“There’s more to life than love” he said, folding one long leg over the other. He had a cigarette pinched between two fingers attached to a hand resting lazily on top of an old, rickety little typewriter.
“Like what? Forcing yourself to be miserable just so you have something to write about? You’re nothing without your self-inflicted problems. Nothing. Matter of fact, you aren’t much with them either.” He just stared at me. Just stared. He took another long drag on his cigarette before scratching his chin with his thumb thoughtfully.
“I suppose so.” There was no anger in his voice. No hurt. No denial, sarcasm. Nothing. For some reason, this infuriated me.
“What the hell d’you mean ‘I suppose so’? You stupid bastard. You stupid, worthless bastard.” Another thick drag, but this time he responded with the cigarette still trapped in the corners of his mouth. Little wisps of smoke curled off of his lips as he spoke. Those lips.
“I’m not much of anything. What really is ‘anything’ and how much of it makes someone something? I mean, hell; I don’t deny that I’m nothing, but now I’m free to do anything, aren’t I? So I guess that’s something. I’m nothing without nothing. Simply put.”
“Does that even make sense?” a rhetorical question, obviously, but…
“No. I’m afraid it doesn’t.”
He sat in relaxed silence.
I sat in furious silence.
We sat in silence.
“Listen.” He said, finally pressing the tip of his cigarette roughly against a grey ashtray- little Egyptian looking symbols painted in silver around the sides. He blew his last gasp of smoke out in a jet that traveled in a straight line, right into my face. My hair. My clothes. I coughed. I glared at him but still I sat, waiting for whatever ridiculous stream of words would roll off his lips and onto my lap next. Those lips. I wished those dirty, antagonizing lips would rot and shrivel in hell.
I waited.
He leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him and just stared at me for a few moments longer. He stared at me as if I were a subject. A specimen. Something to be analyzed. Dissected. I wanted to hit him, and on instinct I clenched my right hand into a tight fist.
“I think I’m in love with you.” He said, matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that the words traveled right through me, before hitting me square in the back. Like a boomerang.
I was winded.
“You writers are never any good. Men that write are usually either depressed, sick, or clinically insane. You’re a breed of drunks, insomniacs, dead-beats, filth.” He made no sign of discomfort at these words. His face remained completely placid.
“The world would be better off without the lot of you.”
He laughed softly.
“I think that’s the point of our existence.”
“I hate you.” But
I
never left.
Shit.
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