee shop on the corner is routine, and the shift at the bar and the beer he throws in to glasses and slides into ungrateful, dirty hands. The chatter that floats into dead air is routine and the bearded man shooting eyes at him, and buying him hard liquor before going home to his stoic wife shouldn’t be routine, but it is. Dan feels the burn of the alcohol on the way down, but it helps him stop feeling much else so he doesn’t mind.
It’s here the routine varies. Between destruction and vague attempts at creation. There are the nights, when the final patron has departed and he’s staring at a row of glass soldiers filled with blessed numbness, that he’ll decide to self destruct. To blow away the remaining fragments of hope he’d had that today would mean anything other than the inevitable, and he’ll fix himself a drink, and another, and he’ll lose himself on that desolate starless road he’s so often wandering down.
Few times he manages to break ranks, drag himself home bone tired and weary and perch on his couch as if poised for something. With nerves and muscles bundled so tight, he’ll set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and he’ll leak words until the sun is nearly up. He’s searching for starlight maybe, somewhere, always coming up empty, or wanting. These nights, of pointless creation, he’ll file away somewhere, or leave loose leaf pages scattered and haphazard around his tiny flat, crinkled, misused, and unseen. He doesn’t glance back to them, but keeps them as a reminder, to keep searching perhaps.
Dan is forgiven for being surprised that he’s only twenty two. It’s worn him down the last few years, and he’s exhausted from making it this far. He’s pretty convinced he wouldn’t make it another twenty two. Or ten. Or two. He’s got no definite plans, but tiptoeing a line between creation and destruction night after night isn’t going to last. He would offer up his own destruction if the creation meant anything. But all he has to show for his perfect demolition is a flat littered with torn up pages, protruding hip bones, and a penchant for straight vodka and skin that isn’t his own.
He’s studying the glinting bottles today, weighing up his options. He’s been over them a thousand times before tonight and no doubt he’ll go over them another thousand after it, but he persists, because he won’t fall into inertia, it has to be an active decision. He has to choose to self destruct.
But suddenly there is a manager at his hip, stuttering around clipped sentences about trivialities while his fingers slide into the belt loop of Dan’s jeans. Dan lets a sigh slip past his lips, and it’s almost relief, because the decision to give up on creation for the night is easier when he doesn’t have to blame it on loneliness. It’s a poor substitute for something real but they’ve reach an impasse where they both know it’s nothing, and empty, and pointless, but neither cares enough about the hollowness of their coupling to put an end to it. It’s not all the time, but it’s sometimes.
Dan sets a smile on his mouth. It isn’t real, but it’s the ghost of something real, and he pours himself a drink. It’s quick and heady and they don’t use a bed. Instead Dan perches on the top of a drinks crate in the cellar head and the man at his feet kneels on the cold concrete floor.
When he comes he doesn’t see stars, but he squeezes his eyes tight shut and does enjoy the darkness on the inside of his eyelids and the faint pulse of his blood in his ears. It reminds him that it’s still pumping through his body, that he’s still existing. It’s not comforting, but it’ll do.
Afterwards Dan downs another mouthful of something acidic and burning. It rests in his stomach, queasy and thick, until it enters his bloodstream and helps him to forget.
And then its back to his couch, and the crack in his ceiling, and the routine starts again.
Objects in motion stay that way until external forces are applied. Resistance, friction, opposition. Dan's existence isn't so much motion as it is a slip stream, a meander through a pointless narrative he's always trying to pin down. He'd been drinking until the rising sun tinted the tips of rooftops visible from his apartment window in pink, and then laid unconscious and not dreaming for a few hours before rising in a fog.
He should be worried that he's sluggish. That his head is clogged and fuzzy and his tongue feels coated and thick, but it's all such repetition that he stopped worrying about it long ago.
He shuffles into clothes from the night before, needing them only because he doesn't want to be accused of public indecency. He's already indecent, but he covers his bare skin, pale and jagged over his bones, to save onlookers the trouble of looking. It’s not like he feels attached to it, his own body merely transportation for his rambling mind.
Back to the coffee shop, and the sugary caffeinated air. He orders it black, with an extra shot, hoping that the stimulant will enter his bloodstream. It’s a more acceptable drug at this time in the morning, but he knows he’s just counting down the hours, until he gives in or the muse takes him.
This morning there’s a collision. As he turns from the counter, hot salvation in one hand, lid lifted to allow the steam to escape and the liquid to cool, he meets resistance. His front pressed up to another person’s while hot coffee is expelled from the cup in a burning stream that coats both of their shirts. It’s seeping through to his skin and the added irritation of being practically scolded on top of the thrumming headache at his temples is enough to make him yell.
He looks up into bright blue eyes beneath a shaggy black fringe and his whole world focusses in. He’s in pain, and the world is sawing at his already frazzled nerves and he doesn’t like the extra shock the sight brings him.
The guy is smiling and apologising, telling Dan he’s the clumsiest person alive and all Dan can see is blue eyes and black hair and he feels disorientated.
“I’ll buy you another one,” the guy says, swabbing at Dan’s shirt with a handful of useless paper towels.
Dan wants to bat him away, save him the energy of trying to clean up a mess Dan’s involved in. It’s an old shirt, and old skin, and he doesn’t care if he’s burnt. It’d be one more injury to stack on the others and it barely matters in the grand scheme. The fact that the pain has whitewashed his brain is neither here nor there because the face of this stranger is more vivid than anything else he’s allowed himself to be exposed to recently.
He’s been living in a grey world, the shades of it too subtle to distinguish the differences between his nights and days. This guy is a whirlwind of colour, furious hands moving over Dan’s shirt and Dan using his own to move him away.
When he takes the guy’s shoulders into his hands, he’s more gentle than he can ever remember being, scared his destructive fingers will mark this elusive thing.
“Don’t worry.” He’s saying, and his voice is cracked. These are the first words he’s spoken today, besides the order for his coffee. “It doesn’t matter.”
But this is a dismissive the stranger won’t accept, he’s already spinning them back to the counter, still apologising and moving with an ease that makes Dan notice his own creaking bones.
“Um, what were you drinking?” He asks, face turned in expectation.
“Coffee,” He manages to croak, straining for control over how dry his throat is, how rasping he sounds. He swallows around his words.
“Black coffee,” the stranger is saying over the register, and then “caramel macchiato.” Which makes Dan chuckle, because of course this unbelievable and unexpected being has all that sugar and all that foam and all that extra nonsense in his coffee.
“Why order coffee if you don't actually like coffee?” Dan hears himself asking. He's engaging with this person, conversing like a normal, albeit sarcastic, human being. He's dipping his toe into the theory of social interaction, and he's rusty, he hasn't done this in so long.
“I like coffee,” blue eyes says simply, shrugging off Dan’s tone, which must sound confrontational despite his best efforts.
“Coffee with a bunch of sugar and stuff in it doesn't count.”
“Who are you, the coffee police?”
Dan wills the smile on his face not to appear, not to crack through his weary and jaded facade, but it happens anyway. He knows it's the one that makes his dimple appear, fills his cheeks, crinkles his eyes. He doesn't think he's worn that particular smile in quite a while. Not since--
“If I were,” he quips, so he doesn't have to think, “you'd be in trouble for assaulting an officer.”
And his stranger laughs. The tip on his pink tongue poking from the side of his mouth, head crooked slightly backwards, eyes lighting up. Dan thinks he probably doesn't deserve to witness something so beautiful.
He definitely shouldn't be lingering in the conversation once the coffee is pressed into his hands but there is something about the warmth of the stranger that's drawing him in. There is nothing of the drink he had last night left in his system so the gentle vibration running through him at the sound of this guys voice is a mystery. A wonderful enigma Dan wants to capture in over egged prose, scatter this man in the spaces between words.
His brain hasn't been this quiet while sober in a long time.
“What are you?” He asks. Quite accidentally out loud.
“Not the coffee police either,” the warm voice rolls back, across the distance between them as they move from the counter. “Though nearer. I actually work here.”
“I know.” Thin fingers push their way through a black fringe and the pads of Dan's own itch to follow them. “You think that would mean that I'd be able to navigate the place without crashing in to someone but… There you go.”
Dan can feel his head nodding and is almost surprised at the laugh that makes it way out of his mouth. He certainly hadn't agreed to make the noise, not consciously anyway.
“So that's what I am. Coffee barista. Well… Coffee barista slash graphic novelist.” This is said all in a rush, with a slight frown as if his stranger doesn't know why he's saying it. “What about you?” He settles for eventually.
“Pub down the street. The Three Bells?”
“Know it, or know of it?”
There is a smirk that Dan probably deserves. And anyway, he doesn't even know why he's bothering to ask, it has no bearing on this temporary meeting, this fleeting encounter that will no doubt be a mere memory by morning.
There's a moment of silence and Dan wonders if this is the space in normal conversations where one should make a move to leave. They aren't moving to sit together, there's no reason why they should, and they're half blocking the gangway between what the counter and the seating. Dan shuffles his feet and tries not to look indecisive.
“What is?” His enigma doesn't make a move to leave, so Dan doesn't either.
“Asking if I know about a gay bar, to establish if I'm queer. Effective but… A bit round the houses isn't it?”
Dan swallows. It hadn't really been what he'd meant. Not really. It's inconsequential what this person does or doesn't like, who or what he is, when he means nothing to Dan, never will and definitely shouldn't. Not if he knows what's good for him.
“Not that I'm not enjoying this little meet cute we've got going on,” Dan says in lieu of answering properly, “But I have to get going.”
“No problem,” there's a confident smile set on pale pink lips and Dan has the sudden and intrusive idea that he wants to wipe it away with his own mouth, “meet cute?”
“Is that your slash then?”
“Me. Phil. Barista <i>slash</i> mediocre graphic novelist. You…. Staff in a gay bar slash… Movie writer?”
Dan laughs for a second time and wonders if the sound can really be coming from him when he can't remember actively making it. It sounds wrong anyway, alien, separate from him.
“Dan. Beer slinger slash shitty novelist.”
The confession startles him. It's an admission of a dream only, not a fact. A half truth, sitting flush up against the lie but not quite there.
“Well, Dan, nice to meet you.”
“Is this the part of the meet cute where I ask for your number and, noticing that you wouldn't want to embarrass me any further than my own clumsiness already has, you take pity on me and actually write it down?”
Dan glances around him just once. The coffee shop looks the same as it always does, the tinkle of cups echoing in the distance, below the din, the smell of caffeine thick in the air. And yet.
Yet here Dan is, enacting a perfect replica of an everyday encounter. Bumbling through his own timeline, swerving against someone else’s and taking the moment to decide if the two narratives should converge. If feels like a next chapter to a book he thought he'd stopped reading. Not a sequel, just… A potential beginning.
He could type the number into Phil’s phone but instead pulls a beat up biro from his back pocket and, resting his coffee on the edge of a shelf, smudges the digits onto Phil’s palm, holding the back of his hand gently and pressing pressing the nib down. With it, Dan leaves the decision of where this chapter is heading to Phil, not knowing on which side he's pinning his hopes. A beginning or another inevitable end. They're the same of course, but the former has more delay, and perhaps more pain traded for it.
It's a blip. An anomaly to an otherwise steadfast routine. He barely thinks of it again.
Instead, he tries his hand at adding words to paper on his coffee table. But, unsuccessful and only barely annoyed about it, he spends the rest of the day wavering between sleep and awake beneath his threadbare sheets. Later, bleary eyed and a bundle of frazzled nerves stretched over jangling bones and translucent skin, he returns to his humdrum. To the night time and that endless road, starless skies calling to him between shots of something stronger than he is. He's not lost, he tells himself, because he didn't even know where he was headed.
If you like this, and you are so inclined, you have my permission go take this, extend it, remix if, make it your own. I would love to see what you do with it.
